Summary of our work so far

For the last exercise we did a lot of work with the high-fidelity prototype and it really paid off. Everyone in the group got to use their skills - like doing a great job with the design, extra research at Tom Tits including user testing, or implementing an actual clickable high-fidelity prototype. Overall, we are very happy with the progress our group has made over the last weeks.

In many meetings we discussed our workflow, sitemap and the actual implementation of the prototype. Additionally we’ve debated often and considered different approaches whereby we used social medias as Facebook, Google Drive and telecommunication.

Since the beginning of the project, we realized the key to great work is a good communication within the group. Also an important factor for being efficient was making use of personal skills and therefore we divided the work after professions. Everybody also gave a lot of feedback on everybody’s work, which helped developing our project further. Everybody has found out what their particular skill in the group is and what their strengths really are. Through our work, our target group has always been our number one priority and we develop this product for them. When we did our interviews and observations on our visits, we met people similar to our future personas. Our observations and their opinions gives a concrete idea about the needs and the personality of our customers which has helped us in creating personas and scenarios. These lead to forming main goals and pain points according to our personas that we wanted to tackle with our product.

It’s fun to see how this project has taken shape since the brainstorming with all its crazy ideas to something that’s actually relevant. During these weeks, we have narrowed our ideas down a lot to keep the simplicity of the product and only have what is absolutely necessary for the target group and Tom Tits. This way, it is easy to understand our product and according to staff members it fits perfectly with Tom Tits values for their guests’ experience. We kept focus on our target group at Tom Tits, but we have always kept the museums interest in mind to create the best compliment. Tom Tits values learning by doing - an ‘hands on’ learning experience. There is no instruction to any experiment because there is no right or wrong way to do it. With our product, the visitors simply get more scientific explanations on the experiments which helps families getting the most out of their visit and attracts also children by small quizzes to experiments.

The final step in this project is considering the proposed changes after the evaluation last week and the feedback from think-alouds, and preparing the final presentation. This also includes making a visual design of the product when being used - a picture of the interactive screens at Tom Tits. Making these final pieces of this project is not overwhelming, the feedback we got has been throughout very positive. In the end, we have learnt to work well in advance instead of doing the presentations last minute and therefore we don’t feel stressed anymore when close to a deadline.

Continuation from the visit at Tom Tits yesterday.

We went to Tom Tits and did our Think-alouds. We interviewed a lot of people who got to try out our prototype. It was exciting to see them try it and as it turned out also very useful for us to develop the prototype further. It was important to us to go back to Tom Tits so that the prototype would be tested in its right environment. We focused on letting visitors that fitted our main personas characters, but also we had some staff members try it out. We did the later just to see if the staff could see if our concept would work with Tom Tits´ concept.

When interviewing the staff, we got their thoughts about what the products should contain. Tom Tits is about hands-on learning - trying out the experiments without someone or something telling what is right or wrong. Therefore the staff liked our product, which doesn’t come with instructions on how to do the experiments.

One of the staff thought our design was alright but could be improved - she said some buttons could be more clear where they would lead. This feedback helped a lot and we have now improved them by changing icons and colors to make it more user-friendly. So now we have changed the icons and tried even harder to find metaphors thats would help the user understanding what to expect when they press a certain button. So instead of having + as the icon for “more information” we have now changed it to an i. That icon was also something some visitors had as suggestions.  

We got questions about how we’ve planned with the screens - where would they be located and how many do we want? Have we thought about school holidays when there is a lot of people - would all the guests be able to use them or only a few? We have already thought about it and decided to have a few screens on each floor - not one screen per experiment. This is, once again, not to interfere with the playful experience of doing the experiments which is one of the main focuses on Tom Tits.

We talked to both parents and grandparents at Tom Tits. Several pointed out that it was important that we don’t have too much information on the screens so the kids don’t loose interest. It is better to have a start screen and then being able to continuing reading if interested. Also good to hear since it was something we had thought of as well and in a way expected to hear from our target group. People in general thought it was a good idea to have a competitive element to the screen - another fun thing for the children in particular. It was not super obvious that our icon for the competition, the star, represented a quiz. We have now changed it.

The grandparents were not as used to this format - the interactive screen - but happily tried it and thought it was something the children would appreciate.

To summarize our visit - people seemed to like our idea and thought it helped out with something that was missing at Tom Tits. Our product is all about giving more information about the scientific part of the experiment and works as a complement to the playful visit at Tom Tits.

With the feedback we got, we were now able to make some changes after the users expectations and needs. Now we have a more coherent prototype.

Today the group went to Tom Tits again to get some feedback on our prototype. It went really good and the comments on the design was sometimes surprising, some buttons were very simple and obvious to us but not to the user. Especially old users. For some it was learning by doing instead of obvious from the start.

