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!