Kenneth Runnman Think Aloud

When you gather data you have to first consider the five key issues. So before I was doing the session I had to set goal for what I wanted to accomplish with the session. My goal with the session was to get answers to the questions.

The Questions:

• How can we make the app more user friendly? I want to see if there is any misunderstanding that can be solved with icons and if it is easy for the user navigate through the app.
• Find out if the user is missing any functions in the app that could be useful?

Identifying the participant: I did a think aloud protocol session with my cousins wife. She has only been in the country and the city for about three months and she has a kid so I thought that she would be a great subject considering that she fit both of our target groups: parents to children and tourists.

Relationship with the participant: I began with explaining what we were going to do and how I was going to use the information that was gathered during the session. She is from the Philippines and her english is limited so I asked her husband to be present so that he could translate when she couldn’t communicate properly in english. Then I explained how our prototype works and the purpose it has.

The five key issues also includes triangulation and pilot studies. The meaning of triangulation is that the investigation should be viewed from more than one perspective, and I think that we do that as a group because everyone is doing their own think aloud session. I am a little bit uncertain about the pilot study because we are doing only one think aloud session per person in the group. But we did one collective think aloud session before we did an individual session.

So I continued with the statement “Imagine that you are looking for a museum in Stockholm and you are using this app to find a suitable museum”. I took notes with the use of pen and paper because I think that the subject was more comfortable with that rather than a audio or video recording. As the session started I kept quiet and took notes, only to open my mouth when she was quiet for a longer moment. When that happened I asked her what she was thinking about.

The conclusions from the session were that the icons was hard to understand because there were many similar icons that could be the same thing on the first page. The icons was better on the second page but that there can be improvements to those icons too. It wasn’t very clear what “estimated time”  means, if it is estimated time in the museum or travel time to the museum. She also didn’t like the background that the app had, she didn’t think that it was neat. On the third page she thought that it would be great if you could see a star rating and feedback from other users to make it easier for her to decide. She thought that the fourth page could use a little more information about the museum and its exhibition as it can be a temporary exhibitions that would be interesting.

Kenneth Runnman

Think aloud

Yesterday i met with Kalle, a friend of mine to do a think aloud test of our application. Kalle is 22 years old and lives in Stockholm. However, he's only lived in Stockholm for about 6 months, originally being from the northern parts of Sweden. Because of this i figured he could maybe fit in to one of our target groups, tourists.

I started off by explaining what the application is all about, that you can find different types of museums based off interests & also find routes inside the museums, with the main focus to simplify the searching and also have all the information you need to plan a museum visit in one place.
I then told him to try out the prototype and also keep an open dialogue with me explaining his thoughts throughout the usage.

He started off being a little bit confused as to what the different icons meant, and tried looking for information on the different icons but couldnt find any. He then proceeded to click one of the icons and got taken to the next page (the convenience page). Here he told me that he kind of understood what we were trying to do and didnt seem confused at all. He said that liked that we had an estimated time function (but that it could use some more information and some better graphics), seeing as in this city, you really have to spare on time.

He then proceeded to the page with the suggested museums and said that this was the page that he liked the best and the one he understood the best.

All in all he gave me mostly positive feedback, he liked the idea alot and said that he thought it could be very useful, especially for someone who isn't familiar with Stockholm or is new in town.

I think that this think aloud and the feedback it gave did good and will help us (it was also very fun to do and interesting!), but at the same time it feels like we already knew these problems and that we already had plans to fix them. It was also useful just observing someones workflow with the application. I think that this way of gathering data from observations could be as important as actively asking questions and 'giving instructions' just because you get to see the user in their normal state, just how they would have used the application on their own.

Think aloud with a friend

Today I met a friend of mine, Maja, whom i asked to try our simple iPhone version of our idea. She's a woman in her late twenties and a mother of two small children.

The first thing I told her is that this is an application used for quickly finding a desired route for a suggested museum. I told her that the purpose of this application is to make it easier to choose museums and that it reduces the amount of problems on the side such as, apart from finding a desired museum, checking for transport routes and other conveniences.

I sat beside her, asking her to focus solely on the application alone, and to speak her mind whilst navigating it.

1. The first thing she mentioned was that that she didn't quite understand all the icons. She suggested that we combine some icons into more general ones. For example; why was there an icon of a coffee cup as well as an apple?

Furthermore, she suggested that there should be some kind of 'help' box providing information for how to use the application. She asked if these museums were restricted to one specific city (Stockholm in this case), and whether the user may change it to other cities.

2. After choosing a desired icon she proceeded to the page with convenciences. She approved of the idea that one has the opportunity to choose conveniences such as ATM machines or wheel chair support. However, she didn't quite understand the "Estimated time" slider; since it had no display text, it was hard to determine in what scale the slider was measured in.

3. Ending up in the page with the suggested museums, she told us that it would be nice to see where the museums were located, with some more displayed text beneath each suggested museum's title.

She did like the concept and considered it relevant to our work, and that an application like this might help people like herself, with children, to make it easier to visit museums.

Think-aloud Eric Hallström

Think aloud with international student in my house
The yellow marks is reference to the literature. 

