Reflecting on the course

Our design process has now come to an end and it’s time to reflect upon the results and the process itself in order to improve ourselves. We think it has been an enjoyable journey although there are some things that we might have done differently if we could do it again. For example, it hasn’t always been easy to schedule meetings with five people who have completely different schedules. It would probably have been easier if all people in the group took the same courses.

In hindsight we should probably have chosen a less ambitious idea to work on, since the objective wasn’t to have the most innovative idea but to learn how to run a successful design process. The fact that our design had such futuristic technology made several of the steps more difficult than they needed to be. The two most obvious examples of this were when we built and tested the prototypes. As they were so different from the original idea, it was very hard to get our point across to the testers.

We did not apply brainstorming to the same extent that was recommended, but we feel this was a good decision. Us having our own time to reflect on the project rendered several good ideas, and after reading a little bit more about brainstorming it has become clear that it is more popular than it is effective. In an article about a study conducted by Michael Diehl and Wolfgang Stroebe (Michael Diehl; Wolfgang Stroebe (1991). "Productivity Loss in Idea-Generating Groups: Tracking Down the Blocking Effect". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology), it is concluded that a group that uses the technique that we used (discussing ideas, having our own time to think and then meeting again) came up with both more and better ideas than a group that used brainstorming.

In our design process we had some design constraints, one being that the product should allow the children and their guardians to have a shared experience of the exhibitions in the museum. We really thought about this and had a lot of ideas to make sure that this was actually implemented in the design, but with our difficulties in building a prototype that actually reflected the product that we designed, this was unfortunately a bit forgotten. Therefore we think this might not have been clear to the audience when we presented our product.

Overall we are pretty pleased with both our design and our process. We had a Facebook-group which made it easier to communicate fast and efficiently, as well as keeping discussions in different threads to make it easy to find the information you were looking for. We feel that we were successful in following the steps of a design process recommended in the course, and that the whole group had a good understanding of the concepts and methods. The fact that we can identify things we would have done differently doesn’t feel like a disappointment, but only like we have managed to learn something.

Summary of Think-alouds

We found it difficult to get good insights from our think-alouds. Our concept is, rather than a simple app, something that requires input from both location sensors and the camera and will only provide a meaningful experience when one is actually at Fotografiska.

The prototype we made was interactive in that the tablet was overlaid on a museum wall background and was able to be moved around. Other than that, we found that we could not easily implement location detection. This meant that rather than the app reacting to one moving around in the museum, we had to provide external buttons for browsing through the different steps. Furthermore, the parent's mobile app was implemented using a different tool.

This meant that all of the comments we received during the think-aloud were related to the way the prototype worked rather than to our actual idea. We were able to explain how it was supposed to work, and then the subjects liked the idea, but since we were able to explain what our interface didn't already make obvious we were not able to get insights into how the app could be improved.

The Parents App Prototype

Interview Transcript

Due to the fact that group D3 already chose a target group so quickly after conducting their interviews, it felt unneccessary for me to do leap backwards in their process instead of participating in going forward. However, since it is compulsory to conduct an interview and since we already are done with the project, I went to Fotografiska Museet and managed to conduct an interview containing questions where we can see if our thought process of the idéa seems beneficial enough.

Föräldrar

1. Hur visste ni att museet existerade och varför bestämde ni er för att komma hit? Har ni varit här tidigare?
   → Frugan gillar konst och vi kunde inte lämna barnen ensamma, så vi googlade runt och hittade att det var gratis inträde för barn just här. Ja, vi har varit här tidigare med barnen för längesedan.

     2. På en skala 1-4, hur var er upplevelse med besöket? Vad var bra och dåligt?

        → 3, Det var som vi hade förväntat oss. Det som var bra annat än utställningen var ju att det var              andra barnfamiljer här, känns  mer bekvämt då vi inte behöver tysta ner barnen så mycket.                  Enda nackdelen är priserna i restaurangen.

     3. Känner ni att ni kan vara avslappnade och njuta av utställningen?

        → Så mycket som det går Ja men man blir lite distraherad av ljudet från andra barnfamiljer och                sedan så måste vi ju också hålla koll på barnen.

     4. Så ni känner en liten konstant oro gällande vad barnen håller på med?

        → Ja.  (Mannen och frun gav varandra en gemensam blick)

     5. Skulle ni låta era barn göra det de vill och vandra fritt i museet?

        → Nej, det skulle göra oss mer oroliga. (En gemensam blick delades och frun svarade)

     6. Om ni alltid visste vart barnen befinner sig och ha möjligheten att navigera till dem och även bestämma när de ska komma till er, skulle det ta bort er oro? Skulle ni då kunna njuta mer av utställningen?

