Winning picture!

We won the final, happy team picture!

Looking back

Tomorrow is the final so we find today to be an appropriate time to look back at what we've learned during this course.

Starting off we learned about different ways of designing. We have mainly tried to focus on user-centered design during this process, but due to time constraints we have also sometimes acted as genius designers and tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the user. We learned that it is hard to stick to only one design approach and it is often best to have several in your design arsenal.

After learning about approaches it was time for us to start our own research with museums in mind. By doing state of the art analyses we evaluated current solutions and designs at museums, taking with us strong and weak points. We also turned to different kinds of qualitative research at the museums we visited (we decided to visit two in order to get a wider perspective) conducting interviews, observations and taking a lot of photos. By doing this we got a good picture of our target group, realising that their needs and wishes perhaps weren't what we thought. With a clearer picture of the museums and our target group we started brainstorming and coming up with ideas for the problem we decided to focus on: learning.

We did both structured and more un-structured types of brainstorming. For example we wrote down a bunch of ideas and concepts on post-its and stuck them all to a big paper, used the "Yes, and also..." method where we further developed each other's ideas as far as we could and also narrowed down personas and pain points to further the idea stage. Looking back at this perhaps we should have focused more on quantity instead of quality when doing our brainstorming and ideations in order to get even more ideas in movement.

When narrowing down our ideas to a concept we found many design principles in the book that we wanted to keep in mind. We wanted a really clean and simple design since the current solutions often were messy and hard to interact with, Fitts's Law came in good use as well as the Poka-Yoke Principle. We wanted it to be clear to the user what elements to interact with and we wanted to minimise or even remove mistakes as much as possible. Another problem we found in the current solutions was that not enough feedback was given to the user, we got really confused when trying to interact with screens and such because of the lack of feedback. We put much focus on doing this better than the current solutions, making usage more natural and painless. 

While refining our concept and design we imagined different scenarios when the user might interact with our product. Our main three were: At the start of the visit, during the visit and at the end of the visit. Our product needed to do different things in the different scenarios, which then had sub-scenarios where other things had to happen and we focused on making solutions for as many as we could think of.

Another important factor to us was the input controls - we wanted it to be easy to interact with our product. We decided on a few traditional ways of input on a screen: text box for name, slider for age and buttons for everything else. We chose the really traditional input controls in order to not confuse our users. We don't want people to spend time wondering what to do, we want it to be clear. We did however also decide on a more non-traditional way of input: Presence. The interaction with all of the screens in our concept starts off with this input method, we believe it provides a real "coolness-factor" and it makes it clear to the user that this is a screen you can interact with.

When prototyping our design we did both low-fi and high-fi prototypes. The low-fi we did using paper and it really helped us to come together as a group and all get on the same page when it came to how we wanted things to look visually. Small things such as where to put buttons and what size things should be sometimes took more time than we though they would. We also used our low-fi prototype to get feedback from users by doing think alouds which gave us even more to work with when doing our high-fi prototype. Already having discussed so much about the look and feel of the design in the low-fi really helped when we did the high-fi prototype, saving us a lot of time. Giving our design a personality in this stage is something we found both important and fun! We have tried to have a consistent graphic profile, putting effort into making our design look good and have a real personality.

Finally, we have learned a lot about working as a group and how to work on a concept for a longer period of time. All in all we feel that we can take many of the lessons learned with us as we continue our education and eventually in our working life.

D5 - having fun and learning together.

Post semifinal thoughts

We won our semifinal!

link to our presentation: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5WPa5zeFDYvcEJfYVR3dWUzYTg/view?usp=sharing

When designing the presentation we wanted the look and feel to match our concept and therefore went for clean and simple design. The slides mostly had headlines about what we were going to say and a few pictures on them. We feel that with too much text to read it is easy to get tired and distracted, we believe that we can deliver the information in the presentation in much better ways than just writing everything down on our slides. We focused on making what we said interesting and engaging.

Our presentation is built on the past, present and future. We begin in the past, taking the listeners though the early stages of our process and concept; interviews, personas, scenarios and target group etc. Providing a deeper understanding about the ground which our decisions have been based upon.

We then move on to the present, presenting our concept: NILS. We explain the main components of our system and how it is used. When we feel the audience have a basic understanding of the concept we venture into the future showing the prototype (see links in earlier post) and a real life example of how we imagine NILS could be incorporated at a museum. We feel that the prototype really completes the presentation, it gives a real feel for the experience we want to give our users in real life. 

We thought it was challenging to convey our entire process and all of the thoughts behind our project, as well as sell our concept and show it to the audience in just ten minutes. We are however extremely pleased with the balance we found between process and concept in our presentation. For the final we will probably not change a lot and hope that the audience will be on our side and hope for a second win!

Final preparations

The Wristbands

It might be time to clarify how our wristbands work, since we have mostly focused on the screens up to this point. 

When designing the wristbands we had a few things in mind. 