The feedback was good and we can use it to continue the work on the design.

The users all agreed that our product would be a good compliment to the museum and were over all very enthusiastic!

Group Meeting

Today we had a short meeting and decided which changes we will apply to our prototype. Furthermore we planned shortly how work will be divided. As our group consists of programmers and graphic designers, for logical reasons it got divided after profession. This work division also improves personal time planning as smaller groups are coordinated more easily. This way we can create the high-fidelity prototype more efficiently.

Since we are dividing the work we also schedueled a time limit so we can constantly check how far we have come and be sure that the two parts are being produced.

reading seminar 2 group discussion

Today we stood down and talked about what we had read for this reading seminar 2. We also went through the comments we got for our project.

Starting with the book. Chapter 6 contained information regarding brainstorming. We found it interesting to read about but said that it would have been good to read it earlier in the course - our brainstorming was two weeks ago.

Chapter 6 also contained design principles that we haven't used either but could be useful in future design projects.

We discussed a lot about feedback from chapter 7, it's a part of designing that you normally don't think about and is not that obvious. But of course, how a system respond affects the user experience. The example with pressing buttons and waiting for reaction, and how the user needs to see something has happened and different time limits for when the system should respond, was especially interesting.

We can really use this knowledge of affordance in our design, even though we are using screens our "buttons" can still have a design of real buttons so the user know where to press.

Chapter 8 is about prototyping, development and testing. We are thinking from our own experience it is best doing the interface design by going down the way starting with sketches, then proceeding with detailed paper prototypes to end up with detailed digital low-fidelity prototypes is the best way to develop. We have discussed about testing and thought that it would be good to test it already now in the beginning and then continuously test it as we update it. This so we won't have to go back to the start if something where to go wrong if tested at the end.

Reading seminar 2

For our second reading seminar we read three chapters: Ideation and Design Principles, Refinement and Prototyping, Testing, and Development.

The first chapter covers how to create ideas and how to value them.
For the first there are some easy methods. To start the process you can use mind maps or association games.
Afterwards you do structured brain storming by using Personas, Process Moments and Pain Points.
Out of those design principles can be created, which should be memorable, specific and cross-fitting.

Second chapter is about how to get details fitting to constraints. There are several principles of interaction design that have be contributed to.
Just to name important ones: Standard, The Poka-Yoke Principle, Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity and The Magical Number Seven.
It is important to document and use methods of refinement such as scenarios, use cases as well as sketches and models.

The last chapter can be divided into three steps. The first one is Prototyping. Hereby you start with Interface Design.
Then you can build low-fidelity prototypes as for instance paper prototypes.
They base on Wizard of Oz manipulation to appear interactive. Out of those first tries high-fidelity prototypes are build, which require much more time and ressources.
The next step is testing. In the user testing phase you are observing a user using the prototype, which is evaluated by testing protocols and opportunity reports.
Besides an heuristic evaluation can be done by applying common questions.
The last step is developing, which can be summed up as troubleshooting.

Reading seminar 2 - Isabella Richiello

Chapter 6

This chapter is about brainstorming and different techniques that are helpful during the process. While brainstorming you need to keep in mind that quantity is more valued then quality, therefor concentration and an open mind towards all ideas are two key words. The book later on points out structuring up the ideas with follow up exercises such as e.g. pain points or personas. This is the hardest step and I agree when thinking back on our brainstorming process. Although the personas, pain points and scenarios we made gave a push into the right direction making the exercise brainwriting successful for our group. I feel this is when we really started producing ideas and developing them further by choosing which one was worth pursuing. Many things mentioned could have been of an advantage for us to know about before doing the brainstorming session.

Chapter 7

This chapter was very interesting to read about, lots of things mentioned were new and explained easily. Different constraints to help define a product are mentioned, which I found fun to read about since we have touched this point a bit during our brainstorming. For example the technology and context point which affected our designing process. Also laws and principles of interaction design are mentioned, which contains lots of information, some of it irrelevant for our project and some more interesting. The part about Affordance and Feedback was something I thought could be very interesting for us. Affordance is important since we are developing for users that could be older and doesn’t want to learn new things meanwhile feedback would be important since it is a new device and by having good feedback we keep the users trust and patience for it. Another part I found was meaningful was task flows and use cases, I think using them would help further develop and understand our design.

Chapter 8

We are now at this stage of building a prototype so this chapter was good to read through. We have started out by doing a paper prototype and I agree with what is said of it being the easiest way to quickly sketches up different steps of the device. I’m looking forward to go deeper into high-fidelity prototypes. Therefor I would like to discuss what type of high-fidelity prototype is the best for our design and when would be a good time to test it?