The data gathering from observation and interviews should have a clear goal through when we did our interviews we might not had a really clear goal in mind but after gathering the data we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with the material we had. The main point in our interviews was that the visitors didn't find stuff inside the museum, even though that the stuff where inside the museum. I feel like we adapted our interviews good and that we didn't went to the museum with one strict focus point in mind so we were able to adapt good during the circumstances. This is confirmed by the literature that it’s important to have a fine balance between goals and being open minded so small modifications. When we were at the museum we had in mind that we wanted to find out

-        What kind of person visit this museum?

-        What are they doing?

-        How are they doing it?

From this main focus point we adapted our design to be most fit for younger parents and tourists. First from our personas and from observation at Tekniska muset we found out that younger parents visiting a museum didn't had much time to experience the exhibition itself and was constantly looking out for their children. Another observation we did at Nordiska muset was the tourists and how they adapted to the exhibition. Even though the museum wasn't crowded and there were only a few visitors at the time we were there, they consisted of tourists.

To get different perspective from the observations at the museums we visited was our real strength that we worked in a group. Even if our group consist of only male around 20 years old we still have different ideas, experience and lives. Though we have not pointed this out that different members of the group should observe different areas we went on to just doing a total observation at the museum and then combining our experience when we sat down and talked about what we should do.  

This is why I contacted a international student in my house. This think aloud fit in a direct observation in controlled environments.

First of all it was good that we lived in the same house so she didn't had to travel or feel that she wasted her time. The second good thing was that the environment was quiet and we could solely focus on the main thing, the observation.  

I presented our design and didn't really tell her much about why we did it and who should use it. I told her more about this after the testing was done. I did this because I didn't wanted to influence her with my ideas and my thoughts.

The degree of participation I had in the observation was to a minimum. I choose to call myself a passive observer, even though I was there to answer any questions and ask question, I wanted the interaction to be as real as possible and I told her to think out loud on what she was doing and why she was clicking on different stuff.

I gathered my information with paper and pencil to minimize the distraction from computers and recordings.  

The application started with the main screen with a few icons, it’s was confusing at first what the icons meat, the first thing she said “what are these?”. I did not answer that question because that would have spoiled the whole idea with the application. Instead she clicked on the icons and was directed to the second page, and it was first here she said “ahhha!” and understood what the different icons did. She went back to the main page and started to interpret the different icons. And clicked on one and came to the second screen where she should fill in here special requests. It was the same problem here with that are sometimes not that clear. But this page was easier to understand not when she were used to the icon system. 

She went on the said “I really like this idea, it would be great for my international friends to visit different museum because it’s hard to find out where to go in Stockholm.” The rest of the observation was straight forward and after she got used to the icons she could easy understand what to do and what it was for.

So the main problems here is the icons, one way to solve this is to either find really clear symbols or add some informative text to every icon.

We wanted to design to be as minimum as possible this is why this think aloud went so fast. This is a good thing because we wanted to product to be as smooth and self-explaining as possible and from this observation I can say we reached that goal. 

Think-aloud with my parents

For this think-aloud I sat down with my parents, one at a time and observered how they interacted with our design prototype. All the testing was done on a live iPhone running the prototype.

The main goal of this test is to see if the workflow of the application is working as we intended from the start. If that turns out to work then we have a foundation to build the other designs upon. There is huge win if the workflows on the different platforms are the same.

I made the following introduction to both of the testers.

"The product you are about to use is a museum visit planner. It takes what you like and need from a museum and calculates a personal route for you.

The only thing you need to remember during this is to say everything you think, even if it is gibberish. All feedback is written down and condensed. Here you go!"

Mom

Mom started out looking for help boxes and stuff in order to figure out how to use the application. She seemed a bit afraid to test around and was scared that she might ruin something. But after a few clicks she figured our how the main procedure worked. Below are the problems that arised.

Question marks/Problems

• No helpful text
• Needed to poke around
• No animations made for confusion during transistions
• Some colors caused some confusion
• Button unclear if text or a button

Notes

• Tester seemed to understand the workflow after a couple of minutes.
• Low quality textures, icons, pictures, weird colors, all distractions.
• Understood where it was going in terms of value towards the user, might not have found it.

Dad

Dad was a bit more aggressive in the way he handle the application. He started clicking around and exploring. This caused a tad bit confusion as he drifted between the two main views and had a hard time understanding that this was all of the application. After that epiphany he started on the main procedure. Below are the problems that arised.

Question marks/Problems

• Unclear directions
• No direction text
• Lack of options
• Minor stutters
• No animations
• Weird color combinations
• Hard to interpret icons

Notes

• Tester seemed to understand the workflow after a couple of minutes.
• Low quality textures, icons, pictures, weird colors, all distractions.
• Did not see the point of the application
• Hard time seeing the workflow as a process

Update on prototypes #3

Yesterday, 2015-03-09, the group finished the second iteration of the highfidelity prototype for the companion application. The remaining prototype; the website and printout, still needs their second iteration.

These pictures are user interface screenshots from Xcode showing real UI files which will run on the iOS platform. The idea is that other platforms shall replicate this design to the pixel.

We have established the main pipeline in which the user experience shall travel through. In order to include as many target groups as possible we wanted to keep the number of views and UI elements down to a minium without causing confusion. Therefore we went with one workflow/procedure and two main views.