        → Ja om vi bara hade med oss Linda (11år), då men nu när vi har Pontus (8år) så kommer det                  nog alltid kännas mest bekvämt om han är inom vår synhåll.

      7. Ni sa att ni googlade upp museer innan ni valde att komma hit, brukar ni oftast kolla upp i förväg på nätet innan om evenemanget ni ska till?

         → Ja det gör vi alltid.

      8. Om utställningarna innehöll någon form av nakenhet, våld och/eller droger, skulle ni valt att ta med barnen då?
         → Vi skulle förmodligen ha valt att gå till ett annat event för att vi känner inte för att besvara på frågor om könsorgan offentligt om en sån fråga dyker upp av barnen.

      9.  Har ni båda smartphones och har ni någon slags surfplatta i hushållet?
        → Ja, vi båda har smartphones och ja, vi har en ipad hemma som familjen delar på.

      Barnen (11 åring)

      1. Hur var din upplevelse idag ? (Emoji-skala 1-5)
       → 3 ( barnet kollade på föräldrarna först och svarade därefter)

      2. Vad var roligast/intressantast och vad var tråkigast/sämst?
       → Roligast: färgglada roliga bilder

       → Tråkigast: Svartvita bilder, ledsna personer.

      3. Din pappa sa att ni har en surfplatta hemma, vilka spel brukar du spela och vad gör man där?

        → Toca Hair, där man kan byta hårfrisyr och färg på mig och mina vänner och andra roliga saker. (Man tar bild på sig själv och kan byta hårfrisyr,färg,lägga till örhängen och sånt)

      4. Vad gillar du mest och minst? Måla in färger i bilder, pussel eller frågesport?

        → Jag gillar att måla färger. Jag gillar inte pussel eller frågesport.

      5. Vad skulle du vilja ha i ett Foto-Museum som skulle göra att du har det roligare här?

        → Ett lekställe där man kan göra vad man vill och låta föräldrarna bli klara med museet.

    Summary

After showing the parents the parents app prototype, I received positive feedback and feedback on some features we could improve on or take into consideration. A short summary on valuable points to notice:

+ That parents look up in advance about the exhibitions. This is good so that they will know to bring with their own Tablet to the exhibition.

+ That parents would let their 11 year old take part of the experience and this will make the parents enjoy the artwork in a more comfortable manner. 

+ That the child (11 year old) would probably enjoy to have an Augmented Reality game where she can paint on black & white pictures (a game we had).

- Even though the parents will have total control of the experience and have the ability to navigate to their child, they would still worry about their youngest (7 year old) child.

- If the kids wander freely, there is a chance of the tablet being lost or stolen.

- Battery drainage will be extreme on both devices if they choose to stay for a long period of time. 

     

Final presentation

This presentation is done under free web-app Prezi.
Here is the link to it: http://prezi.com/akn2v0lrkou4/untitled-prezi/
Iframe:


Link to the parents app prototype made under Popapp: https://popapp.in/w/projects/545b7961684533a018031c4c/preview

Links to prototypes

For the record

Prototype with focus on Augmented Reality
http://www.icosacid.com/DH2620/proto3

Prototype with focus on app-scenario
http://www.icosacid.com/DH2620/proto4

Prototype with other game ideas
http://www.icosacid.com/DH2620/proto2

Picture painting game

Most museums in the UK turn out to be very children friendly with often dedicated areas for kids to enjoy the experience in their way: touching, playing.

One of the devices for children at Edinburgh Castle caught my attention because it reminded me of the painting game we though about while brainstorming. Here is what it looks like.

On a fixed tablet was displayed the UI below:

This is designed for all visitors, the bottom right feature is made for kids.

Taping on it leads to the game itself:

Touch the jester to choose an area to paint

When you touch the jester, the borders of the selected area are drawn:

Then touch a colour

The area is filled with Gold and some information about the colour is displayed:

 Same process to colour the rest of the jester:

There is a little number of possible actions (Reset, Finish, Exit) and the focus is on the game. If I remove my spectacles I can still play with my short-sight owing to the presence of colours that clearly stand out from the background and simple shapes. 

Simple GUI, children-friendly and entertaining. 

Few children would read the texts, though.

The technical complexity of detecting where the user touches the screen and highlighting the corresponding area is here reduced by less accuracy. I guess hands are modeled as circles, the head might be an ellipse. Based on such simplification of touch areas we could integrate such a feature in our prototypes.

Last point, I witnessed very aggressive behaviours of children in their use of tactile devices. Some would even hit them without mercy when not responding, with surprising violence. I assume they would not act that way with tablets owned by their parents or themselves, but if Fotografiska were to lend tablets they should consider purchasing this sort of protection:

Summary of the Feedback

Feedback – Key-points & Suggestions

-          - Our interactive design is based on an assumption that the kids (of our target group) are able to read, hear and see.

o   Solutions for the illiterate, deaf, and blind?

