Divij Gupta Assignment2


a) For this part I observed people interacting with the ticket machine at the Palo Alto Caltrain station, which has a pretty standard interface for a ticketing machine. It is a 4 step process: 1) choose the type of ticket for example one way, full day pass etc 2) choose the zone to go to, Palo Alto is in zone 3, 3) the  number of tickets 4) click a button to purchase, the transaction can be in the form of bills, coins or inserting a debit/credit card. Like any new interface, for new users the majority of the time was spent getting used to the process of buying the ticket. Since the interface is only in English, language is a potential barrier. However most of the observed people were very comfortable with the system, which is basically constrained by the knowledge gap factor as opposed to the observations in b)

 

 

b) b) In this part I wanted to observe people interacting with a device that not many people on campus have used before which is a cigarette lighter, since not many people smoke on campus. The interesting part about this product is the emphasis on mechanical functionality which makes it a lot harder to operate that electronic devices. One needs to spin the roller on the lighter which causes a spark and ignites the fluid to produce a flame. However the people I observed had a lot of trouble consistently producing a flame, as a result of their fingers slipping on the roller. It turns out to be a very frustrating experience for a non-regular user and different techniques need to be tried to carry out a simple process like producing a flame. Hence, this does indicate a need to improve the design based on inputs from first-time users.