Big Honkin Report 1 Virginia Pettit and Raquel Dottle
The scan of the literal napkin:
User tests: Participant 1: Adult white female in her 30s. Works in academia. Regular microwave user When asked, “What does this look like to you?� she immediately knew it was a microwave control panel. Upon some further prodding she began to give many insights. She likes the auto features at the top that we thought maybe were overrated. Her microwave is very similar to this one and she says she uses it fairly easily but her husband often has
trouble. She was confused by the “snack” button and that it seemed really ambiguous. The clock button makes sense to her to get it to change to a mode where you change the time. She likes the popcorn button and the soften button. She likes the reheat feature, but it always confuses her even though she has had it for many years. She also never knew that there was a “cheat sheet” on the inside top of the microwave door that explained the different setting for reheat. She said if there was a cheat sheet she would want it somewhere on the outside of the microwave. She thinks the buttons like “potato” and “beverage” should be incorporated into the reheat function. She was also confused by the cook button and the start button and what was the difference between those and also how they worked with time cook. Participant 2: Adult white male in his 40s. Works in academia. Regular microwave user When asked, “What does this look like to you?” he immediately knew it was for a microwave. He knew and understood the display for numbers including clock and record cooking time. He acknowledged and understood the specific buttons like popcorn or potatoes. He expected pushing the numbers on the number pad to allow him to pick a specific time, like 230 then start to get 2 minutes and 30 seconds, but that’s not how it works. But there’s also a time cook button - which was confusing to him. His conceptual model is that you could press 230 then start and it would go for 2:30. He wants power levels. The button that just says “cook” was very confusing to him. He was also confused that popcorn and potato and snack were with reheat and defrost were next to each other. That’s poor mapping. He doesn’t usually use reheat and defrost or any of that - just popcorn. He doesn’t trust the buttons to know how long to cook it, and snack is too ambiguous. He regularly uses 2 different microwaves and they are different
with time cook stuff and it’s confusing and frustrating. He prefers the one that has you type start first. He REALLY doesn’t like the other one. Participant 3: Adult White male in the 18-24 age range. Student. Regular microwave user He said it was obviously a microwave. He noticed the timer and popcorn buttons. He wondered if the numbers make it do minutes or 6 seconds. He was surprised that there was no timer button. He expects that the Popcorn button leads to popcorn time. If he wanted to cook something for 3 minutes, he would push 3-0-0. “Time cook I guess is how you put in the different tyme styles.” Usually just types number in - “what is reheat?” I can’t trust the reheat to know what I want. The time cook and cook buttons are confusing. Summary and Design Implications: All users explained their usual thought process behind using a microwave, comparing it to their mental model. The buttons caused much confusion; their “clever” titles, to use Krug’s phrase, didn’t let the user know their function, so the gulf of evaluation could not be bridged. The mappings were illogical; user #2 discussed this when we were testing him. Users seemed to run into a description-similarity slip when encountering the “start”, “time cook”, and “reheat” buttons; no one was exactly sure how those were different, and decided to only use one. These numerous errors and discrepancies lead us to believe that we should do away with the majority of the additional function buttons, leaving only “popcorn” and perhaps “reheat” behind. Based on what users said their mental model for starting the machine was, it should operate by pushing the desired time and then start. We also need to consider the mapping; these should be separate from the number pad and perhaps colored differently. We need to make sure that there is abundant knowledge in the world so that our users will not be confused when they are trying to find some knowledge in their head and come up empty.