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Alpha Note
Working and learning with a better efficiency
There are many presentations that contain much information that needs listeners to pay attention to, but there are many cases where it is hard to follow the presenter's speed when listeners are trying to take note, either because the speed is fast, or there is a bad accent.
Therefore, Alpha Note, designed by the Alpha Team, is to help users take notes in presentations and give users opportunities to focus on listening to the presentation rather than being busy writing words down and losing track of the presentation.
It is very much appreciated that my team, Alpha Team, grouped in the HCI course, helped each other throughout the semester and completed the Alpha Note Version 1.0.
User Interview
Part 1: Questionnaire
We had a questionnaire for interviewees before we conducted the face-to-face interviews.
The questionnaire questions were designed to be close-ended / scale-based questions to get to know
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if that interviewee was one of our target users.
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some basic behaviors they had when taking notes.
Part 2: Face-to-face interview
In order to get real feelings and thoughts from users, the questions designed were all open-ended questions and were divided into three high levels:
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situations — when would interviewers take notes.
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strategies — how interviewees currently take notes.
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difficulties — what challenges interviewees have when using current note-taking methods.
High-Level 1: Situations
we need to know in what situations will our interviewees take notes
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Questionnaire question #2
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Questionnaire question #3
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Questionnaire question #4
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Why do you take notes (in ____ situations based on the questionnaire question 3)? What encourages you to take notes? What do you want to get from your notes?
High-Level 2: Strategies
we want to know how our interviewees take notes currently in order to know their habits, preference, and goals, and have a better idea on the alternative products they are currently using
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Questionnaire question #5
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Questionnaire question #6
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Questionnaire question #7
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Questionnaire question #8
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(If questionnaire 7 is no) What forms/formats/structure do you usually use to take notes?
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(If questionnaire 7 is yes) What templates do you search for?
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What alternatives do you usually use to help you take notes?
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Why do you choose ____ tool to help you take notes? What features do you like the most/use the most?
High-Level 3: Difficulties
we want to know what difficulties they meet currently in order to know their pain points and hopes
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Questionnaire question #9
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What difficulties did you encounter when you took notes before?
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Would you like to use ____ feature to help you ____? (the specific questions are in the writeup for the mock interview below)
Part 3: Insights from user interview
After sorting and categorizing interview answer, the team summarized seven insights:
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Most of our users would take notes in lectures and team meetings, and most of them take notes at least two times a week.
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Tablet is the most frequently used tool among interviewees, with paper and pen, mobile phones, and laptops equally used among them.
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Most interviewees only write keywords down, but there might be some cases where all details and interpretations are needed to be recorded.
The Problem
4. Some of them find it difficult to keep up the speed of the presenter.
5. It is sometimes difficult for users to recognize words on blackboards because of the bad eyesight
or the bad hand-writing habits of the presenter.
6. Some users find it easy to lose track of lectures if they want to search for some external resources
when meeting something confusing.
7. Some users want clean notes, but it is time-consuming to organize notes.
The Solution
Therefore, based on insights of users’ pain points gained from user interviews, we decided to set the following four parts as the MVP of Alpha Note to meet their desires:
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Audio tracking and word transferring :
to help users focus on understanding context rather than writing notes and help them minimize the chance to lose track of the presentation. -
Image OCR :
to help users recognize hand-written words. -
Academic resources searching :
to help users search for related support content. -
Community templates sharing :
to help users have easy access to reusable and well-organized templates.
High-Fidelity
As some evaluations were made during the paper prototype stage, the high-fidelity stage went quicker than planned.
Palette
Feature 1: Audio Recording and Word Transferring
Note page
When the word transferring panel is open.
When sentences are selected.
When sentences are added onto the note.
When the edit panel is open.
Part 2: Selecting important sentences from the word transferring panel
The above was the first design of the word transferring panel. The audio is transferred into a sentence-based structure for users to choose from.
However, some interviewees suggested that it was messy to scroll down the sentences.
