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.