Interactions, Car Data, and Play Dynamics…Oh My!
Welcome to Sprint 2 and the official midpoint of our summer! At the end of our last post, we had temporarily pivoted to guerrilla recruiting with close friends and partners, built the Frankencar, and completed testing on our trivia + personal question game prototype to answer the question:
Can play, using outside stimuli and facilitating self-disclosure, create shared presence?
From Sprint 1’s testing, we easily answered our questions and learned a lot about the impact of conversational UI, location-based games, and personal questions in the car (with close friends). We headed into Sprint 2 with these takeaways:
- Play is a good anchor for exploring shared presence (how we’ve defined “connection”) because it engages users with a collective goal and with each other.
- Visual interface outweighs audio interface, but multimodal interaction will be crucial in the car due to safety concerns.
- Buttons (or other haptic input) are very appealing to users in the car (more to explore here!)
- Everyone was highly engaged in the game and with each other, but the driver may have been top engaged to be safe in a real driving environment.
- Personal questions were very effective at creating shared presence and were intrinsically motivating.
Moving into Sprint 2…
We were excited by what we had learned about the interactions we tested in the car but we were still curious about the multitude of other interactions afforded by the car. Our opportunity space coming out of the Spring semester highlighted how the unique experience of being in a car was under-explored for fostering connection between families.
So, rather than only iterating on the Sprint 1 test based on our findings, we decided to both iterate on this test and explore new and innovative ways of utilizing the unique aspects of the car. We aim to challenge ourselves with the requirement of designing experiences unique to the car. With this, our goal for Sprint 2 was born:
Explore a broad range of interactions, data uses, and play dynamics in order to understand how these dimensions affect shared presence between families in the car.
To do this, we developed an ideation matrix with three variables: interaction modes, data from the car, and play dynamic.
Thinking about these variables, we brainstormed, bodystormed, and rapidly prototyped three new experiences uniquely designed for shared presence in the car.
Our final three prototypes attempted to answer these questions:
1. Is kinetic movement enjoyable and effective as an input method for connection through play in the car?
Here, we wanted to explore how shared motion and collaboration could function as a means of connection in the car. To rapidly test this, we built a paper prototype that would allow us to understand interest in this interaction before devoting time to more complicated physical computing prototypes.
In this paper prototype, participants sit on foam core seats on top of instability balls. The seats are connected to a foam core marble maze. The goal of the game is to use your movement on the seat to maneuver the marble through the maze to the finish.
2. Is button-pushing interaction enjoyable and effective as a means of connection through play in the car?
Here we explored how buttons might affect interpersonal dynamics in the car given how interesting the button was to users in Sprint 1.
To rapidly prototype this interaction, we gave users buttons (clickable lights with changing colors) and asked them to find things outside of the car that matched the color of the button. The users were asked to press the button when they found something that matched the color of the button and say it aloud.
Additionally, to explore the desirable location of buttons, we let participants put buttons wherever they like using velcro around the Frankencar.
3. Is the car playing a role in music co-creation enjoyable and effective as a means of connection through play in the car?
Here we explored co-creation with data input from the car. To rapidly prototype this interaction we overlaid the video on the TV windshield in our Frankencar with the popular children’s song “Baby Shark”. The interesting thing was that we changed the speed of the song based on if the “car” was speeding up or slowing down.
In user tests, we simply asked families to sing along to the song to see how they felt about the changes in the song based on the acceleration of the car.
But how do we measure success?
All of these ideas were designed to utilize the car to facilitate connection through play. Thus, to evaluate the effectiveness of each interaction we had to measure connection between family members as a result of the games.
To do this, we asked each member of the family to rate how connected they felt to each other on a scale of 1–10 after each game, and asked them why. We also asked them how much they enjoyed the game on a scale of 1–10. At the end of all the games we engaged the family in a casual debrief interview where we asked them to tell us about their experience during the games as well as what their normal drives together were like.
How’d it go?
All in all, our testing was very successful and gratifying. We learned a lot about how these new interactions could foster connections between families in cars and we sharpened our understanding of how families interact in cars.
The ultimate measure of success: We connected families and created moments of joy!
Overall, the marble game was the unanimous favorite of both parents and children in our tests. We observed so much laughter and excitement around this game as well as collaboration and communication to achieve their goal. We found mixed success with the other two prototypes and plan to take our learnings from all three prototypes forward in our next sprint!
Next time, see how we take our findings forward as we dive into adding physical computing for higher fidelity prototyping!