First we have a main screen which is the general search view. This aims to eliminate which type of museum the user wants to visit. It can vary from art to ecologi.

This view shall be one of two consistent views. The other one is where your personal route is displayed. When not displaying a personal route that view shall redirect to this one, thus gently pushing the user towards making a new route. These two shall always be within one click.

 The second view which shall be presented after the first main view is the options view. This is where the small details in the visit is nailed down. These factor may include things like; children friendly, open today, has WiFi, has a cafe, has warderobes, price, opening hours/days, distance from the user, time to travel to museum, et cetera.

This view is where the generated routes are displayed to the user after all the requirements are inputed. As it is right now the back buttons do not show but are included in our design so that the user can at anytime during the procedure go back and redo some of the inputs. They are also able to cancel the creation at anytime.

This is a rough mockup how a typical personal route might be displayed. The idea behind the map is to have a sort of slide up motion to bring the map into fullscreen. On the map itself the route is displayed with an option to hide/show it as an overlay. This is the second main view which shall always be present.

Update on prototypes #2

Before exercise #4 we made some high-fidelity prototypes for the companion app for the design Route Planner.

Below is the first screen which will be the first thing you encounter. The purpose of this screen is to sort the routes presented in a general fashion. There is no reason to show a natural science museum to someone who is looking for a history museum.

There is a very simple and crude representation of how a detail view of the personal route could look like. The main things are here; the basic information, personal map of the route and some pictures. 

Feedback from Exercise #4

During the fourth exercise we presented our designs and progress so far. The feedback inspired a couple of ideas for our design "Route Planner", which is by the way still a placeholder name. This post is about some ideas and concepts.

Feedback

One of the important aspect of the Route Planner is to provide the user of the service a better and faster experience than what they could have manually searching for all the information brought together by the service. This goal is pretty easy to achieve but to maintain high quality content on such a service the need for user-generated feedback, such as comments, are a nice feature for both the user who expresses herself and the receiver.

Target Groups

After the presentation one in the audience said that tourists are a nice fit into our target group. This statement is completely true and to be honest our group hadn't thought about all the tourist because we simply did not see any during our field studies. This also brings up a flaw in our field studies, we missed the high season for museums. The people going to museums spike in the summer as the rush of tourists flood the city. This made us miss a whole target group. But to our defence the Route Planner is by design made to fit every one who wants to go to a museum. This will hopefully be achieved by good interface design in the outlets (website + companion app + printout).

Like Trivago for museums            

Thinking ahead we sat down and thought about ways to monetise this service. I narrowed it down to pretty much three and a half options. 

1. Trivago

This option is to model the entire business as the trivago model. In order to fill the service with information and data (pictures, et cetera) we could make it in such a way that the museums pay us to be featured on our service. The prerequisite is that the museum itself provides us with high-quality assets and such for the routes. Basic information will also be included in this bundle. This information could include; opening hours, prices, nearest subway station, and such. 

The approach has a couple of nice things going for it. For starters it is simple to understand and liberates us from the job to generate content for our service. We will just process their information and thus bring value to the end user. 

There is one main problem with this approach, that being the sale of our service to the museum itself. Why should they want to pay us anything when we do not have anything to show for it. 

   2. Curated

This approach is simple and dirty. We will bring in the information from the museum by visiting them. After this we will need to bring ads onto the service, which represents the 'dirty' part.

Below is the raw notes I took during the exercise.

FEEDBACK

            * FEEDBACK SYSTEM   (+ COMMENTS/USER GENERATED CONTENT!?!/WIKIPEDIA STYLE??)

            * TARGET GROUP: TOURISTS? (+ INCLUDE "This might interest you")

            * LIKE TRIVAGO FOR MUSEUMS VS CURATED SYSTEM ( One OR the other )

                - THEY JOIN OUR NETWORK, WE CHARGE THEM A SMALL FEE TO APPEAR ON OUR SITE. (SNOWBALL EFFECT .. SLOW)

               ( - WE CURATE AND GATHER INFORMATION -- ADS == MONEY)

               ( - AD-SUPPORTED ? On mobile, web and perhaps printout? )

               ( - SELL USER INFORMATION )

        

            * ALTERNATIVA RUTTER: 1) Speed/Crucial 2) All-of-it 

Prototyping crazy idea

One of our crazy prototyping.

The idea is that we visualize big quantity of different items with Virtual Reality technology. For example you could enter the amount of how many items you would want to visualize. say you want to see how the whole worlds gold reserve is compared to Sweden or how 1 million of sausages will look like in a pile.

The application will have gravity and you could touch and throw away  items you visualize.

Here is a picture of what we came up with, to point out it's really low fidelity prototyping.

I think it’s good that we had to design something different. This made us step outside the box and not just focus on a single idea. This was really clear when you had a great idea and just thought it was awesome and it was really hard to think of something else. We could take some key features from this simulation design and add into our route planner idea or vice versa. The literature talks about trade-offs and how to balance in ideas and features in a design. As in this idea the user have lots of freedom and can do really whatever he wants. Compare to the route planner the user is limited in what he is doing even though the goal for each idea is totally different. The literature quotes Linus Pauling “The best way to get a good idea, is to get lots of ideas.” I think this is smart in some way but it’s really just scratching the surface of what an idea really can be. Of course lots of ideas is great but what if you had 100 ideas and just started developing one compare to just 3 ideas and you started to develop all three. What I’m trying to say here is that an idea that seemed dull at start can grow and become something super awesome. And how can you possible think one step ahead of 100 ideas? (I’m not saying lots of ideas is bad!). During this prototyping we came up with lots of ideas even if the time was short.  To address the problem with lots of ideas and not having time to go under the surface on each one of them I think a general solution is necessary to find a fast and cheap way of putting something together and visualize with something real like paper of how it could really be. 

