Stage 4: Evaluative Research

Speed Dating Concepts with Rosedale Instructors

With the fifteen concept scenarios we had developed — exploring a range of technological interventions at various levels of familiarity and employing diverse interactions — we went back to Rosedale’s instructors to speed date our concepts. The goal of this speed dating activity was to get some visceral feedback on our ideas as well as confirm or complicate our assumptions about their needs and technology’s role in addressing those needs.

Our storyboards explored four major need areas of 1) providing invisibility without the need for invasive procedure, 2) enhancing vocational training with the the addition of multimedia content in context, 3) enabling simulated technology training and 4) supporting remote collaboration between instructor and student. We also made sure to represented a range of technological interventions, from familiar tools and interactions to novel systems within our concept scenarios.

For reference, the fifteen storyboards we presented during our speed dating activity are shown below.

We presented each of these concepts to two Rosedale instructors one by one, starting with the most familiar technology in each need category and slowly working up towards more involved and potentially uncomfortable technological interventions. As the instructors responded, we captured their thoughts, feelings and ideas on post-it notes. Positive comments were captured on blue post-its, neutral on green and negative comments on pink.

We received a lot of great feedback about our concepts. The Rosedale instructors gave input on the tools, their integration within a classroom or workshop setting as well as the interaction patterns that did and did not work for their unique needs. A few key takeaways are listed below:

1. Forums to share ideas and tricks might not make sense in the auto repair context. Forums are only as good as the people that contribute to them, and following a suggestion blindly might lead to issues. Additionally, mechanics are hesitant to share knowledge with their competitors. Their knowledge and time are how they make a living, and asking them to give that away for free isn’t so appealing.
2. Anything that requires a mechanic to do something more than once is a problem. For example, asking an instructor to “repair” a digital object for their student to watch and repair on their own would turn a 3 hour job into a 9 hour job.
3. While remote education offers opportunities for MR, so do traditional vocational training settings. Students are often scattered across a large workshop, and it’s hard for the instructor to interact with everyone. Additionally, getting multiple students under the hood of the same car is a challenge. Anything that helps an instructor “drop in” on their students from across the room, or share a hard to reach view with the whole class would be a benefit.
4. Instructors are always looking for ways to capture small learnable moments — from an accidental broken part, to a particularly interesting repair problem. Being able to capture, display and teach to those moments would be helpful.
5. Visualizing student workflow or repair history would be an incredible benefit to both auto repair instructors and mechanics. Deconstructing a problem, or trying to work backwards to understand what’s been done to a car, is some of the most time consuming effort for a mechanic.
6. Information presented in MR must be subtle and intuitive. Overwhelming pop-ups are annoying and it can be hard to interact with technology with full hands.

This color coded note-taking was helpful following the speed dating exercise as we were able to post the storyboards on a whiteboard and see a sort of heat-map of feedback on our concepts.

From there, we synthesised our learning from this session and were able to map our ideas on a two-by-two matrix of effort to value. This was useful in helping us identify both the most salient needs our technology might address as well as a few solutions worth further development.