Our second sprint — working remotely in times of coronavirus

Team Sauron is back with a new update on our project Inclusive ArenA. At the beginning of March, our second sprint was about to start and we were about to dive into thorough user research and prototype testing with the end-users. The team has come together to create goals that we were striving to achieve and deliverables that we expected to get. After successfully identifying the aforementioned matters, unfortunately, we had to face unpredictable changes that had a great impact on our way of working and our goals themselves. New challenges have come our way and pushed us to adapt to new situations quickly and effectively.

As many of you have probably understood, we are talking about coronavirus and the measures that governments of many countries have imposed to flatten the curve. Three weeks ago when we started our sprint planning, we could not foresee the changes that will come our way due to coronavirus measures. Because of the quarantine, our initial plan and goals differed in their essence from the goals we are pursuing now.

Here you can see a table that represents these differences. In our initial plan, we were going to have face to face interviews with VIP to get to know our end user better. We were going to continue working on our physical multisensory prototype — the maquette that we presented in the first sprint. Moreover, in order to understand the journey of our user better — we were planning to complete user shadowing at Arena and get insights on how to tailor our project to VIP better. Lastly, we wanted to test our physical prototype with some of the users and get on hands feedback.

Unfortunately, due to different challenges, some of these goals had to be altered or removed. Interviews were held online and sometimes it was difficult to get full information as we couldn’t interact with the user or read their body language. Nevertheless, we managed to get interesting insights from VIP from all over the world. Reaching out to them was not the issue as we used different social media to find them. We did lose out on the experience of meeting some of the VIP in the Netherlands personally and getting their feedback for our prototype however we did receive a piece of informative advice from our interviewees. Our main research purpose for the interviews was to find out the main challenges of VIP when going to public places and their opinion on what public spaces lack. Some of the things mentioned in the interviews were providing multisensory experience and trained guides.

“Providing tactile models, braille information, people with knowledge to assist could help improve the experience in public places”

We have also talked to professionals and experts who work with VIP to identify some challenges that we could not see coming in advance.

“There could be lots of obstacles that change from situation to situation (a stadium may have a concession stand selling merchandise one time, and other things another time)” — Orientation and Mobility instructor on unexpected obstacles that come in the way

Moving on, we faced a lot of uncertainty with regard to our prototype. We didn’t know whether quarantine will last two weeks, one month or until the end of our project and this was one of the main challenges that we faced. We had to change our prototype to digital but would it be for 2 weeks or for the whole project we did not know. In the end, we decided to mostly focus on our digital prototype. The experience was made digital with the help of C#. The idea was based around making a sort of a virtual tour that can be taken from ArenA as well as from home. We needed just some pictures and sound for feedback and the user could command the stadium. Exploring C# and sound libraries were the main tasks to make the prototype come true and in the end, we succeeded! Here you can find a demonstration of our Sprint 2 prototype.

In our next sprint, we are hoping to improve our prototype and explore 8D sound and its implications. Moreover, we are striving to get feedback on our prototype from VIP in order to have the best possible result.