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!

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

I’ve read chapter 6, 7 and 8 in the book ‘Designing for Interaction’ by Dan Saffer. It was an interested read, the first part being about brainstorming and coming up with ideas for the project and the design. Following come descriptions of ways to work with the development of the design. Many factors weigh in, like for example time, money, user needs, business needs, context and teams and so on, which affects the design. There were a few laws mentioned which I found particularly interesting:

Fitt’s law from 1954 which says 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. This law is useful when designing for interactive screens.

Hick’s law says that the time it takes for users to make decisions is determined by the number of possible choices they have. As an example, users make a quicker choice from one menu of 10 items than from two menus of 5 items each. This is not working for sites full of content though, as Yahoo and Amazon.

Tesler’s Law of the Conservation of Complexity says that you can only simplify the process so far, and then move the inherent complexity. E-mail is mentioned as an example, where you only need address of the receiver and of the sender, but the software can automatically take care of your e-mail and save who you write to frequently.

I think it’s interesting to read about laws since we so far haven’t really come across any in this project, and in all technological courses we read we always have rules to follow. I’m curious to see what other’s put out as guidelines in this subject.

I also found the section where interaction designer standards where discussed interesting. Some standards are widely used (short commands were mentioned in the text). We discussed standards at the lecture the 15 of October, more specific how many webpages created today look a lot like Facebook. I’d like to end this blog post with the question: is it because Facebook has many users or because it has the best design?   

Developing the prototype

Today we continued with our prototype for the information screens at Tom Tits. We got feedback at last weeks' seminar and now we looked over it and made some changes. Some features have been removed and some added, and we hope this will make the design better!

group meeting - 8/10 -14

Today we decided on the final design, we sat for a long time just reflecting on the already existing designs and the pros and cons for each one. We draw some sketches and tried to come up with the best one. We decided on that the museum should have screens at place and it should be easy to use.

Here is some pictures on how it looked like when we thought about how visitors could use one of the
design:

 But after some time we sat and made a more detailed design for what should show on the screens:

Design: Wild and Crazy

We (Calle, Matilda and Rebecka) discussed a wild design idea and came up to an idea about using holograms to project a character that explains experiments and tells the user about the museum. We thought about holograms because it offers a more interactive way to get the information than for example a text. Our idea is that children will be more encouraged to learn when teached by some cartoon or character that they associate with fun. Below we have the main points of our idea listed.

Main points:

• Holograms of customized character depending on knowledge level and age
• For example, a five year old gets to talk to a cartoon character and a very interested parent get to talk to Albert Einstein
• Stationed by the wall at a few places in every room, not by the experiments.
• Able to answer questions that you ask them (speak)
• You wear an “id” of some kind so the hologram device will recognize you and adapt to your own customization. Handed out in the entrance where you choose your “customizations” such as knowledge level and character/s to interact with during your visit.
• Do not require any device of the user.

Brainstorming in class

Today during the exercise we tried different brainstorming methods. It gave us a lot of good ideas for us to use in the future. First we wrote one idea each on a post-it, and then handed it over to the person to the left that added something for the idea. After that, we split the group in two and came up with one idea and design each. 

Here is some pictures from today:

Exercise 3 - Pain points

Issue/opportunity	Marie	Sven
Get information before visit	4	1
Get information fast (without having to search on own device)	4	4
Support from staff	3	4
Need of further information to explain to kids	5	5

1 - very unimportant ... 5 - very important

Exercise 3 - Secondary persona

Sven

Name: Sven Karlsson

Age: 71

Hometown: Lidingö, Sweden

Background

Sven grew up in Småland where he worked as a glassblower with his father. After meeting his future wife, Anna-Lisa, they moved to Göteborg and started a family. There he worked as a carpenter, mostly involved in build houses. Anna-Lisa and Sven had three children, two girls and a boy. Sven built their house himself when the children were young and lived there for many years.

When Sven turned 50, Anna-Lisa gave him the tools to create oil paintings after seeing him do sketches his entire life. It quickly became a big hobby and he started to sell his paintings to small studios for little money. A couple of years ago, Sven lost his wife after a few years of illness.

Personality

Sven used to be a outgoing person but since he lost his wife he became more shy and withdrawn. It’s when he is with his family that he feels comfortable and like his old self. He finds a lot of joy being with his grandchild, Moa, and tries to spend as much time with her as possible. Sven likes to do his same old routines every day. During a normal day he likes to take a walk with the neighbor and their dogs, drink coffee with his friends or take care of the house.