Reading seminar 2

The eleventh chapter of the course book deals with evaluation. More specifically it deals with the process of trying to improve your prototype with the help of paradigm evaulation and the framework DECIDE.

Paradigm evaluation is described in the subschapter 11.2 and it is a method for doing an evaluation on the product. There are four core paradigm evaluations: “quick and dirty”,  “usability testing”, “field studies”, and “predictive evaluation”. The techniques that is used in these evaluations are: observing users, asking users or experts for their opinion, testing users’ performance and modelling users’ task performance.

In the follwowing subchapter is the framework “DECIDE” described which is helpful for planning evalutions. The framework consists of the checklist:

1. Determine the overall goals that the evaluation adressess.
2. Explore the specific questions to be answered.
3. Choose the evaluation paradigm and techniques to answer the questions.
4. Identify the practical issues that must be adressed.
5. Decide how to deal with the ethical issues.
6. Evaluate, interpret, and present the data.

It can also be useful to to a pilot study before you do the main study to ensure that the study is well designed. A pilot sudy is a small trial run of the main study.

The theme of chapter 13 is “asking users and experts” and it deals with the different ways that you can get useful information about the product from other people. From the chapter we learn about the three styles of interviews which is structured, semi-structured and unstructured. Structured interviews can be replicated with large numbers of users with the help of surveys. Getting feedback from experts can also be useful, for exampel in a predictive evaluation is done by an expert who offer their opinions on the design.

The following chapter is about user tesing, which is a central part of usability testing. The test is usually done in controlled conditions like a laboratory. Many aspects of user testing is discucussed in the chapter ush as setting up test, collecting data and analyze the results from the test.

The question that I want to bring up at the seminar is: What are our ethical issues when it comes to our ideas and prototypes?

Kenneth Runnman

Prototyping and evaluation

Prototyping

A prototype is generally like a model of the final product. It can for example be a scale model of a building or simply a paper based model of a computer application or program. It is meant to serve as a preview of the final product and should try to attract investors or people who might be interested in the product. It is also an effective way for designers to get new ideas and can also help the designers to choose between different design alternatives. A prototype should be designed so that it concerns key issues.

There are two different types of prototypes, Low-Fidelty Prototyping and High-Fidelty Prototyping.

Low-Fidelty Prototyping.

• Doesn't look very much alike the final product
• Simple, cheap & easy to produce and modify
• Should encourage exploration and modification
• Storyboarding, Sketching, Using index cards & Wizard of OZ (for software based prototypes) are examples of Low-Fidelty Prototyping.

High-Fidelty Prototyping.

• Looks more like the final product
• Good for selling ideas and for testing technical stuff
• Usually fully interactive
• More expensive and time consuming to develop

DECIDE.

DECIDE is a framework that is meant to help with evaluation.
The term DECIDE can be summarized to these points;

• 1. Determine the goals - Who wants it and why?
• 2. Explore the questions - Find out the questions you want answered in the evaluation
• 3. Choose the evaluation methods - Choose the form of evaluation
• 4. Identify the practical issues - What can be done and what can't?
• 5. Decide how to deal with the ethical issues - Respect the people taking part of the evaluation
• 6. Evaluate, analyze, interpret, and present the data. - How should the collected data be used in the best way?

Measurement of tasks

When users test the product the main focus of the data can be listed as;

• Time to complete a task.
• Time to complete a task after a specified time away from the product.
• Number and type of errors per task.
• Number of errors per unit of time.
• Number of navigations to outside help (online help or manuals).
• Number of users making a particular error.
• Number of users completing a task successfully.

These are then analyzed to help develop the product in a good way.

QUESTION FOR THE SEMINAR:

How much time and effort should be put into prototyping to make it efficient?

Prototyping

We got a really good idea of tracking the visitors movements at the museum so they manager can use that data to optimize and evaluate their exhibitions. If we are going to prototype something like this , as we started doing at the last exercise we need to choose one method to show what our product will turn out to be.

Chapter 11 is talking about how prototyping should be used. They divide prototyping into different types, high and low fidelity prototyping.

High fidelity prototyping is when your prototype is as close it should be to a real product with a realistic design. The advantages with a high end prototype is that it could be used as a good sale argument there the user can get a real feel of what the product will be like. Thus this can also be a problem when the user expects this to be the real product. For example with software programs the code, could be terrible and bugs may appear as it isn’t tested as it should.

Low fidelity prototyping is for example when your prototype appears only on paper or some simple material that is not a real program. This could be used to see what to user expects from the program and to prove that the product is needed as it could wake up needs that the user didn't realized he had.