-          - Is there a solution for families who don’t have their own tablet(s) to take part of the experience?
                    oThe museum could lend out tablets for a small fee.

-          For the design, is it possible to expand our target group?

Suggestions

-         -  A possibility for the app to “push-notice” about similar upcoming experiences/events to the user later on

  -   Having an auto-mute option for the sound, so that the kids can quickly turn it on or off if necessary (in case they don’t use headphones).

     

            

   

Pre-seminar thoughts on the literature

Chapter 6 - Ideation and design principles

I like the thought of the ideation process having the goal of creating as many different concepts as possible. It is easy to believe that you as a designer should be able to intuitively come up with the most optimal design in the first try but I think that just letting your mind flow freely lets you come up with unconventional and unexpected things that can be turned into something great later.

This is improved further by the rule that “there are no bad ideas”. It is important to have an open attitude so that everyone feels invited to bring his or her potentially spontaneous ideas forward. In our sessions, that felt difficult in the beginning and might come with experience and a group that has worked together for longer.

It also seems like a good idea to stay focused, but not spending too much time on a single idea. When brainstorming we tended to experiment with a central concept during most of the session, but I now realize how that might only take you along what can be thought of like a “desire path”. If you spend too much time on an idea, you might get comfortable with it and not want to stray too far.

The idea of “method design” is appealing to me, and I think we tried to do that unconsciously since we are designing a product for a target group we are not part of. Since we had clearly designed personas, this felt like it came naturally.

Chapter 7 – Refinement

I found this chapter to be the most interesting one yet. The previous chapters have been build-up for the refinement part, where your initial criteria, research and brainstorming come together to start forming the final product. In a way, it finally makes the product feel “real”. This is also the point where you take constraints and “laws” into account and have to make trade-offs and prioritizations.

Most of the constraints feel like common sense, but I wouldn’t have thought of all of them if I were asked before reading the chapter. Time, money and technology, for example, were always in the back of our minds, but tools and teams are not really relevant to our current project (since they are unknown) and so we hadn’t considered them.

The principles of direct and indirect manipulation are useful and were something we had considered earlier. Since our main target group is kids, we felt we needed something that they could touch and interact with directly rather than through indirect manipulation with menus and buttons. Since our product is digital, all manipulations are technically indirect but as the book mentions, when designing a technical product the terms can be redefined slightly.

One thing that really stood out to me was that “sketches are inherently unfinished”. It is easy to see the benefits of pen and paper compared to digital tools in how quickly they allow you to put your thoughts into pictures, but the fact that sketches look unfinished and how that makes it easier to discuss their flaws was something that I hadn’t thought of.

Chapter 8 - Prototyping, testing and development

The eighth chapter pieced together and summarized things I have come across on the web before and gives a good overview. It is easy to get carried away with all the technical possibilities and leave out focusing on making users understand the interface. It is easy to provide instructional text to try to compensate for bad design, but as the book says, instructional text is rarely read. You are supposed to have an interface that makes it clear to the user what is expected of them.

I also remember the concept of digital versions of analog technology not necessarily having to resemble the original product from the movie “Objectified” and find it to be very interesting. However, I agree with the argument that while making a new version free of many of the old constraints can be interesting and open up new possibilities, keeping the design in line with the analog version reveals intent and will make the product accessible to users of the existing technology.

I also particularly like the emphasis on giving items on screen a visual weight based on its importance and will try to keep that in mind when designing our product. The rest of the chapter provides useful feedback for our work with the high-fidelity prototype and testing.

The question I would like to raise at the seminar is how to best improve the openness of the ideation process in a setting that is not inherently business-like (such as ours). Rewards and the like might work fine in a more conventional design setting, but is there anything concrete that you can do in a more study-oriented setting?

Pre-seminar thought on the literature

A big part of the first chapter in the literature is about brainstorming in different forms. We’ve used the ”yes and..”-technique ourselves and created a few ideas with it. We used a form of structured brainstorming since we had some tools available to us: pain points, personas and some basic ideas of what we might want to do. A design principle soon emerged since we were already very clear on whom our target group was and had examined them thoroughly, and now had some design ideas. After looking at possible constraints such as time, money, technology, user needs and so on, which idea to choose became very clear. I personally hadn’t read this part of the literature yet, so it seems that these steps are quite intuitive.

