Remix User Testing

Today, I managed to get (count them) 1 user to try out remixing at the science center. It seemed plenty hopping, but there were a lot more toddlers to about eight than other kid demographics. That said, it was a useful user test.

The goal was to capture Julie's bow in Tricks with a Flamingo and make the yeti bow after a dance I'd already set up. The yeti was trying to make friends by showing off his dance moves. My one user managed to do this correctly but there were definitely some bumps along the way. None of them feel ginormous, which is good, but there are still some changes we can make to improve things.

For a long time my participant didn't notice the bar at the top. He went straight for the time slider and understood pretty quickly that it was going back in time. But then was at a loss for what to do. So, he clicked around on both the code drop down menus and the + menu. He used the + menu to replay and appeared to make the connection that it replayed what that line did. Eventually he found the top, and used the help button to walk through how to get the start selected. The Show Me buttons were quite effective "Oh that's what I need" kinds of comments. He worked through selecting the start using the help and then selected the end without it. To make sure it was what he wanted, he moved the time slider and then played the statement.  All in all, it felt fairly promising.

But, as always, I have some thoughts on how to further improve it.

• The Show Me style of highlighting something and immediately dismissing the stencil when they interact seemed quite effective but also like it doesn't get in the way. I'd like to experiment with also using it when we switch into remix to highlight the guide bar at the top of the screen. I think we may be able to use it to throw attention to that bar without getting in the way for people who already know what to do.
• Interacting with the code is still a temptation. We know this, we've seen it before. It needs to actually get fixed for both this view and arguably the mentoring views as well.
• We changed remix here so that when the code has finished, play stops. But if a user hits play again, it will keep simulating nothing forever. When users are trying to figure out what the heck to do, play is a pretty attractive action. So the play needs to stop the second time around and the third, etc.
• When the instructions direct the user to mark the line as a start or an end, the whole line is highighted. It might be good for the whole line to be the thing that triggers the popup, but right now it's only the + that does so. We either need to highlight just the plus, or prioritize getting rid of the interactions in the lines of code in remix mode and make it bring up the remix menu at all of these points.
• A user following the instructions will naturally look back to the panel to see what's next. If they aren't sure about what's going on (as is likely for first time users) they will check back with the panel to see what next, even after marking the start or the end. Right now, there's no "Congrats!" feedback in the panel. It obviously should be there.
• In the progress bar, we have two buttons that are optional (i.e. help) and one that's not "finish remixing". Once today's participant finished selecting the start and the end, he looked for a way in the interface to move on, assuming that the finish action would also trigger help somehow. I'm not really sure what to do about this, but perhaps playing with the wording a little will help. It makes complete sense, though.
• In the export dialog, the language is about describing the animation which left today's participant with some confusion about whether he was naming his remixed action or describing what happened in the source world. His entries were a combination of both. But he transitioned back to his own world smoothly, selected the yeti without hesitation, and chose to add the code to the world.
• There was a problem with dragging the remixed action back in, but this is largely because he hadn't done any drag and drop at all yet, so I'm less worried about that.

And there were a couple of bugs

• The remixed action seemed to lose the spine part from Julie to the yeti. Not sure what's up with that.
• The instruction panels sometimes disabled forward progress when they shouldn't have.