The toolkits’ layout

From the beginning of the first study, the author tried to create a user-centred high- fidelity prototype. However, the layout or structure of the prototype was always in question, due to the lack of existing knowledge. Therefore, the result of the third task was not only helpful to make a toolkit with a satisfying layout, but also to gather more insight to create the design framework later.

Each group’s layout design is depicted sequentially in Figure 7-3, Figure 7-4 and Figure 7-5 below. For exploring customer preferences more easily regarding the on- screen location of various features, the layout generated by each participant group was re-created in Adobe Illustrator Figure 7-6, Figure 7-7, and Figure 7-8. The integration of these three designs into a single composite image was achieved by calculating the average location of each feature relative to the top left corner of the screen. This was an arbitrary coordinate centre, and any other screen position could have been used. Figure 7-9 shows the overall integration of features’ locations in one representation. The features that had different locations are excluded from this composite, including physics providence, and price update.

120 Figure 7-4 Group 2’s layout design for the toolkit

Figure 7-5 Group 3’s layout design for the toolkit

The integration result of all the layout designs was instrumental to design the prototype layout for the second study ( Chapter 8). Most notably, the features that represent navigation are concentrated on the left side of the screen. The features for guidance are scattered on the right side and bottom of the screen, and the features for feedback are scattered unevenly through the centre, right and bottom of the screen.

121 Figure 7-6 Group 1’s layout design representation

122 Figure 7-7 Group 2’s layout design representation

123 Figure 7-8 Group 3’s layout design representation

124 Figure 7-9 Integration of all layout designs into one joint layout

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The toolkit had an intuitive structure, and common layout that was acquired from the workshop. The workshop participants tried to put elements in the place where they usually encounter them in common software programs such as Word (Microsoft). As an example, the undo button had been placed beneath the product visualisation in the first instance in the prototype, but as the workshop result showed, the participants’ preference was at the top left corner, where undo is commonly placed in most Office programs such as Word, Excel, etc.

7.6 Conclusion

This workshop aimed to investigate further the content and layout of MC toolkits. This is helpful not only to prepare the prototype for the second study, but also to enrich the framework. With the first task, an expectancy ranking of the features from the users’ point of view was obtained. It was shown that it shares almost the same result with the first study's, and validates the selection of visual feedback, price update, material selection and flexible navigation as the four most important features in the first study. Therefore, it was concluded that the most important features are almost identical to the most expected features of the MC toolkits (objective 2).

Concerning the second task, the categorisation helped participants to understand which feature belongs to which element of the UI, and this helped them in the final task. However, it did not bring about any outstanding results (objective 4). The final task, wireframing, led to discovering the favourable layout for these toolkits (objective 3). Toolkit layout can help users navigate through the options easily, and get useful feedback instantly when needed. The findings from this workshop shed light on user- centred MC toolkit design, especially on content and layout, specifically layout configuration.

Overall, from the first task, visual feedback, price update, material selection, undo and guidance are sequentially the most expected features to be included in the toolkits.

More specifically, the workshop led to the following conclusions:

• The representation of a feature’s location on the screen based on integration of the groups’ layout design is mostly in line with official internet usability guidelines (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006). For example, the usability guidelines state that navigation features should be included in the left panel of a webpage, whether they are primary or secondary, which is consistent with the workshop`s results. This shows that it is more likely for MC toolkits to inherit their UI characteristics more from online websites rather than CAD software programs (objective 1).

• Four features that were put in the threshold group (the most expected ones) were the ones that were previously ranked as the most important ones.

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Similarly, the features that were put in the excitement attributes group were previously ranked as the least important ones. The overlapped results from workshop and study 1 specified which features are essential for a toolkit: visual feedback, price feedback, material selection, and flexible navigation (objective 2).

What users say they do and what they actually do are often not the same (Sainio et al. 2006). Even though self-reporting and data collection based on users’ self- reporting can potentially provide data relating to preferences, performance measures and observation are also needed to achieve a more comprehensive view (Sainio et al. 2006). The study detailed in the following chapter addresses this issue.

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