Gotcha! Your productivity platform

Gotcha! is a productivity app that incorporates mindfulness and holistic distraction recovery for studying students. Meant to track work sessions, Gotcha! encourages users to take intentional breaks whenever they need to stop, and disrupts break time with a timer alarm as a refocus cue. We incorporate mindfulness by transitioning users into the work mode both coming back from breaks and starting up the app. During this process, discrete photos are taken of users to help them track progress and tag them with useful meta-data later. Finally, as a reward for completion, users can optionally post these photos to a story and browse stories and their own data.

Gotcha! High-fidelity Prototype

Usability Script

PreInterview

1. Are you a student?
2. Are you interested in improving your productivity?
3. Do you get distracted while working or feel like your work habits are sub-opimal?
4. Can you describe frequent distractions you engage in?
5. What do you do to avoiding distraction?
6. Are you interested in learning more about the role distractions have during your work time?
7. Have you ever tried to improve your productivity? If yes, how. If no, why not?

Script

Intro

Hi, ___________. My name is ___________. I’m going to be guiding the testing today. Before we begin, I wanted to give you an overview of what we will be doing and why.

We’re asking people to test a website so we can asses how easy it is to use. The testing session should take about 30 minutes. Just to clarify we’re testing the website, not you. There’s nothing you can do that’s wrong and you don’t have to worry about making mistakes. As you use the site think out loud as much as possible: say what your looking at, what you’re trying to do, and what you’re thinking. Also, I will be asking questions throughout the process. This will all be super helpful for us and don’t worry about hurting our feelings. We want your honest reactions so we can improve.

Please ask any questions as we go along. I may not answer right away because we want a sense for how the app is used when users don’t have someone to guide them. If you need to take a break at any point, please let me know. With your permission, we’re going to record the screen activity and our conversation. The recording will help us improve the site, and won’t be seen by anyone except the people working on the project.

Any questions?

Screener Questions

Before we begin, I’d like to ask you just a few questions.

1. Are you a student?
2. Are you interested in improving your productivity?
3. Are you interested in reducing unintended distractions while working?
4. Have you ever tried to improve your productivity?if yes, how so and why do you think it did or didn’t work?
5. Do you currently have any tools or methods you use to improve your productivity?

Home Page Tour

*opens home page

Looking at this page what do you make of it? What strikes you? What can you do on this page and what is the purpose of this page? Go ahead and explore and think out loud but don’t click on anything yet.

*let them explore for three minutes at the most

Tasks

Thanks. Now I’m going to ask you to try doing some specific tasks. I’m going to read each one out loud and display the written prompt for you to reference as well. If you can try to think out loud as you go along.

*say each scenario below and show them a written scenario or them to reference

*Allow the user to proceed until you don’t feel like it’s producing any value or the user becomes very frustrated.

*Repeat the steps above for each scenario for until the time runs out.

• You want to study productively so you enter a focus session
• Take a break during a focus session
• Exit early from a focus session
• navigate back to the home page
• begin a short focus session (ie 1 minute) and finish it to unlock the social feature and then explore the social features (ie view stories, post a photo, leave a comment)
• navigate back to the home page
• begin a short focus session (ie 1 minute) and finish it, then navigate to the data analysis feature and edit data that has been classified incorrectly or described inaccurately

Probing

Thanks, that was very helpful. I’m going to consult with my team to see if they have any follow-up questions.

Wrapping Up

Any questions for me, now that we’re done?

*Stop recording

*Thank them