Our design for the facebook chat application relies heavily on illustrations and symbols to help guide the user. I was wary about some of the illustrations we had chosen to represent certain functions, such as the button to start video chat or the button to block an individual.
During our paper prototype study, the task given was to initiate a video chat with a certain online friend. This seemed to be a fairly simple task, almost no one had problems getting to the chat window. However, once they were in the chat box, they seemed bombarded with icons which some were unclear what they represented. Every participant eventually found the video chat button, but hesitated for some time.
This confirmed my suspicions that we may need to redesign a few of our button graphics. During last week’s class we already came up with an alternative design for the video chat button and the block button which I think will be more self-explanatory and solve our problems during our second paper prototype testing.
