Exploring Human-Computer Interaction

Chapter 1 - Exploring each other & the public transport

The birth and first steps of Coffeetrain5000

Once upon a time, there we’re some media technology students sitting in D1. They we’re in their first Human-Computer Interaction class and they we’re told that they we’re to form groups. Linnea, Möller and Frida, who is like a 1st grade girl squad, always found together (but without fighting and actually working good together) teamed up without even blinking. But who should they merge with to get the perfect group?

In the other side of the room, the Osqledaren-big wigs, Ariel, Emma and Vigge, sat and conspired against the world. They had to find some teammates and sent their messenger boy - Vigge - to the other side of the classroom where the girl squad sat. He barley had to pop the question - the answer was obvious - and so, Coffetrain5000 was formed.

After forming the group we had to choose an area to investigate. We listed some of the areas we found interesting and decided to observe our public transport-environments the following days and after that pick an area. Eventually we decided to go for Tvärbanan, and investigate traffic to and from events going on in the Globe Arenas, since that felt like an interesting area with an unique target group.

Chapter 2 - Exploring our surroundings

Field studies

The field study was our first attempt to do data recording about the Tvärbana. It helped us get a good sense of how to move on with the project and also lead us towards the same goal. At the field study we did both observations and interviews, and our main focus was to see if there were any recurring patterns in the users behavior.

We decided to perform semi-structured interviews which means the interview is adapted to the situation and has appropriate follow up questions depending on the answers. This way we figured we would get answers regarding the same subjects but still keep the opportunity to get some unexpected input as well. Read more about our discussions before the field study here.

If you want to read more about the field study in action click here, and here.

Since we divided our group into smaller groups for the field study we made sure that we afterwards presented our findings to each other to make sure everyone got to take part of all experiences. When finished with out field studies we felt that we wanted to get an even wider perspective. Therefore we performed our interview on some friends living nearby the “Tvärbana”.

All this work lead to us getting a feeling about what problems that might occur in these situations, some being everyone running to catch the first train, people thinking it’s not so nice travelling during event-traffic and people not caring about crowded trains at all since they weren’t going for such a long ride. Even some unexpected result came out of this such as the crowded trains only occurred at some events and wasn’t so disturbing in the everyday traffic.

After the field studies we naturally started discussing personas which was our next step in the process. If you are interesting in reading more about our discussions follow these links: Reflection after exercise 2, Summary of field study

Here the result from the interviews

Interview transcript 1

Interview transcript 2

interview transcript 3

Interview transcript 4

Interview transcript 5

Interview transcript 6

Interview transcript 7

Chapter 3 - Exploring the world

State of the art-analysis

Next up in the course was the State of art-analysis. In the state of the art-analysis we all chose different areas or products which we wanted to investigate, within our field, and did a blog post about it. Through this we learned what’s already on the market and it also opened our eyes for new things and technologies we could use, or not use.

During the project we used this method several times. When we got stuck, or were between choices we investigated the market and looked into science to make our decision better. This was for example what made us choose symbols for our final product.   

The purpose with doing a state of the art-analysis is to gather data and also to inspire. It also a method to find new areas to work within, or to choose areas which you don’t want to work within. In the end we had great use of Emmas state of the art-analysis, which we’re on behaviour design. She wrote about how to use subtle methods to change the user's behaviour and also about instant feedback - something we discussed and used all through our design process. We didn’t do any of the examples in Emmas analysis, but we learned about the concept in this part of the process and developed from there.

Our state of art analysis are to be found here:
http://coffeetrain5000.blogspot.se/2015/09/state-of-art-analysis-behavior-design.html

http://coffeetrain5000.blogspot.se/2015/09/state-of-art-analysis-virtual-reality.html

http://coffeetrain5000.blogspot.se/2015/09/state-of-art-analysis-frida.html

http://coffeetrain5000.blogspot.se/2015/09/state-of-art-analysis-smart-watches.html

http://coffeetrain5000.blogspot.se/2015/09/state-of-art-analysis.html

http://coffeetrain5000.blogspot.se/2015/09/state-of-art-analysis-part-1.html

Chapter 4 - Exploring our context

Personas and scenarios

During the field studies we had gathered data which we now were ready to use. We started by creating personas. We defined their background, their interests, motivations and life goals. Through visiting the “tvärbana”, exploring the context and learning about our chosen environment, and through investigating how different people behaved in this context we could then create scenarios. We choose to envision two situations for each persona, one positive and one negative, and created scenarios through informal narrative descriptions.

Here you'll find our scenarios Peter and Johan.

