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.