Mandeep Chawla, Ben Dombek, Group # 8
Critique of Group #3
CS 422

The screensaver: The display that shows the average temperatures is very crowded and
not easy to read or understand. If you wish to inform the user of the average
temperatures of Chicago, do it in a more organized way (maybe in a form of a table) and
avoid making the user strain to read it. Instead of displaying the Fahrenheit and Celsius
temperatures separated by a slash with no blank space, leave some more space between
the two sets of temperatures. Also, by looking at the screensaver the user won’t be able
to tell that he can use it to find more information than just Chicago statistics, so it would
be helpful to let the user know that they can get more information by touching the screen.

Main Screen: By looking at the main screen, the user won’t be able to tell that they can
find information about local establishments since there is nothing indicating that. If the
user doesn’t really need a map, but would be interested in looking at menus of local
restaurants, they won’t be inclined to go into the map option and thus never know that
menus are available through this touch screen.

Emergency Screen: It might be helpful to include an option to call for an ambulance as
well as the police and fire department.

Event Screen: Instead of the label Week, specify that it corresponds to Current Week
because the user might think that they can use the general Week option to pick any week
they are interested in finding events for.

Train Station Screen: In the screen, it is not clear where exactly the user has to push to
get information about the station: the label reads “Press on the station names for
information”, however the station names don’t look like buttons, instead there are little
white circles that sort of look like buttons. The user will be confused by this
inconsistency of the label saying Press on station names but the buttons look like they are
located just under the names.

Map Screen: The icon used for the banks button doesn’t really clarify to the user that this
button is for the banks option i.e. looking at the icon of money could mean ATM’s and
not necessarily banks. Same thing for the exchange rates icon, the meaning is not
implied by looking at the icon, so I would suggest using better icons or maybe some text
for clarity.
I noticed that the background color of the map is the standard google map color but when
you zoom in to the streets, the background is white. I would keep the color the same so
the map is consistent whether you zoom in or out.

Finally, for all the screens, the icons next to the back button makes it look like pressing
the back button will take the user to a location specified by the icon. Since this is not the
case, I would change that particular layout.

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CS 422
Group 7
Group 3 Critique

This groups design overall looked well.  First the screen saver was very informative.  It makes 
good use of down time, time when no one is using the screen.  However this tends to make it
look like a display just for the screen saver information.  It needs to be clear what the machine 
does (while in screen saver mode) and that a user should come up to it and start using it if they 
want certain information.  

The appearance is very clean.  The use of a white background overall along with white
background buttons was a clean implementation.  Maybe this is too plain looking, if so try a 
different color scheme, especially for the buttons so that they stand out better and grab a user’s 
attention.

It also seems that there is almost too much white space, which is empty space where 
there are no controls.  Give your controls a larger proportion of the screen so that the user can 
play with them. For the first screen, the one that has all the options for where you want to go 
within the system, it is not overly intuitive.  The map feature is the one that will show directions
and what restaurants are available to visit.  This isn’t apparent to the user with the current design.
Similarly if a user wants to look up a location of a restaurant or someplace to visit that isn’t 
apparent either.

On the events page there is some slight work that can be done to notify the user of how many 
events are actually going on in the area.  Currently the user can go up and down through many
events without really knowing where the user is within that list of events.  This can get
problematic if you have the whole year’s worth of events in that list!

The train schedule looked very slick.  The only question lingering on that part was does the user get
every train stops schedule if it is clicked?  If so that’s great, if not that might be a feature worth
looking into adding.The same suggestion exists for the restaurant/event description up and down 
arrows.  The user can scroll without knowing how much information is left to view.

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