Therefore, the second design below was created after referring Google History design. The time stamp was created to help users have a sense of when they heard the sentence.
Feature 2: Resource Search and Link
When there is something confusing, long-press the words.
When the search result panel is open.
When the filter panel is open.
When one detail page among the search results is open.
When the one resource is selected.
When the one resource is selected and return to the note page.
When the preference panel of this note is open.
High-Fidelity Testing
To again check if the design is intuitive enough for users to use and give the group another chance to create a more user-friendly product, two heuristic evaluations and one cognitive walkthrough were made for the high-fidelity prototype testing.
Heuristic Evaluation
Heuristic evaluation is a usability testing method for finding problems in a user interface design, where “heuristics” simply means guidelines. We followed Nielsen and Molich’s 10 User Interface Design Heuristics and selected 5 from them to conduct the evaluation:
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Visibility of System Status
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User Control and Freedom
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Consistency and Standards
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Recognition, Not Recall
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Aesthetic and Minimalist Design
For each evaluation, we provided our evaluator with a list of three high-level tasks. From the feedback on the 5 heuristics, we identified the following problems and possible improvements:
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For Visibility of System Status, the small book icon beside selected text was a bit difficult to understand. It may be better to give short pop-up instructions or provide tutorials for new users.
Cognitive Walkthrough
We invited an evaluator and asked her to perform a sequence of actions for each of the three tasks. Most actions went quite smoothly, while there is one action that confused the user.
When linking a resource, the user was confused by the link/unlink icon and not sure if the resource is successfully linked.
A possible fix for this is to provide clearer and more explicit feedback on the linking action such as showing a toast saying “Linked!”.
Design Process
To design a user-centric application in an efficient way, the team followed the five steps for the design process.
Image from https://thomas-sokolowski.com/
Define
After summarizing the major pain points from users, the competitor research was made to analyze why existing products cannot satisfy users' needs and what strengths they have so that users are still using them. The major products interviewees use for taking notes are GoodNotes, Notability, and OneNote.
Competitor Research
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Persona
After the basic ideas were drawn, we created three personas to realize the target users and to facilitate our following processes including user flows. The personas mainly covered four aspects — demographics and bio to realize the user, goals to list the features that the user is looking for, and frustrations to record features the user wants but is currently inconvenient to use or missing in the market.
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Conclusion from persona
Must-have features in the first version:
1. Audio recording and word transferring feature
2. Various options of pen size and colors
Nice-to-have features:
1. Image OCR
2. Resource search
3. Template sharing
Business Goal
Offer users a better working and learning efficiency, including:
1. Let them focus on listening and understanding.
2. Let them draw ideas and use resources effectively.
Product Goal
1. Enough options for users to choose from for pen size and colors.
2. Audio recording and word transferring feature will help them take notes down.
3. Image OCR and recourse search features will help them read blackboard and find resources quicker.
MVP for Version 1.0
As required by the course, only two features would be chosen for the following processes, the Audio Recording and Word Transferring feature and the Resources Search feature were chosen for creating paper prototypes of Alpha Note version 1.0, because:
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These are the main features that can solve the main user pain points as defined in the empathize and define stage — want to take notes faster while listening to the presentation.
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The Audio Recording and Word Transferring feature is the most basic feature which must be implemented as one of the MVPs because it would take care of writing notes down.
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The Resource Search feature is the second most basic feature because it allows users to solve questions anytime by searching online.
The remaining two features would be developed in version 2.0.
Step 3: Ideate
Use Cases & Storyboarding
After having a big picture of the business goal and product goal, use cases and storyboardings were created to help remember small details of each feature.
Audio Recording and Word Transferring
As an assistant to the chairman, I need to make meeting notes when the chairman is in a meeting.
However:
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Sometimes when the discussion is too intensive.
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I will miss some key information, which will make the boss unhappy, and may even bring some losses to the company.
In order to solve this problem:
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I want to use this software to use the background automatic speech generation function.
