User testing on Interactive Prototype

We began doing user testing of our interactive prototype this week. Overall, it seemed that the interactions on our prototype were pretty intuitive, as people generally understood how to navigate from place to place, and what each screen represented. The most contentious part of the prototype was actually the up/down-voting portion of the queue. Some comments:

• "If there are 3 people in a car that each take the time to first add songs to the queue, I can't really see anyone saying, 'I don't want to hear the song that somebody chose,' to anything in the queue."
• "I don't actually think the up/down voting makes it more anonymous - it just seems like a more passive aggressive way of saying 'no' to a song. And that's kind of an awkward interaction when there are so few people in a car."
• "The thumbs are a bit misleading - they've become synonymous with likes, so I thought it was rating after the fact whether or not I liked the song. Maybe an up and down arrow would be more clear."

These were very good points that have made us start to reconsider the voting feature. In truth, we were quite excited about the idea of using the app at a sports game or something of the sort, like Jay mentioned in our SGM last week - the voting feature would work especially well in a setting like this. However, within a car setting in which there are likely only 3 or 4 people together, this type of voting interaction might not make the most sense. It also seems that allowing for this up/down voting feature might not be the best way for the driver to express his/her opinion, especially since they should be watching the road. After discussing these results and new insights, we decided we would do more user testing using the prototype before we make a final decision on the voting feature.