Scenarios and personas is good since we all have something to exceed from when creating ideas and making sure the whole group work towards the same goal. We can also test our ideas on our personas. The purpose of the personas was to get at clear view of what kind of people that would use our coming product and in what kind of situations.

Later on during the project, we realised we wanted another persona and more scenarios. We created another persona with two scenarios, to envision our idea in more possible scenarios, since we didn’t feel Peter and Johan fulfilled our goals with the personas. When designing for public transportation it’s easy that the target group becomes pretty wide, which our was, and because of that we wanted a more diverse set of personas and scenarios. This led to the birth of Viktoria.

Chapter 5 - Exploring our brains

Brainstorming

The brainstorming-exercise was a turning points in the course and felt like it was time to get our hands dirty with some concrete and conceptual design. The whole idea of brainstorming is to just speak your mind without criticism and kind of sort out all the good stuff later. This was very effective for us as many of us had done it before in various projects but it’s always a challenge to keep the critical thinking away. We had to remind ourselves of that.

Before the brainstorming we had already come up with our personas and scenarios that effectively helped us to kind of box in what the whole idea of the prototype could be.

The goal of brainstorming was to use the results personas and scenarios, fuse them with our results from the brainstorming and come up with a low-fi prototype. However, our first session of brainstorming did not result in a solid idea. We rather used it to encourage reflection until another session of brainstorming knowingly that this is an iterative process.

In retrospect one of the difficulties of this kind of task is to keep in mind that once we have come up with an idea we shouldn’t stick to it but rather keep in mind that cycles of prototyping is necessary to achieve a satisfactory High-Fi prototype in the long run.

In the session we started out with making low-low-low-fi paper prototypes and sketches just to kind of visualize how we are thinking to each other. One can imagine that this kind of work is common in product development and hopefully with a great deal of participatory design involved. That is, involving all concerned stakeholders in the process.

Before our brainstorming we had already decided that we wanted to do some different prototyping that using the regular services like flinto and so on. We decided that we wanted to build something close to physical computing with Standard Development Kits since we had seen that LittleBits was available to borrow from Eva.

Chapter 6 - Exploring our idea

Prototyping

The conclusions that we received from the Brainstorming session was summarized as a concrete design and helped us a great deal in wrapping our common thoughts around a prototype.

The first part of the prototyping process was to come up with a low-fi prototype to present to others so they could get a grip on what we were trying to do. So what we came up with was basically this in form a design sketches and of course complimented with an oral presentation describing it.

After presenting this we got some valuable feedback from other groups evaluations and we really thought them through and discussed them as it is easy to become narrow sighted while working on a prototype like this. We valued the evaluations highly as it was from another point of view and the result from this was that we once again could repeat and rethink the whole concept and refine it once again as a true iterative process.

All of this helped us in our work towards a High-fidelity prototype and what we focused on was the functionality and usability and modifying some core concepts to fit into how our physical prototype was to be designed.

As we already had a thought about using SDKs and LittleBits in our prototyping process we ended up with that as well. It made our work a lot more fun and we think that it influenced our evaluators while doing the ThinkAlouds as well.

To summarize the prototyping process we could clearly agree on that it truly is an iterative process where we refine our prototype for each step in evaluation and polish it to become as good as it can be. Even in the end we rethought our whole Hi-Fi prototype and changed it quite much in relation to previous iterations.

Chapter 7 - Reflections

Things that did not work out

The thing in our process that didn’t go as well as we had planned was the field study. It was hard getting good interviews and we had to go out several times to get what we needed. We had hoped the interviews would have given us more qualitative data than they did, and by looking back at this stage in our process we realize what was most useful to us in this stage were all the observations we performed on the field study. This shows that things don’t always turn out the way you think they will and this is something we really learned. It is important to see the opportunities in the situations rather than the failures which is what we tried doing when looking at our observations as qualitative data too.

Our product didn’t reach point of understanding when we thought it would. We had a clear view of how we thought it to work, but it took several evaluations before we had come to a design users seemed to understand as well. The fact that it’s very important how to present something and to never feel afraid of doing changes in the design has been very useful to us and something we’ve worked a lot with.

Chapter 8 - Exploring our idea featuring users pt. 1

Think aloud

When we had finished our low-fi prototype we wanted to test it on real users. Therefor we let several people do a think aloud on our prototype  (blog post).

A think aloud works so that the user test the product and at the same time talks out loud about everything he/she thinks while using the product. This leads to qualitative data collecting, since the feedback we get is unique and vary from all users. This technique also makes it possible to find problems in an early stage. (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/thinking-aloud-the-1-usability-tool/)

The think aloud was very helpful to us because we found out pretty fast that people didn’t feel comfortable with a red light since that signaled danger and felt more of an urge to follow the other light being yellow in this case. This first lead to us thinking red would be good since we wanted to get people to move away. After presenting this at the coming exercise we got some more feedback saying it was to alerting and pointed out something wrong which could be intimidating. Since a design process is an iterative process, meaning it’s not linear but always goes back and forth, we didn’t feel scared to go back and change things so that is what we decided to do next. We did a lot of modifying to our product and from that we created a hi-fi prototype, containing all the functionalities of the final product.

