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Design Process

This is a picture of our different design phases that we went through during our project. As one can see we had a quite primitive sketch in the beginning where we had a starting menu interface which is not presented in this picture. From this first idea we quickly decided that this menu wasn’t such a good idea, so we remade the design and changed the starting interface to the bubble interface, which can be seen in the second image. The argument we have for this change is that we think that the bubble interface is the main feature of the application so it should be presented directly for the user.

At this point the design didn’t look so made for an iPhone platform, so we thought to ourselves about what we could alter to make it more realistic. In the end, we added a menu banner at the bottom which is some sort of standard in many iPhone apps. Later on we added a banner at the top as well as working through the design of our other main parts of the concept which can be seen in our prototype video post.
During our think-Alouds we received feedback about the bubble interface and, more specific, the bubbles themselves. The bubbles where not so intuitive in their design. The users didn’t know what to do with them and the icons presented inside the bubbles wasn’t clear at all. So in phase 5 we changed the design completely and presented text based information in coloured bubbles, instead of icons. This design solution is both clearer and cleaner and the user receives relevant information with just a glance at the screen. It was a difficult choice to decide what the colours would mean and represent, and after a lot of discussion and critique from our exercise group we decided that the colours, for now, would represent when the starting time for each group is due. We settled on three colours: Red (the group is due soon), Blue (the group is due far from present time) and Green (the group is due somewhere in between red and blue).

At the point that we are at now, we added another button in the bottom menu, and added icons instead of text based buttons on the top banner.

Another design choice that we made is that the number of bubbles presented is restricted to seven, this choice was based on Hicks’ Law. The user can, if he/she wants to, slide the screen to the left to get a new set of click-able bubbles.

Final Design

This is the design that we landed in in the end:

How has the work in the group been?

We all knew each other before the project started so we didn´t have to go through the time consuming phase of getting to know each other.
A thing that has benefited the group is that we all had about the same idea of how ambitious we wanted to be with the project. The level of ambition has been pretty high and we have all been wanting to get a good result with the project. That made us put down quite a lot of time and energy to make a good looking application. We decided to focus both on design and functionality but in the end it seems like the app became more design focused. From this we learnt that fine tuning your final design is very time consuming and there are always things that you can improve when it comes to the design.
From the beginning we wanted the app to be user-friendly and easy to interact with and this was also something that we all agreed upon early in the project.

A challenge that we had in the group was that we all had different views in our heads of what our final design was going to look like. It wasn't until we made a prototype that we realised this and it became clear that we had different ideas and views on how our design was going to look like. By making the prototype we could put together our different views and come up with a design that we all agreed upon.

Another challenge that we had was avoiding the genius-design. We created our design mostly based on our own ideas and perspectives and this became particularly clear when we conducted the thinkalouds. It’s difficult to design without using the genius design. Things that seemed obvious to us as creators weren´t always as obvious for the users.

What have we learned

From the reading seminars we got the basic knowledge of what guidelines already exists in the human-computer interaction field. This helped us design our prototype in a way that would make it user friendly. From our design process and the lectures we learned how to combine this knowledge with our own ideas and thoughts in our journey from creating a target group and personas to present a final design and prototype.

From the exercises we learned a lot about presenting our work in front of others who weren’t as familiar with our concept as we were. We believe that the greatest lesson of them all comes from working together in a group and the challenges that follow. We have learned how to work together in a group with a given task and how to keep the process moving forward. We often had to compromise since we didn't always agree on different matters. We believe this was a good thing since that's how working in groups works in the real world.

The importance of setting up a good communication channel to communicate through is also an important key for the group to succeed in it’s goals. We think that we’ve had good communication, throughout the project, but there is always room for improvement!

Evaluation from other groups

The main critique we've got from other groups was that it was hard to get an easy overview of the available bubbles in the interface, especially if you have many bubbles. Although we made efforts to change this, both we and the other groups agree that this was not fixed for the final presentation (when we had our final critique session). But we got the excellent feedback that maybe you could slide easily between groups of bubbles instead of throwing away bubbles to get new ones.

Group meetings 5/11 and 6/11

Thinkalouds
We all did our think-alouds separately and let different people test our prototype and give feedback on what they thought about it. We all found it quite challenging to be a quiet observer while somebody else was testing the prototype and we all had to focus hard to not give help or advice to the person doing the testing.

After doing the thinkaloud sessions separately we all gathered and discussed our conclusions in the group. We could see a few similarities in the feedback that we all got but there were also remarks that not all of the testers had thought about.
The most common remark was that our bubble interface is hard to understand and not so clear. The testers thought that it wasn´t entirely clear what each bubble contains. It is hard to get a good view of a bubble if you only see an image of a museum on the bubble. It might be more clear to have the name of the museum as text for an example. We all agree about this remark and it is our main focus when re-designing.

