Heuristic Violations in Denim Prototype

The assignment that is due this Friday involves taking the heuristic violations our peers found in our DENIM prototype and making adjustments to the design in order to address them. Basically, we're "fixing" our DENIM prototype now that we're a quarter into the design process and we have some feedback to work with.

A number of the issues stem from confusion about the delineation between your posted location (the one that other people can see) and your actual current physical location:

• Location information is resident in different places in the UI - currently broadcasted settings through the bottom "profile" view, details about the world around you through the "local search." Why are they so far apart when they fall under the same "location" umbrella?
• How does falsifying location fit into this - do you do it through local search (even though this is an "honest" view) or is there a more sneaky way to do it?
  
• The inability to tell if distances are measured from your real location, the "current location" you're displaying, or whatever location you have selected on the map.

We have two options in dealing with this feedback. The first is to more clearly define the different location feature areas for the users. I strongly believe that by taking this approach, we would be fighting a losing battle. To familiarize the user with three different concepts of location (currently displayed, current physical, and possible next update) with clear boundaries and no overlapping UI will prove very difficult.

Instead, I think we should consider reducing the number of different locations we present to the user. It is necessary to include:

• current location - it is central to our project and is important for deriving the state of the user for use in other functionality.
  
• "lying" about your current location - we decided early on that this is a must-have feature.

I believe displaying the static "last updated location" is not only unhelpful, but redundant and confusing to the user. This makes our major design problem "how to allow for the broadcast of real time location information and also facilitate lying without turning the functionality off." I don't have the answer to this question yet, but one way would be to support zoom (e.g. zooming out from "Finn's" to "Seattle" so my Mom doesn't know I'm out drinking but also doesn't think I'm hiding from her).

Regardless of what we decide to do here, by fixing these areas, we will address the majority of the heuristic violations that were described in the evaluation. Though I doubt any design change will be linked as a direct answer to a specific complaint, we can answer them as a group and thus accomplish the assignment.

There are also some simple fixes that need to be made:

• Distances less than one mile should be notated in blocks.
  
• Reduce steps it takes to accomplish any task (e.g. create event, send SMS).
• Add a "back" button - though this was "by design" in the original interface. We might not want to change this.
  
• Label navigation off the home screen (this will be important regardless of how we change the navigation - the user needs to have some idea of where to go right off the bat).
• Scope the search box in Local Search.