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.

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.

Readingseminar 2

For this seminar we read chapter 6, 7 and 8 in ‘Designing for Interaction’ by Dan Saffer. Most of the information very relevant to our project. The only negative I have to say is that I felt like some came a bit late. We have already gone through the brainstorming part of the project for example.

But never the less, the key for developing is to repeat. Chapter 6 had brainstorming and principles in focus. By reading this chapter I got a deeper understanding of why it’s so important to let brainstorming take time. It takes more than one idea to get a good end product. You need to have many ideas so when you are ready to move on, you know that you have the best idea. It takes time to become a professional “brainstormer”, and it is easy to make mistakes along the way. But I think my group did a good job with following the important rules of brainstorming. We stayed focused during the whole exercise and “lived” by the most important rule of them all: leave your ego behind and there are no bad ideas!

Principles are something that’s new to me but I can really see the use of it: it’s created so that the whole team is on the same page. And can be used as a measuring stick when deciding on ideas worth keeping. By having principles you can make sure that your original vision on what problem to solve is intact.

Now when we have decided on a prototype the next step its important to know your constrains of the project and how to work around them. For us it’s important that the project doesn’t take to long since we have a time limit for example. Since our product in the end will be seen on interactive screens I thought the piece about feedback and feedforward was interesting. It’s very important to give the user feedback so they know it´s working. And it’s a matter of seconds; if the feedback is delayed the user will think less of the product.

One other thing to help use understand the product was affordances: how shape indicates how the user can use something. By using standards on how it looks like will help our prototype to be user friendly.

Question: how can we use feedback and feedforward in our prototype?