This week at the pub I took KeepScore for its first test run in a little game of four-person cribbage. It got high marks from my friends, who agreed that KeepScore was better than the other Android scoring apps we had tried. (But of course my friends would say that.) Still, I also received some useful criticism that informed an update I wrote later in the week.
It seems the biggest problem was that the bolded history items were too small, and therefore difficult to read. In light of this, I considered just upping the text size on all the history items, but then I realized: the only history item you’re usually interested in is the most recent one. When you’re trying to tap the button 7 times to add 7 points, you want to verify that you’ve actually added 7, instead of 6 or 8. But after you’ve given the player his/her points, you tend to stop paying attention until the next time you need to add points.
Before
After
So instead of the bold text, I decided to use little “badges” over the numbers (or “blibbets,” as we called them at my old company). I think they’re pretty neat looking, and they also make it dead simple to tell how many points you’ve added. After 10 seconds of inactivity, the badges disappear and move over to the history column instead. This has the added benefit of drawing a clear distinction between the modifiable and unmodifiable parts of the history.
Something else I noticed was that, in the long-press popup, the buttons were also too small and too hard to read. So I simply enlarged the text and gave the buttons more space relative to the EditText (which no one at the table used anyway).
Before
After
Both of these problems stemmed from the fact that I had only tested the app with the phone held in my hand, rather than flat on a table within reach of multiple people – which is how it’s actually used. Held in my hand, all the text on the screen is perfectly easy to read, but in the middle of a dimly-lit bar table, it’s another story.
In the end, this turned out to be one of those slap-yourself-on-the-forehead-it’s-so-obvious kinds of problems that you can only really discover through usability testing.
Read the Tea Leaves 