Catching Up on Blogs! 10/30–11/26
Behind on blogs again! Here’s a quick update on what we’ve been up to in the interim.
10/30–11/5: Team Building and Conferences
This week was a short week for us on the work front as many of us attended a couple conferences on mainland Europe. We did end up doing some team building by visiting the some gardens in Funchal. You can see some of that in the first half of this vlog.
11/6–11/12: Conferences and Materials
People were still away for conferences on this week, so we used it as an opportunity either to learn from our conferences or to prepare for the coming weeks.
We compiled and requested our supplies list on this week. Here’s a diagram of the plan for the supplies!
11/13–11/19: User Testing Again! Finally
This week, with everybody back, we got back into things! We planned and carried out user testing and a presentation.
For the user tests, we wanted to test our dual focus concept. The tablets were to act as controllers and the projector was where one was to look to see the results of manipulating the controller. We prototyped this by making two different Keynote presentations: one for the controller and one for the “projector” which in our test case, was actually a monitor.
The controller actually responded to user input and the projector was controlled in a Wizard of Oz style where an operator would choose to jump to the slide corresponding to what the user had chosen on the controller.
One big take away from these tests was that users don’t switch contexts very naturally. Once they started looking at the controller, they were unlikely to look back up at the projector without some sort of prompting.
11/20–11/26: A Bit of a Change in Direction
This week we began exploring iterations to our design. We wanted to address a number of issues we had identified through testing, like context switching being problematic, exploring ways to increase user engagement (giving them a reason to want to interact), and adding a human + Madeira context.
We explored this in two main ways: making a more contained experience (without switching contexts) and by changing the ways in which the 2 contexts interact.
Our plans for the next week are to quickly prototype and test these 2 directions to make a decision about which to move forward with for our final product. More on that next week!
