Seminar 2 - Viktor Gustafsson

In the current stage of our project we are just about to start forming more detailed and well thought-out prototypes that are the products of our design iterations so far. 

If our prototypes get good responses on thursdays exercise I am really looking forward to start evaluating our work. The whole point of evaluation is to make sure the ideas that been formed is corresponding to what the users want. Different ways of doing evaluations are being discussed in chapters 13 and 15. In chapter 13 the literature focus on the DECIDE-framework which basically is a checklist one can iterate over for planning evaluation studies. In the 15th chapter we instead learn how to actually do heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs. This is also called inspection methods and hints us about the form of evaluation. Sometimes we can’t be in contact with the users so we need to use different methods. One way of doing this “pretending” to be the user and interact with the designs or prototypes. This is quite difficult and the people using these techniques are usually experts. Heuristic evaluation is mainly developed by Jakob Nielsen and has been boiled down to 10 out of 249 heuristics which are to be used when testing aspects of an interface. 

Walkthroughs are alternative approaches to heuristic evaluation where cognitive walkthrough mainly focus on evaluating design for ease of learning and is considered undetailed in contrary to pluralistic walkthrough where you set up a whole team of experts, developers and users that with their combined knowledge can examine and evaluate in great detail.

One really interesting form of heuristic evaluation that I liked that the literature brought up was hedonic heuristics which evaluates how the users feel about their interaction. For example, the user can indicate wether the interface or product is making the time spent enjoyable. Maybe this can be useful for us in our project in the sense that the user can reflect on their feelings in correlation with our idea AND while sitting in the train cart or standing on the platform. Can we use hedonic heuristics to evaluate our product?

Predictive models really was an eye-opener to me. Especially Fitt’s Law. I was really fascinated that there were mathematical relationship that could describe why the size of buttons matter and the best spots in terms of usability on an application is in the corners.