Sprint 5: A “Eureka” Moment Through Data Synthesis
Catching up with the team’s progress
Over the last few weeks, our team has been collecting data through user experiences. We encouraged user to react to a variety of experiences from immersion to personalized interconnected devices, through pretotype testing. Our testing sessions yielded a wide range of results: some that validated our assumptions and others that completely contradicted and challenged our way of thinking. We found many interesting user responses that contradicted each other, creating opportunities to explore in our future research.
The team extended our research to existing experiences within our area of ideation: the Van Gogh Immersive Experience. Here, we interviewed multiple participants after they had taken part in the immersive experience and had them fill out a survey measuring their emotions during the experience. From this testing session, the team found some key considerations that were important to people during immersion like potential tangible inputs, control over their immersion, and varying levels of musical volume.
Synthesizing our Data
Sprint 5 predominantly consisted of research synthesis: making sense of all of the data collected through our research processes and putting that analysis into a context that is relevant to our topic. We highlighted learnings that attempted to understand the boundaries of users’ comfort-levels, required to gauge the willingness for adoption of new and advanced technologies. Further, the team outlined next steps towards developing a prototype based on potential use cases that emerged through these learnings.
Finding patterns
The team compiled all of the findings through our research activities and sorted through the different types of data, categorizing and making connections between different groups. We learned that categorizing this data and analyzing each category gave us more meaningful insights than sifting through large quantities of user data.
Collaborative Session with Faculty Advisors
To understand different ways of synthesizing and visualizing our research data, we had a collaborative session with our faculty advisors. They challenged us to think about the insights we had found from our initial analysis of pretotype testing, Van Gogh Exhibit, etc. and ask the question, “Why?” This also brought up questions like:
- What stood out to the team when synthesizing?
- Why do certain insights seem more important than others?
- What insights are relevant and how do they connect to other insights?
- What is important to recognize when user responses contradict each other?
- How does everything connect to our main theme of advanced technology?
Based on the collaborative session with faculty, we adjusted our way of thinking and focused on major points within our research. We extracted and organized high-level insights by correlating topics within our research, and creating a concept map to better understand their connections. Interestingly, despite introducing participants to diverse applications of advanced technology, the team learned that users predominantly think of AR experiences enabling personalization.
Creating models
We further found that people’s preference for level of immersion is closely related to their physical environment. Based on this learning, we mapped out different experiences across a graph of immersion against space or context, public or private.
Though invasive and immersive, current technology doesn’t stimulate all of the users’ senses. For a truly immersive experience, the team needs to push the boundaries of stimuli. Additionally, while a highly immersive experience is the future-forward, we shouldn’t let the user feel that they are losing their sense of control.
These models provided a visual and digestible way of understanding our data and picking out major highlights. Based on feedback we received about the layout and representation of these models and charts, we hope to iterate and make them more understandable to people outside the team, to make them more accessible to InterDigital executives as well.
Creating a Prototype
Combining findings and capabilities from our pretotypes, we created a few conceptual prototypes in the form of fake news articles on The Verge. These articles combine personal immersion, social immersion, and personalization in the contexts of travel and live entertainment. The team sees these prototypes as an opportunity to present various 6G use cases related to the future of travel and entertainment. We expect to be able to determine which ones are worth exploring by evaluating the reactions of different users that these apply to and considering network requirements of 6G.
Our fake news articles from The Verge helped us describe current and preferred states inspired by our models of immersion-place and stimuli-control, and to synthesize our research into possible contexts, user needs, user pain points with advanced technology, and their reactions; a preliminary step towards creating a persona of our general user.
What’s Next?
As we synthesized all our research findings into valuable insights, we also started prepping for documentation and presentation of all our work from January to April. The team is working towards:
- Creating a research report containing detailed explanations of our research process and the value it provides to our clients
- An initial prototype that informs future prototypes to build throughout the next semester
- A presentation outline that provides an overview of our research findings and the rationale behind each step of our process, including next steps.
Retrospective
Looking back on the Spring semester, the team has come so far in terms of how we viewed our problem space before versus now. With each research step, our extremely open-ended project space became more and more clearer, and how deeply we understood our topic directly correlated to how confidently we conducted our research. The team has picked up pace and doesn’t plan on slowing down. Until next time…
