PERSON

• Task 1: For question 2 the person did not see the toggles on the right. Went to answering the question right away with profit data instead of customer data. For question 3 they realized their mistake as they explored their surroundings a bit more. They spent a lot more time “playing” with control panel as if looking for some control that would directly answer their question instead of having to figure it out on the map. Found it hard to tell direction of the people, in or out of the stores. This task took about 5 minutes of looking through the tool.

• Task 2: Quickly found the correct values and used the hover feature for specific cells.

• Task 3: Identified that the store is lacking people at 10AM vs 4PM on the heatmap and increase of traffic near the entrance. Chose the heatmap metric over the paths of people to make the decision for the store ad placement.

• Suggestions: Paths were hard to disambiguate. The person did not understand that the thickness of the lines represented the number of people in a path and suggested that numbers be placed on the path in order to let the person know how many people are there. A suggestion was made on showing directionality on the paths and the ability to filter the paths based off of demographics/leaving specific stores at specific times. Also suggested a 2D matrix with stores on the x and y to show who went where after entering a store.

PERSON

• Task 1: For question 2 the person did not notice the toggles on the right to switch the data, though this time more care was put into identifying the different sections of the tool to begin with. They immediately, however, went to the heatmap to identify answers to the question. It was also pointed out that the map is on a different color scale than the heatmap. The person was able to quickly compare information from one store to another.

• Task 2: Noted that Macy’s is hard to see because of the contrast of the color and the text. In order to see a lot of people streaming into a store, it was mentioned that it would be interesting to see the motion of the people through a time lapse. It was also mentioned that it would be nice to hover over the specific portion of the map and see the stream of people exiting a particular store at a particular time. For question 2 the person answered it quickly, though mentioned that the tooltip takes too long to show up if someone wanted to see the actual value for the heatmap.

• Task 3: Person used column hover to see what stores had the highest amount of customers at a specific time and associated customer amount and foot traffic to select the add placement. With this, the center of the map was chosen over the entrance of the map.

• Suggestions: Need to make sure colors are binned appropriately for the map and for the heatmap. Need to label the data better so that more people will notice that there is a toggle. This could be done by coloring the data and showing in words what data source that you are using. The legend was confusing on the heatmap, they did not notice the greater than signs because of the spacing with the text and the legend.

##PERSON * Task 1: * The user completed the task within 2 minutes. He did not use panning nor zooming. * Quickly find the information from the heat map by hovering the mouse. * He figured out Capital One Bank very soon, then he mentioned AT&T, Macy’s.

• Task 2:

  • Not very much. When mentioning time, they moved to heat map very soon.
  • Not very often. Maybe because many people are having lunch.

• Task 3:

  • This question seems a little hard for the user. Anyway, he focused on the time instead of the position since the heat map differed significantly in 4PM and 10PM. He chose center of the map 4PM.

• Suggestions:

  • There should be caption for the figure / table
  • There should be direction on the path (and more color)
  • The color scheme is not very well for mall. Yellow, red is more welcome?

##PERSON

• Task 1:

  • Took about 3 minutes. He did not use panning nor zooming.

  • Found Safeway quickly.

  • Yes, but unsure. Was looking at the heatmap. Said paths weren’t that clear, but after explaining it made more sense.

  • Said Capital One Bank very soon, Bank of America. He followed paths. Unclear about directions though.

• Task 2:

  • Took about 3 minutes.

  • Found Macy’s quickly. Yes, based on the heatmap color intensity at 11am, he said a lot people visit Macy’s. Understood heatmap.

  • Said 11am based on color comparison.

• Task 3:

  • Took about 3 minutes.

  • Answered that the center point at 4pm would be better. Reasoning: Outside AT&T at 10am, there are not that many people but in the middle, that position is close to many stores and more traffic goes by there. He looked at the heatmap for overall 10am and 4pm comparison.

• Suggestions:

  • Paths not clear. Should have directions. What does the light green path mean? Paths are too clustered. Nobody goes to Adidas? Overall, paths are a bit confusing.

  • Some store names not clear because of color on top of dark background color (ie Verizon, TMobile).

  • Questioned why colors of store change - confused about store colors.

##PERSON (copied from the PDF I sent in email chain)

• general comments:

  • CS major, grad student
  • went through all tasks really quickly

• general think aloud things:

  • dark box first: maybe because everything else had a label
  • lots of lines
  • more activity on the right side, can't really tell if it's Safeway or AT&T
  • not sure if the lines indicate direction or not
  • small labels of time at the bottom
  • not sure what the columns mean
  • no label on legend, don't know what
  • tried clicking on Safeway
  • assume darker means more
  • didn't look at control panel, pretty much
    • most of the tasks were visual

• task 1: stream of consciousness

  • used heat map, see above for initial reactions

• task 2: stream of consciousness

  • color blue: fair amount blue; not the most, but a fair amount
  • same color, so assume same number

• task 3: stream of consciousness

  • glance to heatmap, green so pretty low
  • no idea how many people are in the center
  • fair amount of people in T-Mobile at 4pm
  • bit hard to say
  • hard to see what's going on at the center
  • hard to tell where people are moving at what time

• comments, suggestions, etc.

  • lack of labels on the legend were confusing
    • didn't understand what the cutoffs were; they seemed arbitrary
  • color coding isn't obvious
    • top and bottom seem similar, but it's not clear
    • Verizon is really dark: assuming it's the same coding, it must get a lot of traffic
      • but looking across time, at the heat map, it's pretty light most of the time
      • == noticed that the data didn't agree
    • black text on dark blue is hard to read
  • more focused on the map
  • bunch of squares on the bottom
    • "doing things on the top didn't do anything on the bottom, so I didn't really look at the bottom"
  • noticed later that there were things that looked like times on the bottom
  • maybe divide the page, separate the views
  • color scheme isn't distracting overall: maybe a white font instead of black for the top
    • font on the bottom is a little small
  • "I can see the routes people take, but not when they took them."
  • "I don't know what these little green lines are."
  • some legend (as in 1 inch == 1 meter) would be helpful
  • between two times (gestures at heat map), what the directions are...
    • "I know where people are, but I don't get where they're going."
    • Don't know how fast they move.
    • Don't know direction: add direction arrows?
  • direction arrows
  • biggest dislike: lack of labels; some text was hard to read