1. What function do we want them to have in our system?
1. Give the system information about the position of the user.
2. Give the system information about the interaction of the user.
3. Give the user information about when he/she has new questions to answer.
4. Give the user feedback about points gathered that the screens can't provide.1
2. How are we going to incorporate this function into our bracelet?
1. Give the system information about the position of the user.
1. Using RFID technology, we can have passive RFID-circuits integrated in the wristbands that are activated when they come close to a reciever unit.
    
2. Give the system information about the interaction of the user.
1. This is solved using the same technology as mentioned above, RFID. When the RFID tag is active at a certain location for a longer period of time, we can be relatively certain that the user has been reading or in other ways interacting with that part of the museum.
3. Give the user information about when he/she has new questions to answer. 
1. This problem, however, can not be solved with the RFID-chip. Here we want to use lights to aware the user of the awaiting questions.
4. Give the user feedback about points gathered that the screens can't provide. 
1. We want to solve this problem using the same technology as mentioned in point 2.3.1 (above). Although we can't use the same colour of the light. We solved this by using the colour green for letting  the user know that points have been gathered and blue for awaiting questions. We picked the colour green because it has positive connotations (green-light traffic signal etc.). The reason for the colour blue was that we didn't want the user to feel stressed out about having to get to a question-screen in order to answer his/her questions. Since blue has proven to be a calming colour, we much rather wanted to use it instead of, let's say, red.
3. How can we make the bracelet as cheap, hygienic and simple as possible?
1. In order to make them cheap, we want to manufacture them out of paper. Here we drew a lot of inspiration from the temporary cards that SL use for travellers who only buy tickets that lasts for 24 hours. These are made of paper and also incorporates an RFID circuit for getting past the turnstile. 
2. This is also hygienic because visitors will get their personal bracelet which will not be reused by any other visitors.
3. Keeping it to only 2 lights and a circuit is the most simplistic design we could think of. 
4. In order to be enviromentally aware, we want to reuse the circuits and LED-lights from used bracelets. We therefore encourage the user to leave their bracelets for recycling. 

1. The things we had in mind here was mostly competative parts of the exhibition that is not incorporated with the screens and doesn't require you to remember facts. For an example, at the Museum of National History, at the exhibition about humans, there is a part about monkeys where it says: "A monkey can hang from a tree for X miniutes, how long can you hold on?". Here they have a "branch" sticking out of the wall with sensors built into it in order to record how long you can hold on. As it is today, your time is displayed on the wall for a few seconds and then disappears. With NILS, we want your score to be recorded and incorporated into our Knowledge Hunt. This particular part doesn't include interaction with a screen of any kind, but is a rather physical activity, which creates the need for different feedback. 

After exercise 5

Here are some thoughts on why we have taken our project in a certain direction.

• We did not want to make an application for a tablet or a phone because the people we interviewed specifically said that they didn't want to download an app, they were there with their kids and did not want to use their phones. 
• We also wanted to create a design that would never be outdated and therefore also ruled out the phone application. 
• By not doing an application we include people who do not use a smartphones and children who does not have a device of their own. 
• We felt it was important for our concept to easily blend in with the exhibition and not draw attention from it. 
• When you use a phone you get easily distracted by other applications and may get stuck doing other things than experiencing the museum.
• We wanted one sharp knife not a swiss army knife, with that we mean that we wanted to focus on one thing instead of trying to do too much. 

NILS

We now have a name: NILS - Near-field Interactive Learning System. 

Here is the museums (Naturhistoriska) logo and our logotype:

 

Prototype

The high fidelity prototype is now finished. We think we manage to capture the feeling we desired. The personality of our high fidelity prototype come across as simplistic, straightforward and simple to interact with (Affordance)  as we wanted it to. 

As we have mentioned we have created three  high fidelity prototypes for three stages of the museum-visit. 

And here are the prototypes for each stage:

1. Informative part at the start of the exhibition.
http://invis.io/SD1O6FZAE

2. Competitive part during the exhibition.
http://invis.io/AY1N3A33F

3. Ending screen at the end of the museum with feedback about the visit.

http://invis.io/351PTPF9V

Random "sneak peaks" from the prototype:

Get together

Working on the online high fidelity prototype

Think Alouds

We preformed five different think alouds using our low fidelity prototype. We decided to use the low-fi and not the high-fi in order to get the feedback from the think alouds as early as possible in the prototyping phase. We also felt it would be easier for us to make changes in the layout if we knew of problems before doing our high-fi prototype.

The feedback we got from the think alouds where about the placing of some elements, such as if the button for exiting should be in the left or right corner, and that some buttons needed clarification. But mainly our participants felt that the design we have in mind was very simple and intuitive and it is hard to "make a mistake" when it comes to interacting. This is something we feel very happy about as we use this quote from the book in mind when designing:

 Eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak

We used five KTH students when doing our think aloud, unfortunately we did not have an opportunity to visit a museum to perform the think alouds. A visit might have been ideal for our process but since it simply could not be worked into our schedule we solved it best we could and still believe we got really good feedback.