Friday, July 18, 2008

Another user test!

I just got back from a test with real, actual, live users, and overall, things went pretty well. I introduced a completely new set of people to the game, including my first remote user. Overall, people liked it a lot, but as usual, there were some issues that cropped up, which isn't surprising considering that I totally gutted the application's code since the last time I tested:

-First, it appears that I have lost the game of Web Browser Bingo that any web app must play. The "join game" screen was completely non-functional in IE 7, and one user was forced to download Firefox. As much as people should be using Firefox anyway, it's not really Dangerous Apples' place to force that decision on them.
-Some players did not receive a hand of cards when the game page first loaded, but received them upon a page refresh. I'm setting the "game has started" flag before the cards are dealt, so it's probably related to that.
-Occasionally, the function to reward the winner with an extra point and move onto the next judge was called multiple times, resulting in inaccurate scores and worse, an inconsistent judge status. This was also fixed by a refresh, but I'm not sure why it's happening.
-Some red cards came up multiple times in a game. This might be a race condition issue.
-It was a bit confusing to tell who had won the previous round. To fix this, I will restore the "Last round's winner" display, as well as highlight the winning card, both of which were missing.
-The game should be less formalized - people should be allowed to join and leave during the middle of a game (which might be an issue to decide where in the judge order they should go). Additionally, given that we got to round 34 out of 20, you should be allowed to play as many rounds as you want.
-Other than that, the main issues were just in terms of layout and making sure people know where everything is. And grammar fixes.

So I'd like to say thanks to all my testers (both in this session and in past sessions), and if I missed anything else, feel free to post it!

1 comment:

Integrator said...

Much fun was had! Glad to be your first remote user. =D