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I can find the information I need to record in real-time.
In this way, I will be less stressed every time I attend a meeting, and I can express my opinions more freely.
Resource Search
As a lawyer, in the process of talking with clients,
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sometimes I miss the client's demands due to a lack of concentration, which not only affects my reputation, but also affects my performance.
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I sometimes forget the legal provisions corresponding to user requests.
Therefore, after using this software:
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I only need to find relevant legal provisions according to the keywords in the text after voice conversion, which greatly improves my work efficiency.
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As long as I open the panel and browse the full discussion text in it, I just need to double-click the selected text and search.
In this way, I can guarantee my professionalism and leave a deep and good impression on users.
User Flow
With details of each feature on hand, the group started to create user flows to visualize page interactions.
Audio Recording and Word Transferring
Resource Search
Prototype
Low-Fidelity
The prototyping stage finally took place. As we had enough time during the prototyping stage, we decided to do some paper prototype evaluation before starting creating high-fidelity prototypes.
This allowed the group to make changes in early stages, which would be cheaper if a huge change was found in later stages.
Feature 1: Audio Recording and Word Transferring
Part 1: New note page
When a new note is created, the Audio recording is turned on. This is to help users avoid missing important information if they forget to turn on the audio recording feature.
The above is the first design of the new note page. Some team members thought it was enough for users to know the red icon was clickable and that could be the entry point to the word transferring panel, because it was the only colored icon on the page.
However, I did not agree with that, as I thought a separate and more intuitive entry point should be given to users.
Therefore, the group agreed to do a paper prototype evaluation to see if interviewees could open the word transferring panel.
Not surprisingly, all interviewees hesitated at first when they were asked to open the word transferring panel, and some of them could never find the entry point.
Therefore, the second design below was created and used with a separate icon was used for the entry.
Some interviewees told us that "Audio tracking" was confusing. Therefore, in the high-fidelity prototype, the "Audio recording" was used to replace the original wordings.
Part 3: Editing selected sentences
Feature 2: Resource Search and Link
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When users long-press certain words on the note, the search feature will be activated and help users to find related recourses online and local, in the way users do not need to open other apps to search for resources.
After users find one resource that they like to review often, they can link this resource to the word, and that word will turn blue. Later they can click on the word and the resource will appear.
Some interviewees gave the suggestion that a single-link might not be enough for some courses.
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"For biology, if I want to find something about the brain, I might need pictures, news, definition."
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"For math, there are many examples that can be added."
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"For business, not only for confusing things, this feature can be used for just extending knowledge, news."
For this suggestion, the group decided to have the first iteration designed as a single-resource link, and if time allows - which we have planned to add this feature - we will have the second iteration which will have multiple-resource link.
Metrics
That was the end of the course.
However, I believe for any professional product, metrics should be set for future testing and iterations.
Therefore, I considered some metrics that would be used for later data-driven redesigns.
As the Image OCR and Template Sharing Community would be made in the second iteration as additional features that could help users work and learn effectively, these two features would be considered for subscribers only.
Qualitative:
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Customer Satisfaction Rating
Quantitative:
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Feature Adoption Rate
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Subscription Rate
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Churn Rate
Conclusion
With the Audio Tracking and Word Transferring feature, users can focus on listening to presentations and don’t need to worry about writing words down or losing track of presentations. With the Resource Search feature, users can search for external resources anytime when they come up with any questions to help them to understand concepts better or do brainstorming quicker.
All features designed in Alpha Note are to help users work and study more effectively, because that is the theme of Alpha Note — All about better efficiency.
Most users like the innovation and usefulness of our features. Some limitations we have in our system are mainly some finer details of our features, such as:
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Can we add a dark mode option in the settings?
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Can I register an account so I can sync my notes among different devices?
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Can the source searching feature allow multiple links citation?
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Can we allow users to jump to previously highlighted words or related concepts?
The answer to all of these questions is, YES! Alpha Note will continuously be improved and help any users to get better working and learning results.
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