a. Rationale of Medium Fidelity Prototyping Approach

For our prototype our group decided to make one semi-functional prototype that met our needs for our experiment design. We chose to make the event creation component of our interface to be more horizontal since it is not the primary focus of our experiment, whereas the event details and chat screens are much more complete in terms of functionality, making up the vertical portion of our prototype. This was done so we could better test how users reach and interpret group consensus and compare against other existing interfaces in our experiment, namely Facebook Messenger. Some parts of our prototype have some simulated functionality, such as the create/edit event screens. For instance, the inviting friends feature is faked so that specific friends are selected every time no matter what the user selects. After clicking confirm, it goes to a partially filled create event screen with the expected event information in the corresponding fields. This decision was made because we just need to showcase how the interface would function during normal, everyday use and participants would not be required to perform tasks such creating events or inviting friends as part of the experiment. Similarly when the edit button is used in our interface the edit event screen does not get the event details dynamically. Instead the fields are pre-filled with the expected values for the different event details like time and location. When a new event is created, the home screen will display the new event but it will display the same event information regardless of what the user inputs in the create event screen.

The appearance of our prototype is important in terms of making it clear to our participants as to what parts of the interface they can interact with. Also event and group consensus details should be organized so that it is easy and clear for the users to find relevant information. We found that in our cognitive walkthrough users were confused on what they could interact with and how some of the design elements like the voting system worked. We tried to prevent these problems from arising by using colour to indicate important elements of each screen and changing the colour of icons when they are selected. Our goal for the appearance of the prototype was to have it convey the relevant information and actions for each screen while also only including what was necessary for our experiment. We also choose to use Axure as our prototyping tool since our group had previous experience working with it. It also lets us test our interface on mobile devices which was our target platform for this application.

b. Prototype Illustrations