Today

After his retirement and the death of his wife he likes to spend his time with his grandchild Moa, 7 years old. Today he has moved to Lidingö, Stockholm to be closer to his grandchild. He also have some old friends that he enjoy spending time with.

Scenario 1

For some weeks Sven had been looking forward to bring his grandchild Moa on something that they both would appreciate, and one day when Moa have an afternoon off from school they finally got the time. Sven started the morning with meeting an old friend that lives close by, then he left home to pick up Moa at school after lunch.

    He picked Moa up and they headed against Södertälje. On the way Moa was enthusiastic, she had heard a lot about Tom Tits from their last visit some years ago and had some vague memories that she had a lot of fun that time. This time Sven hoped that Moa would also get more out of the exhibitions and maybe learn something.

    At the entrance they saw some advertisement about an app but none of them had a smartphone and Sven had left his tablet at home. But since they had both been there before  they just walk in.

They started off with some experiments that they knew since their previous visit but this time Moa started to ask questions about how it worked. Sven, who is a practical, had no problem explaining the mechanical experiments but when they approached the more scientific ones he struggled. He tried to read the short texts beside and at some experiments they helped him, but on others he didn’t even understood for himself. It also happened that they couldn’t find any texts at all! Then Sven was searching the room to see if he could find anyone from the staff to help them understand, but they didn’t find anyone. They decided to skip these experiments and move on.

    When they left Tom Tits they didn’t left with the same enthusiasm they had when they arrived. They appreciated the experiments they understood but some of the experiments was to hard for them without better guidance.

Scenario 2:

Sven woke after a bad night’s sleep. He dragged himself up from bed to make some coffee in the kitchen, and was just about to sit down in his favorite armchair to read the paper when the doorbell rang. Moa and her dad were early! Sven answered the door and let Moa in. They waved her dad goodbye, made a last visit to the bathroom and then started the long journey to Södertälje to go to the museum Tom Tits.

    When they finally arrived to Tom Tits they entered a soap bubble show. Moa had never been to Tom Tits before, and was very excited. Sven on the other hand, that didn’t sleep very well, had a hard time focusing on the show. When it was over they all applauded and continued to the first floor. Moa ran between the different experiments and showed a big interest in them, but she showed no interest in reading on the small signs with information.

    When they had ran around for a while they went to the café. Sven picked up his smartphone and went through his e-mail. Then he realized that he had seen something about an mobile application around in the museum and looked for it in the app store. He downloaded it, and realized it gained a lot of more information about the experiments. He told Moa what he’d found, and together they went through the experiments that they’d tried out and Sven got to explain a little bit about it. But when Moa asked about a specific experiment that she wanted to know more about, Sven couldn’t find it in the app. Such a pity, Sven thought, now that Moa had shown some interest.

    They continued their visit and Sven hung with as good as he could. Now that he had downloaded the app he tried to explain the experiments, but before he even managed to find the right experiment Moa would rather go to the next one so Sven gave up pretty fast. They’d been there for a few hours and that started to show in. The bad sleep didn’t help. So when they finally had went through all floors they both were delighted to go home. When they reached the entrance floor and realized that there were a slide from the top floor they didn’t even bother to go back upstairs, but started walking to the car. In the exit there was a station where they could rate their visit and give some feedback, and Sven pressed the really happy smiley with the feedback that they could maybe work a little bit more of finding a fun way to transfer some knowledge to the kids while they tried the experiments out.

    Sven was really happy about the visit, even though he hadn’t been able to keep up and be with Moa all the time she seemed to have a great time on Tom Tits.

Exercise 3 - Main persona

Marie

Name: Marie Andersson

Age: 39

Hometown: Upplands-Väsby, Sweden

Background
Marie is a 39 year old high school teacher of history and social studies. She is originally from Västerås, but at the age of 19 she moved to Stockholm to study at Stockholms University. In her last year she met Niklas, a law student at the same school. After a few years together they got married and decided to move to the suburb, Upplands Väsby. There they are raising their two kids, Erik and Linnea, 9 years old and 7 years old. In their vacations they usually go to their cabin in Dalarna.

Personality
Marie is outgoing, helpful and involved in her family and friends. She is usually very calm, but has a busy schedule and is therefore not always patient. She is very tidy, which she demands from her children to be as well. Her childrens’ well being and education is very important to her, and she likes to activate them, for example with museums and sports.

Today

Marie has been working at the same school for many years and is happy with that. She recently became a Friskis & Svettis leader. Todays she is tired from a long week at work preparing exams.

