Introduction
Being in your last year at Stanford can be challenging in new and different ways. As your time on campus comes to an end, you might start placing larger emphasis on meeting up with some of the people that made your Stanford experience so special.
However, Stanford culture can make planning social interactions a daunting task. Students are often busy and there are inertial forces at play that make planning social outings at any scale a challenge.
alpaca.ai seeks to give Stanford students the opportunity to plan social interactions in a more seamless and fun way. With imported calendars and the latest in generative alpaca technology, alpaca.ai is able to curate enjoyable experiences that work around you and the schedules of your friends.
Today, with your help, we aim to test the fluidity of the onboarding and event generation experience. We are also looking for general feedback on the ideas powering our project and any pitfalls that need to be addressed.
Usability Testing Script
Team Introduction
Hi! We are team Alpaca (Cristobal, Ecy, Jin-Hee, Nolawi) from an HCI course, CS247B, which focuses on design for behavioral change.
We’re here to get your feedback on some new ideas for an AI application to help social time between friends.
Currently, we have a prototype— a mini version of two work flows to test out the app. One flow is the onboarding, the other flow is the task of sending an event to a friend. We’d love to hear your initial impressions of the prototype as you go through a couple of tasks that we’ve built out.
As we go through the prototype, I want to encourage you to think out loud. We would especially love to hear about the look and feel of the prototype, as well as what you’d expect to see on the screen as you go through the tasks. If anything is confusing or you do not like it, do not hesitate to let me know.
Our only goal is to get feedback and what works and what doesn’t work for you, so please don’t worry about hurting anyone’s feelings! We are working on and changing our prototype all the time, so any and all feedback is much appreciated.
Background Questions
- What year are you and how many years do you have left at Stanford?
- What are some of your favorite apps?
- How many times in a week do you have scheduled time with friends?
- How much do you care about ~socializing~ and scheduling?
- How do you usually plan activities with friends?
- Experience with schedule and/or social apps?
Task 1
Context: You are feeling like you want to socialize more on campus. You downloaded the alpaca.ai app. You open the app for this first time and are greeted by the welcome screen.
Task: Navigate the application and complete the account creation process by following Mr. Alpaca’s instructions.
Task 2
Context: You haven’t seen your freshman-year bestie Nancy in forever! Now that you know the basics of alpaca.ai you know you can do something about your predicament.
Task: Generate an event to do with Nancy using your overlapping free times and send that event to her. How about trying to invite her to lunch!
