Building Your Own World By Paper: Paper Prototyping II

HCID 521 Prototyping Studio | Week 1 | Assignment

Our assignment for this week was to make our own individual prototype with interfaces of smartphone and smart watch(es). No other constraints provided, and this means we need to come up with our own design question and implementation idea.

IDEATION

First, I started to think about what is different between a smart watch and a smartphone. I figured out that display of a watch is much more reachable and visible than one of a phone since a watch could always/often be worn on your wrist. That allows user to take less time to reach their device and start doing tasks. Also, one of watch’s constraints is the size of device, since it has to be held on your wrist. This constraint brings out the problem of size of display.

I was also not limiting my thoughts to make the user of smart watch and one of smartphone the same person. A watch could be an extension of a smartphone application, and I realized multiple watches could be different branches of a system controlled by a smartphone application. In this scenario, ones who are holding smart watches may not be available to carry their phone around them. Athletes during group practice or physical training, factory workers in production facilities, and kindergarten kids with a teacher could all be fitted into such scenario. I picked up the idea of interfaces for restaurant workers.

The idea was a cooperating system with kitchen manager(s) and workers, allowing them to communicate with each other through devices. The basic idea is that the manager operates the interface on smartphone, while other workers wear smart watches as checklist of tasks and timer. Manager (himself/herself, or instructed by chef) can control the situation of whole kitchen without running back and forward, and workers would be able to reply feedback to manager rapidly. The other main purpose of this idea is to help new-comers or hearing impairs to work in kitchen smoothly and efficiently.

FLOW

Before prototyping, I started from laying out the whole work flow of my prototype first.

Hand-written work flow of my prototype

As soon as I planned out all the possible states of my idea, I realized the huge scale of realizing the idea. I decided to eliminate several parts in prototyping since they are not the primary functions I would like to learn usability and feedbacks about.

PROTOTYPING

One smartphone and one watch as platforms of interfaces, I completed the interfaces needed in 3 major tasks (described in the following paragraph). These includes 7 major phone screens, 3 phone screen pop-ups, 3 majorwatch screens, and 2 pop-ups for watch. The material of my prototype are papers, cupboards, post-its, stickers, tapes, and ball-pens. I used a lot of post-its to keep flexibility of operating the prototype, and those helped me to reduce amounts of my screen prototype. Also, I chose a easy way to hold screen interfaces on my paper phone and watch: simply clipping paper on it, for faster testing process.

Previous version of my prototype device

Before the this prototype, I did another size of prototype with actual size of iPhone and a much smaller watch. I found out it would be relatively tough to do testing on paper prototyping in 1:1 size since papers are not durable enough to offer multiple rounds of testing, and they are delicate and fragile in smaller sizes.

Basically, smartphone is operated mostly by manager (sometimes allow workers to do self check-ins), and watches belongs to workers in each station in the kitchen.

Below lists out all the functionalities available in this prototype:

• Allow workers to check-in to the system
• Allow manager to edit/add dishes’ production process in the system
• Work mode for workers: receive tasks based on incoming orders and the information in the database, add timer to each dishes under their own process, report after finishing each task, receive “re-do”s from manager.
• Work mode for manager: finish checking dishes that are assembled from every station, send out “re-do”s

Main constraints of this version of prototype (which are unavailable functionalities listed out on interfaces):

• Not allow workers to report problems to or notify manager.
• Not allow manager to edit workers’ data, set up station information, and set up dining time sections.
• Work mode for entire system: the mechanism of receiving orders from tables, complicated orders.
• Work mode for manager: re-assign the workers to different stations.

After constructing a scaleable size of device and completing all the interfaces, I started to design my user testing.

Testing scene: smartphone with watch

TESTING

Since this idea could become a huge system prototype, I decided to create the parts demonstrating major purpose of the idea. All testing were taken place at our studio Loew 019.

Before conducting each round of user testing, since my purpose was to create a rapid operating experience, some operation required some previous understanding of the interface. I simply described some functions requiring several gestures (eq. slide, double-click) instead of showing it out on the interfaces (of both watch and smartphone). No description for entire work flow and testing scenario.

In total I set up 3 tasks for user testing:

• Kitchen workers check-in before entering kitchen.
• Manager adding new dish to system
• Scenario of actual working on orders during dining time

So far I have tested this prototype on 4 different users. 2 of them played both two roles in a single testing, and 2 of them played separate roles in a single testing round.

FEEDBACK

I received a lot of helpful feedback from several rounds of testing. Below lists out most common feedbacks from most of the users:

• Concise interface flow and layout, sometimes might be better to provide detail of each dish (Some said it depends on who is using the interface) or other objects.
• Idea of different people operating different devices is an unique perspective for doing this assignment.
• Several gesture operations, like slide or double-click, are less intuitive and tougher to operate than single-click or tap. Might be better if showing more buttons (digital or physical ones) for each function.
• By only showing the code of dishes might be tough for new-comers.

DIFFICULTIES & CONCERNS

Several difficulties and concerns are involved in this idea, especially seeking technology solutions to these problems.

• Dangerous working environment: workers in kitchen are exposed to high-risk working environment with hot pans, sharp knives, unstable other kitchen equipments, or bad smell of rotten food. The device itself should be durable and usable in such environment. Also, there is still some safety issues for workers to operate technology devices in the kitchen.
• Working culture in kitchens: kitchens and chefs usually have well-constructed working culture. It is usually fast-path, involving lots of oral instructions, and intuitions. How to interpret these into interfaces on technology devices would be a huge challenge.