For our project we should focus on something in between, the author of beyond human computer interaction suggest that a power point presentation is right between high and low fidelity prototyping. Thus you get a feel for what the product would look like in clean text and on a computer and it’s not that expensive or time consuming as a high end prototype could be. I think this could be the best way to go when prototyping our product because of the time limit and non-existing budget.

We should also develop our prototype as an iterative work in progress so we can build a steady ground for our final project. With this approach we could also determine pros and cons with our idea and get a good grip of what we could improve. 

We should also use our previous work, interviews target group and field studies when we are developing our project. By now we have a pretty good grip of what the needs is and what target group we should focus on. This gives us a good conceptual model that can be the base on when we are developing our product. Thus we need to print in text what exactly our conceptual model is.

If we decide to focus on our idea with tracking people at the museum our prototype won’t need that much of direct interaction with the user, of course different bottoms and clickable stuff needs to respond to the user. We should focus on the user’s exploring throughout the program and what the user would like to see is very important here.

The scenarios we came up with last week should also be applied when we do our prototype. We could apply new scenarios with our existing personas.  

So my question is

• What prototyping model should we use and we should really put our conceptual model into text so we can lay a steady foundation to our prototype. 

Reading Seminar #2

Here are notes to the second reading seminar! I have some points I really want to bring up and discuss plus somethings I want to highlight, hence the bulletpoints.

• Conceptual model are best done with wireframes, which is what we in our team have been doing. They are really great at giving you an overview over the product. This is what we instantly did when tasked with designing the website for our conventional design from last exercise (the Route Planner thingy). (page 409, chapter. 11)

• What functions will the product perform? In the course literature we have this interesting scenario in which a travel service is discussed. The authors point out how difficult it is to draw a line and say here the point in which we do not let our program/service do more stuff. It is all about defining the boundaries. Deciding this is called task allocation. (page 408, chapter. 11)

• After the design stages we will need to evaluate our designs and get feedback from users of our prototypes. Therefore it is good to have some iterative workflow to rely on. The course literature brings up one good example of just such a workflow. The first part is to make a field study and get some early feedback then make some design changes. The second part of this is to test the design changes in some sort of usability test with users then go back out on a field study after which you will do one last design change phase. This is something we might do in with our designs. 

• The DECIDE framework to evaluation seems to the way to go. The framework consist of the following points. One main thing to take away from this framework is that the order does not matter. It is consider to be iterative and able to go backwards and forwards. I for one think this is a good starting point for the next step in our designs.
• Determine the goals.
• Who wants it and why?
• High-level goals?
• Determine the scope of the design.
• Explore the questions.
• Why are the trends as we see them?
• How is X more/less/etc for the users?
• Be specific; Is the menus difficult to navigate? Not enough feedback? Et cetera ...
• Choose the evaluation methods.
• What data do we want/got?
• How do we want our data?
• Theories? Frameworks?
• Identify the practical issues.
• Pilot study!
• Unpredictable events/consequences 
• Decide how to deal with the ethical issues.
• See ethical codes
• Privacy, etc ...
• Evaluate, analyze, interpret, and present the data.
• Reliability; how well it produces the same results under different times, etc ...
• Validity; consider if the evaluation method measures what the intent to measure was.
• Ecological Validity; this part is about how the evaluation method might corrupt the results. Placebo is an excellent example in this subcategory.

This is me! In case you forgot to check the link last time! :-)

Concerning evaluations and user studies

Evaluation

There are several ways of gathering data when developing a prototype.
Below is a general description of some of them;

Quick and dirty evaluation - Quick feedback, not very carefully documented. Done in a short space of time. Inexpensive and therefore quite attractive to companies.

Usability testing - Observe the user. Record and process every action. This type of test tests the general efficiency of the prototype.

Field studies - Natural setting. Observe the user's natural actions. Good for identifying certain needs and determining certain requirements.

Different techniques for evaluating

Observing users - Don't disturb or interfere, just observe.

Asking users - What do they want, how do they think and why? How many users will be asked?

Asking experts - Cheap and easy. Experts often have solutions to certain problems.

User testing - Conducted in controlled environment. Well-defined tasks. Data collected mainly revolves around the time to complete a certain task, amount of errors made and how easy it is to use the prototype.

Framework to guide evaluation

Determine goals - Why evaluate? Who needs data? Why?

Explore questions to be answered - What to ask? Can questions be divided into sub-questions?

Identify practical uses - Think of this before evaluation. Budget, equipment, facilities?

Users - Are users chosen for evaluation relevant to the study?

Ethical issues

Tell users goal of evaluation. Ensure no personal information is used without permission.

Pilot study 

Small study or evaluation to see if the real study is viable.

Asking users and experts

Interviews

Planning - avoid long questions; hard to remember. Split broad questions into more specific ones. Speak in a way that the interviewee is comfortable with.

Unstructured interviews

• Make sure the interviewee is at ease.
• Respond carefully and with sympathy. Do not change the interviewees' opinion.
• Analyse data as soon as possible.

Structured interviews

• Short, well-defined and clearly worded questions.
• "Closed" questions, requires precise answers.

Semi-structured interviews

• Both closed and open questions.
• Observe body language.
• Do not prompt answers.

Group interviews

• Interviewees develop opinions by talking to each other.
• Facilitator guides and prompts the discussion.

Testing and modeling users

User testing 

Observe how the prototype is used. What errors occur? How long does it take to perform a certain task?