Another thing that some users pointed out during the think-alouds was that it was hard to navigate through the acquaintances part of our app, though some of our testers found it very intuitive and navigated through it quite effectively. Some found that it was hard to know wether the people under my acquaintances were the users acquaintances or people that could be added as acquaintances. We decided to label that window "My acquaintances" so this would be clear to future users. There were a few other parts of the app that were difficult to navigate through like finding the chat in a joined group and navigating in the “my bubbles” section.

One tester thought that all the confirmation-popups after making an action (for example creating a bubble) were unnecessary and that it can be irritating for the experienced user to always have to confirm your actions. This was something that only one of the testers thought about but we think that it's certainly a valid point.

Another user gave us the feedback that the tutorial for the app could be displayed before the user registers a profile instead of afterwards so that the user can get an idea of how the app works before deciding to create an account.

We all agree that the think-aloud sessions have been very useful and that we have gotten some great feedback from it. We realise more and more that we have designed our prototype using the genius-design mindset. We want the app to be as user-friendly as possible and we want it to be easy to interact with. We are going to use all the feedback that we got from the thinkalouds to make our app more intuitive for the user. We have already implemented some changes to make the bubble interface more straightforward and intuitive. We've limited the number of bubbles on the group screen to be seven, according to the essay “the magical number seven, plus or minus two” by George Miller which states that the human brain has a hard time processing more than seven elements at a time. We have also changed the appearance on the bubbles to make it more clear what the bubbles contain and focused more on using icons instead of text. Another change that we have made is that we have added another element to the menu to make it easier to navigate through the app.

                                       New interface                    Before the thinkalouds

To conclude we've included some of the strong and weak points of our app.

STRONG POINTS

1. The users have a lot of power over how they want to make the visits, so they don't feel restricted.
2. It's a cool and easy way to meet new people.
3. You learn new things both from visiting the museum and from meeting new people
4. The layout is familiar and has similarities with other popular apps, so it's easy to use.
5. It's easy to use the app to find new museums in the area and you can find relevant information about the museums.

WEAK POINTS
1. The solution is not optimal for our main persona and our target group (we have deviated a bit from their requirements)
2. The solution demands a pretty high amount of people actively using the app for it to work properly.
3. It demands a certain form of social commitment to be used properly. There may be a too high social threshold for some people.
4. Some people may not return to the app after using it a couple of times. Apart from meeting new people and interacting with them, there isn't that much value to be had.

Group meeting 3/11

Since last time we've continued to work separately with the design of different aspects of the app following some main guidelines we worked out together. Today we had a long session with all members present were we all sat down nearly completed our click-able prototype of Bubble. Based on our individual work, our thoughts and the feedback from our fellow group B5, we've compromised and come up with an interface and lay-out that we all can agree on. For example, there is now a consistent banner on the app that helps the user navigate. We've continued to work on consistency in the app in how the user navigates in the app.

We will soon test our prototype on users (think-aloud) that never have been in contact or heard of Bubble. By observing and taking notes based on how they experience our prototype and how they navigate through the interface as a first time user, we'll obtain vital data on how to perfect our app.

The following days we'll complete our think-aloud's and together discuss if there have been any patterns or issues that multiple users have shown and what we can learn from that.

Here are some screenshots of what a profile will look like.           

We redesigned the group interface and added a banner at the top.

Group meeting 30/10

Today only Mathias, Anton and Emil could attend the meeting.

Since last time we've worked separately with the design of different aspects of the app following some main guidelines we worked out together. This is the first meeting since, and since the deadline for these separate designs has not yet run out, only Mathias and Emil could show their designs. We decided that we could work from them together to flesh out our design even more before designing the last bits of the app.

Right now we're focusing mainly on the interface and the layout of the app, we chose to work mainly in the mockup-program called Balsamiq.

We showed each other our thoughts on the interface and layout for the different windows of the app. We're designing for the iPhone platform and try to stay true to the standard conventions in designing for that platform.

We've worked hard on enforcing consistency in the app, especially in how the user navigates in the app, where buttons are placed and what they do as well as keep a uniform color scheme throughout.

Another important aspect we've worked on is the main flow of the app, and much thought has been put into response when interacting with the app so the user will always feel like the app is responding to every user decision.

During the meeting we discussed and reinvented the design we had largely according to our own experiences of what makes an app good to interact with and with motivations from Fitts´s Law to make interaction as effecient as possible.

We also decided to do a small evaluation before our "think-aloud", so we used the Heuristic evaluation method to test our current design. We were positively suprised to see how many of the points we actually had considered during our main design process.

Here are some screenshots of parts of our mockup showing the initial tutorial/help and the main group interface. The second last picture demonstrates what happens when a bubble is pressed (it expands and shows an overview of relevant information about the group) and the last shows what happens if the expanded bubble is pressed, which is moving into a more detailed group view.