Scenario 1

Marie and Niklas had been planning their Tom Tits visit for a couple of days. They both knew they wanted to go there after seeing an ad in the local news paper. Marie had been there once before when she was young, but for the rest of the family this was the first time visiting the museum. Therefore, she is slightly more excited so she visited the webpage in advance. When visiting the web page she saw there would be a soap bubble show, that she thought especially Linnea would appreciate. They also found information regarding prices and opening hours there. She is hoping that this museum visit will take her thoughts off all the stress she has been experiencing at work the last couple of weeks.

When they arrived at Tom Tits she saw signs about the new “Tom Tits Exp” app but she didn’t have an internet connection and the museum didn’t have Wi-Fi. Niklas downloaded it on his phone and she decided to have a look with him. She borrowed his phone and oriented around quickly on the app to get an idea of what it was about. She saw general information, maps and experiment explanations and thought this could come in handy during her visit. Then she focused her attention on her family. Her children was eager to start experimenting and Marie and Niklas were just as excited and did a lot of experiments together with the children. They noticed that there wasn’t a lot of staff, which made it impossible to do one of the experiments. Marie found it sometimes hard to explain to her kids. She realized she needed the app to get the most out of the visit and borrowed Niklas phone frequently. She noticed that she was almost alone using it at Tom Tits though.

At lunchtime they stopped by the cafeteria, which was quite expensive, but they just got their pay check so it was all right. They appreciated the food being ecologic and organic, and explained why that was beneficial to their children.

They ended the museum visit by taking the slide down. Erik nagged about doing it another time but they had to go back to the car since they hadn’t paid a ticket for a longer stay.

After the visit, both Marie and Niklas recommended the museum to colleagues at work and said it was a good place to take the family.

Scenario 2:

Holiday season starts and Marie and her family are planning to go hiking at Tyresta National Park for the weekend. Just when they are about to leave, it starts to rain. Thus they decide to go to TomTits, since a colleague had recommended it to Marie. Her husband is disappointed, because he was looking forward to being outside in the nature. But since they didn’t come up with any other idea they decide to go. This was an impulsive decision so they didn’t have time to look up the museum before the visit.

When they arrive Marie sees all the kids running around and with slightly panic in her eyes she asks at the desk for some information pamphlet but they are just offering a simple map. The staff refers to the app or proposes buying the book. But Marie's internet volume is already consumed for this month and she is not willing to pay for a book in addition to the entrance fee.

She accompanies her children to the experiments. After a while they reach a complicated water experiment which fascinates her children. It is a construction, where half of the injector are pointing from inside to outside and the others reversed. Marie don’t know nor the explanation on her own neither how to explain this phenomenon. The experiment is missing an information sign. She asks a stranger who is using the app about the description to the experiment and gets disappointed as she realizes that the brief explanation not satisfies her own need for explanation. Therefore she finds herself not able to explain it to her kids.

When she goes back to her kids, they have already vanished. She finds them running around on another floor. Everything attracts their attention, but only for split seconds. She experiences troubles to motivate her kids to observe intended phenomenon.

On her way out she passes a  TV screen which advertises a bubble show. She just wants to motivate her children to watch it as she is realizing it has already taken place. So Marie and her family decides to leave the museum and go back home.

Group interview summary

In the interviews we found out that the information about the experiments on Tom Tits didn’t reach the visitors. Next to (most of the) experiments is a short text, but to find more information you have to connect to the mobile application that almost no one knew about. The people who knew about it thought it was too unavailable to use anyway. Furthermore neither the app nor the short text was available in another language than Swedish. Some of the visitors could see a problem with relying on visitors having smart Phones and encourage the idea of having some devices at the museum instead.

Almost everyone we talked to visited Tom Tits because it combines an educative and fun environment for both adults and children. But also almost everyone felt that the information regarding the experiments was hard to reach, which made it hard to explain in a scientific way to the children. We realized that the ages of the kids coming to Tom Tits varied a lot, so it would be great to be able in some way to reach all different ages. In one of our interviews, a visitor suggested different difficulty in the information texts for both young kids, adults and “nerds”. In that way everyone can learn something, whatever age you are and how interested you are in the subject. Another important issue is to catch the attention of the children and to motivate them to look out for the observable phenomenons, which can reached by asking for details.

We all got the impression that it was really hard to get the answers we wanted without leading them in a direction.

After our interviews some of us came to the conclusion that parents have a positive view on the idea of implementing technology to the museum which is a good thing for us.