Doing user testing

Plan the testing thoroughly. Are the conditions the same for every participant?

Try to avoid environments with much noise and/or disturbances. If possible, modify the testing space to match a relevant environment.

Be sure to inform the participants about the presence of cameras, microphones, etc.

Question for the second reading seminar; What would be our best choice of gathering data?

Parallell Design Update #1 - Conventional

Parallell Design - Conventional

While at this weeks exercise we were tasked with a brainstorming session. During this brainstorming we came up with a bunch of ideas and crazy things. This post is going to cover the first of these two design,  the conventional one. 

Our design is a website + companion app + printout in which you get a personal route in a awesome museum. The route is planned after all of your preferences; childsafe, contains a cafe, X km away, Y minutes away, history, technical, natural sciences, etc. Each museum needs to be indexed by someone, probably us, so that we might provided a route in the appropriate museum. So the design is really two parted; first it shows you which museum you might be interested in and then second gives you a more personal route inside that museum. A nice bonus is that all the information you will need for your visit in beautifully bundled together with your route thus delivering a complete experience.

In order to target people of all ages we will need both a website, a companion app and a analog version (a.k.a a printout).

This is the notes from the brainstorming session and the more detailed notes of our design.

As you can see we have not yet decided on a name yet but we do have a few candidates.

This is a rough sketch showing a example of a planned route. This sketch is made by Leif S, the rest is me (Alexander L.) and Kenneth R.

The plan is that the solution/design/website can give you a personal map of the museum based on all of your preferences.

This shows a rough sketch over the website interface and a few elements/views.

We are doing a very simplified design as our target audience for this website is extremely broad. This also has the effect of reducing our workload. 

This sketch shows the next views after our introduction/pop-up view.

Personas from 17/2 group meeting

Today's group meeting went good and we came up with 2 personas with a few scenarios. 

Tobias “Tubbe” Samuelsson Profile

Tobias “Tubbe” Samuelsson is 43 years old with no children.  Since Tobias graduated from High school he’s been working at the museum. He started working in the reception and now, years later he is in the position museum manager. He is feeling proud over his accomplish with working his way up in the museum hierarchy. Tobias is confidence with working in every position at the museum and has a good understanding of how the museum is working. Even though Tobias has never really evaluated their exhibitions other than reviews in magazines.      

Tobias faith is with the catholic church but his interest in religions is low. A big interest Tobias has is collection Trains. Tobias train collection is big and is growing for each year. Sometimes Tobias wonder why his museum isn't about trains. Tobias really like the new trains SL bought last year. Since he uses the subway each day to get to work and the new trains feels a lot bigger than the old ones.  

Tobias been working at the museum for a long time, Tobias loves his work and as a consequence of this Tobias have no children and no wife. Tobias lives in the quite suburb to Stockholm, Gribbylund. Sometimes Tobias is out taking a beer with his colleagues after work, A few weeks ago the museum hired a new receptionist that Tobias thinks is really awesome to talk with. He still feels that he doesn't have time for a relationship at this moment. In his free time, the little he have. He likes to volunteer at the homeless shelter. He is always been a caring philanthropist and thinks that everyone should have the same rights and opportunities. He likes to help with serving food and handing out cloths.  

  

Tobias is president of his local neighbor committee and strives for a safe and peaceful neighborhood. Last summer they decided to install a new fiber broadband connection and he was the one that organized the whole operation, which he is really proud of. The last meeting they discussed how to implement ramp for people in wheelchairs and how to make the garbage collection free from mice.

Picture of Tobias.

Andrea Rapp profile

Andrea Rapp is a mother of two children, Birker, 4 years old and Siri 7 years old. Birker has brown hair and blue eyes. He was a really large child when he was born but as the time passes by the other kids has caught up with his size. Siri on the other hand has always been a small child with blond hair and green eyes. Siri is a really fast runner and Andrea thinks she can be in the national team of runners one day.

Andrea makes her living from working at a local food store, Ica. She is in charge of the cheese. Andrea doesn't really know much about cheese but the only thing she needs to do is to put the cheese in the shelves.  

Andrea and her two children lives in a two room apartment in Abrahamsberg. Birker and Siri shares one room and Andrea is sleeping in the living room. The living room is bright with blue colors and the children room is in dark green, which is Andreas favorite color. They live at the third floor with a great view over the park nearby. Andrea really likes this apartment because it’s close to work and to the school where the children goes. The one thing Andrea is missing is a bathtub.   

Andrea is agnostic and don’t really care about religion. Since two years ago Andrea went through a divorce with her husband. Andrea thinks this was the right decision because they started to grow apart and didn't really share any interests. However they maintained a good relationship since the divorce and there is no bad blood between Andrea and her ex husband.

After graduating high school she enrolled university and started studying anthropology but had to drop out because of her children. Sometimes Andrea thinks about going back to university but doesn't feel the timing is right since she needs to pick up her children from school and need the money from work.  

On her free time Andrea likes to read books, especially books from the author Camilla Läckberg. Andrea also like to hang out with her friends. Lately more of her friends have newborn children and they like to talk about how their kids are doing and how to raise them in the best possible way. Even though raising a child can be difficult, Andrea feels confidence in that she is doing it in the best possible way and loves her children unconditionally.