Chapter 9 - Exploring our idea featuring users pt. 2

Walkthrough

A walktrough is an evaluation method used to go through every step in the use of a product, making sure everything work as planned.

Of all the inspection models there are we have chosen to do a cognitive walkthrough, to evaluate our product step by step when developing our final design. Since our product only contain of a few steps we’ve used this evaluation method several times throughout our design process because we have thought it to be critical that the steps really work as we want them to.

A cognitive walkthrough is a user-centered walktrough but not performed with users involved. It is centered around user's preferences to learn a system by testing it and not by reading the manual. It works so that you set up tasks that are suppose to be performed. And then you as a developing team get to be the evaluator, going through each and every step of these tasks imagining you are the user. At all the steps on the way you stop to ask questions about how it went, if it was easy to understand or not, and so on. This way you find out if there are any flaws in the design and will have a chance to fix them before actually creating anything final. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_walkthrough)

Chapter 11 - Exploring the exploring of the idea featuring users pt. 1 and pt. 2

Discussion about the evaluation

By evaluating our product we got input that we ourselves didn’t think about. Through using different methods we learned new things for each step which didn’t show up in the earlier evaluations. We used both think aloud, feedback from another group who acted as experts and did a heuristic evaluation using “Nielsen’s 10 principals of interaction design” as guidance (http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ ) and we ourselves did a walkthrough which all made us see the product from different perspectives.

When developing a product or design it is really important to test it. How else could you know that it works? You have to realise that you are designing for the real world, and to know that it works in the real world you have to try it in the real world. This was one of the first things Jan Gulliksen told us at his first lecture and the key when designing for a user.

It’s valuable to start evaluating your product in an early stage, to get feedback as soon as possible. Something we realised though is to use the right methods when evaluating, and to think about which methods that are used in which part of the process. We had one group evaluating our product through Nielsen’s heuristics(also describes above) and this took place when the product still we’re in an early stage, which made it hard for them to understand and give feedback. That method would probably have been more valuable later on in the process.*

Chapter 12 - Exploring our design

Did your design improve?

By going through so many different steps of evaluation (first we let another group evaluate, then potential users in the think aloud and at last we did a final evaluation our selves with the walktrough) we got the chance to change our product to the better several times. We made sure to take the opportunities to do so every time we could and never felt afraid to modify or change something radically if we found it necessary. We all feel this is the main reason our design improved so much from our first prototype. If we hadn’t got so much feedback we would have felt we had nothing more to work with and probably the design wouldn’t have been improved so much then. We are glad for all the feedback we have gotten during our design process . It is interesting to speculate in how our design could turn out if the process was longer and we had the time to do even more tests and evaluations. There is always room for improvement, but sometimes it is as important to decide when finished to be able to produce something at all.

Chapter 13 - Exploring methods

Thoughs about methods

During our design process we have come to use many new methods all being concepts of Human Computer Interaction. It has been fun to try this out and to see what result you get by using different design methods. We have tried out different data gathering methods and also several evaluation techniques that has shown to be very useful. To try different types of brainstorming was also very inspiring.

From the data gathering we learned the value of collecting both qualitative data and quantitative data. to have both is critical when building your case. Qualitative data is good since you get more specific input that might not have shown from quantitative data. By asking questions like “do you see an area of improvement on the tvärbana?” you can get people to answer almost anything. Quantitative data is better when needing statistics about certain things for example asking a question about “at what time do you usually use the tvärbana” you can get facts about how many people in general that do this at specific times and this gives a sense of how crowded it actually is and when it’s at most crowded.

When brainstorming we tried some new techniques, one of them involving putting different topics together and from them create an idea during a short time. This was very inspiring and got us producing ideas we probably wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. We learned to open our minds up to unexpected solutions which helped us during the rest of the process.

By getting input about our idea from both another group, potential users and ourselves we tried a lot of different evaluation methods. By trying different methods we learned that different target groups thinks differently about the same problem. Therefor we got a lot of good and varied feedback and could work to develop our concept from different point of view and not only our own.

Epilogue

The first HCI-class we sat in different parts of the classroom. The last class we walked up the stage, together, like second place-champions. The girl squad and the Osqledaren-big wigs merged as one and BECAME Coffetrain5000. May the coffee led.U.