State-Of-The-Art Group Analysis

‘Tom Tits Exp’ App

In conclusion it can be said that the app provides helpful information, is nicely illustrated and easy to use. Unfortunately it only aims for swedish speaking parents and isn’t used by as many people as we guess they’d hoped. Furthermore the usage without mobile internet is limited to orientation with the maps as extensive descriptions are only online available. This makes the app less enjoyable since you are dependent of the Internet. 

Some of the experiments that we found difficult to understand had no information text and where neither presented in the app. On this point we felt that the app failed as it could be a good complementary on the lacking information text.

Interactive screens

Interactive screens offer a new way for people to get to know the exhibitions at the same time as they are active. Especially it offers younger persons and kids, who are used to touch input systems, a funnier way to get information. However it can be hard for elderly people to use the benefits from it due to their inexperience of similar systems such as touchscreens on mobile phones. We also think it is important to develop a system where the screens don’t steal to much attention form the real exhibition. Instead it should be used as an aid to improve the overall experience. At Tom Tits we believe that they can use the benefits from screens or even make it to an exhibition of its own.

Website 

It’s a very good website where you can read about the experiments on the different floors, so that when you go there know what to expect. It doesn’t show all the experiments and the explanations of each experiment are very short. 

We think it´s very good of Tom Tits to show what they offer so that parents and other people with children can get an idea of what to expect and see if it is something for them. Therefore the website is more for those who think one step ahead or haven’t been there before. Since our study focused on when you are already there and how to get information and explanations we tried to visit the website by my phone and got disappointed. It didn’t adapt to the screen so it was hard to read and navigate. So if we wanted to know something about an experiment and didn't get satisfied with the information signs we would rather use their app.

Seminar 1 - Group discussion

Chapter 2:  

We talked a lot about the approaches and which ones might be applied in our project. After discussion we think that the The activity centered design and the genius design approach seems like a good way to go since we won't be able too meet the users too much after our visit to the museum. Therefor the user - centered design approach probably won't be our major one.

Easier to design for a target group we are in.

Test on other people that is not in the museum to see if the interaction is working. We won't necessarily need our users for that, but people within the target group.

Mix the approaches as much as we can.


Chapter 4:

Hunt statement - I'm going to research X so that I can do Y.
This statement is something we think we should use before going into the field. Always thinking why the question will be relevant before asking.

Observation and interviews.

Unconscious bias - be careful to not choose people we feel match our expectations and instead also taking in regard people that are the opposite of our expectations.


Chapter 5:

Pain points as a conceptual model.

Personas - Creating different personas to help our evaluations during the development of the process.

Taking research information that are very distant and trying to combine them could give us new ideas and perspective.


Questions:

We think we can evaluate our working process by using different approaches we found to be relevant in chapter two and also creating personas.

Follow up on the interviewed people not necessary since the visitors can vary.

Mixing the approaches could give some disadvantages but we think they are the same as using only one. Therefore we are going to mix the approaches since the advantages are more by doing so.

Thoughts about our own project:

Think about the relation parent - children. Do parents want to leave them alone?

What do parents do during that time?

Will the parents have more fun if they can explain the experiments?

They want to be with their kids or they take them there to have some time alone?


Other group's tips and thoughts:

Be "a part of the environment" while interviewing a child

Observing gave more data than the interview

Hard to get answers without introducing them to the idea

Reading seminar 1 - Rebecka Rönnbäck

For the first seminar we’ve read three articles and some chapters from a book called Designing for Interaction.  They have all been about usability and design between the producer and the user, but in different ways. To begin with there are four ways of designing.

The first is called User-Centered Design (USD). This way of designing assumes that the user knows best and therefore the design is adjusted for the user’s needs. The process of designing is interacted with potential users and their input on how it should be.

The second is called Activity Centered Design, and is based, as you can hear from the name, on activities, behaviors around certain tasks.

The third is called System Design and is a structured design for big and complex problems.

Last but not least, Genius Design. The designer makes all the choices on how the product will end up by knowing the users need. It is not like in the USD though, where the user actually get to decide on looks.

The texts also discuss how to gather information and say that qualitative research is to prefer rather than quantitative research. So what is the difference?

Qualitative research is based on interviews and opinions, on behaviors and expectations, questions beginning with why and how, instead of quantitative which is collected data and statistics.

For our project, I believe we will use a mix of the first and the fourth designing technique. We will get a picture of our target groups and our users and what they want and need, and work from that. For this, we will use qualitative research.

My question for this seminar is:
How do we continue the research after the first interview when we have found the target group? Is it a good idea to stay in touch (using the USD method) or bring new people in if we want to make more research?