She does most of her shopping at second hand stores where she can find cheap cloths and sometimes can be very fashionable. She really likes the vintage style and thinks it’s good with recycling. It’s a good way to maintain a healthy planet. She is specially fond of her latest purchase, a bright red winter coat which keeps her warm at winter.  

Andrea Rapp in her own Highness.

Scenario #1 - Tobias Samuelsson

Tobias started his day as normal, with a cup of coffee and walking through the museum. Tobias started to think about if people really appreciate the exhibition he created. He wondered how he could receive feedback from the visitors. They have been trying with formulas there people could give their thoughts but the response is very low and lots of the answers are not serious. What if he could track where people are going and for how long they stay at certain spots. Maybe we could use the current surveillance system to track where people are going Tobias thinks for himself.

Tobias keep sipping on his cup of coffee. Since they switched out the old coffee machine to this new one that have one specially good coffee, mixed latte with extra dark sugar and cream Tobias has started to come in early for work just to get a chance to enjoy this new coffee in peace.    

     

Scenario #2 - Tobias Samuelsson

Tobias is sitting at home in gribbylund at his desk, it’s Friday evening and it’s raining outside. He’s writing a report that is supposed to evaluate his museum. The government with Stefan Löfven sent out the request for the evaluation last week and it is due Monday. In the report Tobias is supposed to show different sorts of statistic data regarding his museum, but the only numbers he’s got are the ones regarding the amount of visitors weekly. This is a problem. The government is probably expecting a lot more detailed information. How could he get that information? Tobias starting to Google around for what data there is to get out of museums but doesn't find anything other then data over visitors. 

Tobias think’s it would be great to be able to present more numbers over how the museum is doing other than data over visitors. Perhaps statistic data over all the individual exhibitions and the overall enjoyment of all the different parts of the museum he thinks for himself.   

Scenario #1 - Andrea Rapp 

Andrea is at Tekniska museum with her two children Siri and Birker. It’s a good day to visit the museum because of the humongous rain outside. There are lots of activities for children at the museum, she is looking at her children running around and having great fun but she is starting the feel nervous because they are screaming and are too loud. Andrea is out of focus today because of this. She is feeling that she doesn't have time to experience the museum. Aimlessly is she walking around in the museum and looking out for her children doesn't get to see what she is interested in because of the need to look out for her children. 

Time flies by and they decide to go home and make dinner. A vegetarian soup of noodles and asparagus is on today’s menu. When they are home Andrea can’t remember anything from their visit to the museum and feels that the money she spent for her own entrance ticket was wasted.

Scenario #2 - Andrea Rapp 

Today is a slow saturday just after lunch. The kids are watching TV and Andrea is finishing up the last remains of her meal. Then she got this brilliant idea to spend their sunday doing something together! She wants to go a museum but does not know which one and thus need to find some information. On the internet she finds, via Google, that there are a lot of museums in Stockholm. She aimlessly clicks around to find something that is both interesting to her and the kids while at the same time matches her personal requirements. After a tad bit over 2 hours she has managed to grab hold of a fun museum and has already told the kids and they are excited! If only there was a more optimal way ... 

State-of-the-art Analysis - Alexander Lingtorp

Preface

When visiting Tekniska Museet I arrived early so I had to wait for the others. I went to sit on a bench in the entrance hall near the closed ticket vendor area. While sitting there pondering I noticed how people moved through the area. The entrance area functioned as both a central point in which you could get to all the utility parts of the museum, like the wardrobe and toilets. You could also grab an elevator to other floors in which there were exhibitions. When sitting there I noticed that on the opposite side of the ticket area lay an information wall. Over the course of almost an hour not a single person went or even glanced towards that wall. On the wall hang two large shelves with brochures on Swedish, English, Russian and even Finnish. It was contained maps of both this museum and others in Stockholm. Over these to shelves there were two medium sized television displaying various information. Some covered time limited exhibitions and seasonal events others contained essential information about the museum, for example closing and opening hours. This whole arrangement did not attract a single person, except me of course. I had not choice but to look at it. This is what my analysis will cover, the information to visitors on-site.

Function

The obvious function for the information wall is to bring useful information to the visitor of the museum. We already concluded that the current arrangement does not fulfill the intended function. The problem of their current solution is mainly the placement. The inclusion of both television and brochures are both very nice and friendly towards the visitors. Even the various languages available are plentiful and nice. They might consider adding spanish and/or french but that is a minor improvement considering the main audience is pretty much already covered with the current language selection. Thus the main problem must be that the arrangement does not capture the attention of the visitors and thus render itself useless. The things to change is the position of the whole arrangement or use some kind of attention pointer, a sign for example. It is meant to be found and used and yet not a single person except myself even looked at it. 

Improvements for Nordiska muséet

I spoke to Robert Ziherl today about possible ideas and improvements concerning the digital development of Nordiska museet.  Much of our discussion revolved around some kind of a guide system for the museum. As of today, the museum lends out small devices to the visitors. The user simply connects a pair of headphones to the device and then points it to specific checkpoints throughout the museum whereas the checkpoints corresponding audio track is played.

According to Ziherl, the main concern of the museum is to establish a good and dependable guide system, as the one mentioned above (although a new device is under development at the moment). Some kind of a guide system is essential when visiting a museum whether it is based on an audio-device, a map or an interactive application for the smart phone.