On the seminar I would like to discuss how we can move forward in the process using the Laws and Principles of Interaction Design. Since we are pretty set on how the “exterior” of our product should work and look, the next step is probably to think more about the actual application interface.  We have discussed having sound effects and maybe the seminar is a good opportunity to decide if we should use it or not. As the literature states sound can really enhance the user experience, but there are also some risks that needs to be discussed. The sound cannot be audible to all visitors of the museum, as we don’t want our product to disturb the “normal” museum experience, and adding headphones might cause the children who use our product to become less aware of the sound they are making.

I also really want to discuss the different types of prototypes that are described in the literature and which ones might be a good fit for our design. Since our product would take a lot more time to develop than we have, we will have to find a good way of presenting it in a way so that the test users can understand what we want to do even though we can’t offer a high-fidelity prototype.

Thoughts on Seminar 2 literature

Find all notes about chapter 7 of the course book here 

From these notes are drawn here below the implications for our design and some elements that are relevant to get inspired. 

The presentation of the laws and principles for interaction design actually raises a certain number of findings that a designer should be aware of. Some are common sense, but some are worth being thought through. If any concept isn't clear, please refer to the full version of the notes for descriptions.

The direct manipulation seems better than indirect manipulation, especially for our target group: children. On a tablet, the drag and drop with a finger seems to me corresponding accurately to what one can expect as being direct manipulation, as well as clicking buttons. All functionalities of our app involve interacting with the GUI that way.

Feedback and feedforward are very powerful in giving the user a clear idea of the efficiency of the system without even thinking of it. For instance, when the loading time is high, having an indicator that shows the system is loading, i.e. doing something, doesn't shorten the waiting time but makes it seem shorter. We should achieve with our design live rendering without any latency, which is pretty hard if we actually use live augmented-reality. Also, the loading time of pictures for games can be of a paramount importance. The feedforward gives confidence to the user. Displaying instructions such as (Take a photo on a button that takes photos can be part of that).

One should make good use of standard models, also, we ought to have a look a which tablet applications children use most and are the most familiar with, to sort of get inspired and provide the child with an interactive environment that is known. As Alan Cooper said, we should obey standards unless there is a truly superior alternative.

Fitts's law states that the time it takes to move from a starting position to a final target is determined by two things: the distance to the target and the size of the target. However, this shouldn't be a problem for us for two reasons. The first is that we are dealing with tablets, so the interaction of the fingers, i.e. hand motion, is in 3D space and there is yet no model for that. The second is that we are not in a context where users must hurry, nor do we need to keep user's full attention to prevent them from going away (like in Web pages): the tablet remains in the kid's hands; therefore they must deal with the current action anyway. Hence the absence of Fitts's law relevance for us. We can just make sure the GUI is simple enough to avoid users being lost too long, and limiting the number of decisions at a given time (Hick's law, and in a way the Magical Number 7 concept).

The last principle that can help us is the Poka-Yoke Principle, that prevents unexpected errors or misuses to happen. Furthermore, the fact that we should any unnecessary button at a given moment should help us simplify the UI.

From the part Documentation and Methods of Refinement, here are some of the brightest ideas. The first is about using scenarios. Even though we have already worked on them, we focused on the context under which the visitor experienced the museum. Thus, it was neither product-oriented nor design-oriented. The author gives an example of a 5 lines product-oriented scenario that spares days of specifications. Using scenarios, designers can sketch with words, and a picture can be worth a thousand words but a few words can also be worth quite a few pictures.

The power of drawn sketches is also enlightened. We used it a lot and we should probably keep on using it for the design of the GUI itself. Using a storyboard is also an option, as well as tasks flow and use cases.

About the wireframes, we oughtn't create one for the purpose of the course, but it is good to keep in mind that in real-world a whole lot of documentation is needed.

The various controls examples given are known by all of us, so this part was not as relevant as the previous one but it was entertaining.

Last point comes from Bill DeRouchey's experience feedback on frameworks and controls. He mentions the concept of hero task, this is the main task a system has to perform, for example changing volume on a radio, and the design should reflect that hero status. On our GUI, functionalities, buttons that are most often used should be big. The size should be in proportion to the importance.

Since we are at a point of our design that involves making critical decisions, this is probably the right time to discuss some of these points, especially: 

    As the Poka-Yoke Principle makes one consider the relevance of each control at any given time, aren't there some buttons we can remove at some points of our quest? For instance, should the Map and the Find parents remain on the front layer at any time, or could we consider that when the child is busy, he won't need or think of calling his parents?

   The concept of feedforward seems rather important to give used confidence is the use of a system. Since we are dealing with children, and more than half of them might have never used a tablet, should we make the assumption that all children 7-12 will have gone through the learning process of manipulating a tablet and spontaneously think of drag&droping objects, click buttons? Apart from aesthetics considerations, we probably ought to try to get a better understanding of children's mental model of a tablet app.