Another problem that needs an improvement concerns the visitors interests at the museum. What do the visitors find interesting? What objects at the museum gets the most attention?

There is a need for some improvement to the data gathering at the museum. As of today, the only way the museum receives feedback from its visitors is by having them fill in formulas. However, there is a slight problem here since not all visitors use these formulas, and thus the museum suffers from a lack of accurate feedback. A solution to this problem can be found by observing an old technique; by establishing some system that keeps track of the way the visitors move. Where do they move? How long do they stay at certain areas in the museum? One solution that Ziherl mentioned was by having surveillance-cameras set up around the inside of the museum. By using existing software the motions of these visitors can be tracked (see example image below), and the footage can be processed and used for improving the museum. Seeing how visitors move within a museum is considered highly valuable data. This is also a cheap solution, essential for long-time improvements.

Example of how the tracking of museum 

visitor's movement may look like.

There is also an increasing need of digitalizing the content within the museum. The museum has over one million exhibited objects, and much more books as well as archived paper-files. New, modern solutions must be found, as it is difficult to access this content when necessary. However, incorporating the museums with digital software is a challenge which takes much time.

A quick summary of the interview; the subject that needs the most attention and improvements is the guide systems. These guide systems are constantly upgraded and switched,  though not always to better models and versions.

There is also a need of a solution for the data gathering. How to best find out what the visitors find most interesting at the museum? One solution is to add cameras that track the visitors movement around the museum.

Best regards and many thanks to Robert Ziherl for helping us with the project!

Making progress

Robert Ziherl, digital producer at Nya Medier, Nordiska Museet, replied today and gave us his phone number and asked us to call him. Even though Nordiska museet might not be our museum of choice, speaking with a person responsible of the design and development of the museum will surely prove useful for our research.

We'll give him a call tomorrow and see what he has to say!

Summary of our visit to Tekniska Muséet

The visit to Tekniska muséet was very informative and we met some people with interesting things to say. Several new departments have been added to the museum during the last years, many of which revolve around digital and interactive technology or devices that depend on our senses, such as the large screens mentioned earlier by Kenneth.

However, we observed several things that could be improved at the museum, based either on our own reflections or what the people we interviewed had to say.

For example; One of the departments was old, untended and seemed quite out of place. It felt like entering a different, older museum due to its old and outdated technology. We also noticed that people had a hard way to find this department, since the previous room was under construction and some temporary construction walls had been raised, making it harder to find.

Some of the people we interviewed said that it was a bit hard to find certain points in the museum; however, there was an information desk at the entrance as well as a map of the museum. Furthermore, there are so many points of interest in the museum that it can be hard to find some of them, and the map was not very detailed and showed only the floor plans without describing their specific exhibitions.

Some information signs were poorly placed in the museum; for example, the sign pointing to the wardrobe section was basically just outside the wardrobe section.

To summarize the points above we concluded that it was rather hard to navigate through out the museum. As we split our group in three and all three of our groups didn't get a natural walk around as we went through the museum. This observation is also backed up by our interviews when they said they were missing things but as we walked through the museum we discovered the missing things.

 

State of the art analysis

Today our group went to Tekniska Muséet to conduct interviews and make observations.
Seeing as my group mates have covered most of the observations from inside the museum, I'm going to focus on the museums website!

Unfortunately every person i tried to interview either didn't have time or had already been interviewed by another guy in our group.. (There were also not that many people there at the time)

The website can be found here.

Layout and design.

When you first open the website you get greeted by sort of a slideshow in the middle of the screen, showing off new events that are happening/going to happen in the museum.
Under the slideshow there are small pictures with text under them. If you click on the pictures you get taken to their respective page.

The site is for the most part black and white with the exception of two small pictures, one that will take you to the webshop and one that takes you to a page that gives information on how to book parts of the musem for kids birthday parties. I wonder why the only things in disctinct colours are the stuff they can earn money from?

Overall the design of the site is very clean and simple. To the right theres a link to the museums facebook page and also a twitter feed (it even allows you to tweet directly from the site). However it could feel a bit 'clustery' (with all the smaller images) and the focus of the site is mainly centered around the middle.

In the bottom there's information on how to get to the museum, the opening hours & prices and a phone number and email adress for contacting them.

Functionality.

Theres not much bad to say about the sites functionality. All the links are very clear and describes well where they will take you. Theres even a way to change the fontsize and the fontstyle to suit your preferences. The search field allows you to search the site in case you by some reason can't find what you're looking for.

What if you don't know Swedish then? Don't worry, theres a solution for that. If you click the link in the top right corner that says 'English' it will take you to a, yeah you guessed it, English version of the site. However this English version has a lot less content than the Swedish one.

And if you don't know English or Swedish you can click the 'Translate' link, this will take you to google translate and will translate the whole page to your desired language.

I feel like the website is overall very good and i think that every 'type' of person will be able to use it, old people, young people and probably even kids.

Summary.

Pros.

• Good, clean looking
• Easy to navigate
• Informative
• Doesn't limit itself to Swedish only

Cons.

• Can maybe feel a bit 'clustery' for some
• Doesn't have as much contect for the English version

Emil Persson