Group meeting 21/10

At the group meeting today we discussed the interface of our app. Emil had made sketches based on our drawings and previous discussions which are presented in the images here: 

We used these sketches as a base for our discussions of the interface and focused on how to make the interface easier, more understandable and relevant for our target group. With the new discussions and views we made new sketches using the same sketch program and after the meeting the interface sketches looked like this:

We wanted to streamline the experience for the user by making it super simple to reach the main function of our concept. That is why we got rid of the menus and instead direct the user to the group finding page. We also decided to have a fixed set of group bubbles of 3 different sizes (the bubble size indicates match with your personal interests) so that it wouldn´t clutter the screen. The reason for having a fixed amount of group bubbles is because Hick´s law states that it is easier to make a decision from a one set of bubbles rather than having several subsets of bubbles. We also decided not to make the bubbles to small so that it would be easier to navigate between them according to Fitts´s law.
To eliminate jumping in and out of bubbles all the time we made it possible for the user to quickly get an overview of the basic information about the group without proceeding to the group page. We worked really hard to make it user-friendly and easy to interact with.

Until the next meeting we decided for each group member to refine different parts of the interface that we feel aren´t finished.

Thoughts from seminar 2

Our findings from the group discussion was fore mostly that we would liked to been told to read chapter 6 (which was partly about brainstorming) before we had the exercise about brainstorming. We felt that this information was brought up a bit too late in the process. Therefore we didn’t have much use for this at this phase.

We further discussed chapters 7 and 8 which was about refinement and about prototyping your product. We are still in the refinement phase and we feel that the book gave us an idea of how to approach the rest of this phase. A flow chart, which was mentioned in this chapter is something that we found was a really helpful tool for the group to get a common picture of our product. We got a more clear idea of our concept.

The book also talked about low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes and we concluded that we, in our group, probably will use a low-fidelity prototype. The heuristic evaluation method will most likely be something to have in mind when prototyping our product. And this, we think, can also be useful in the iterative-design-prototyping-process.

Some questions we discussed was: “How does the relationship between developing and prototyping work and do we think it should be?”

• We concluded that you would like a technological foundation when you build an evolutionary prototype. Some design decisions might not be possible without technology. It certainly is a good idea to think about…!

Another question we discussed was: “How do you introduce a shift in technical paradigms?"

• Our discussion lead to some thoughts how much trust a user must have for a certain company to adapt the design innovations that they produce. We also talked about having a perspective where you know that a new innovation is better through an analytic point of view. This is something that the book called a superior design cause of the fact that it should work better. We also talked about how leading companies easily can force a new design on the user and that later on becomes a standard.

Group meeting 16/10

Today we had a group meeting where we evaluated group B5s project and discussed reflections and thoughts on their project and ideas. It was fun to get a bigger view and insight on an other groups project and it gave us some perspective of how to think when we design our own project.
During the meeting we also brainstormed about some good names and slogans for our project where one of the most popular name ideas was "Bubble".
We also made a very simple prototype of our product by drawing the interface on a whiteboard to get a good overview of how we might want the product to look.
The next step for us now is to make a simple prototype app in css/html so that we can get a good perspective of how we want to make the design even better.

  

Reading seminar 2 - Anton

This reading seminar involved chapters six to eight which in short were about the stages in the design process where you come up with ideas, refine them and finally concretize them as a prototype.

One of the things I found worthwhile considering brainstorming is that you need to give room to be a little wild and not to criticize any idea that comes up. I found during our own brainstorming sessions that that kind of climate in brainstorming did help us to really dare to approach our problems in new ways. Earlier we kind of had ideas of ways of solving our project, but I found the ideas we came up with during this brainstorm to be superior.

Right now we’re in the process of refining our main idea, so reading about that chapter felt relevant, although I felt much of what was written were not so much about what to do, but rather things to watch out for as to not confuse users. For example you don’t want to two lines of text aligned and looking similar if the texts themselves are not related.

We probably will start to think about prototyping soon so we can get some user input about the small details we most assuredly will miss. I think we have a strong concept so far, but to really make something people will want to use, we’ll have to spend time making the interface understandable for the users. I didn’t feel like I got as much from the eighth chapter as I did for six and seven, but I think I realize how important this step is in the iterative design process. Prototyping can’t be done the last thing you do, because after you let people try your prototype you’ll end up with a long list of things that need to change. It will be longer the longer you wait because a lot of functions often are tied in to each other, so to change one thing you might have to change another.

My question is: Is it better to involve users during the process of refining your idea, or rather to independently work out a version and then develop a prototype to test on the user if you only have the resources for one test study

Design process - "Museipoolen"

Final design!

Main idea: A museum pool for people to form groups with new people and visit the museum together.

Functions:
- Finding and creating new groups, both public and private which people can join.
- Each group has a group leader which manages who can join and the total number of people in the group.
- Each group is represented by a graphic bubble on the main page. If one presses a bubble it expands and covers the screen. In it, you will find all the information; group name, museum, time, address and so on. If you join the group, you can access the group chat. Pressing the icon of the museum will show information regarding this specific museum (people often feel like it is hard to find information about museums). 
- A friend or acquaintance system where you can friend people you had a good time with. It is very simple, and only offers you to invite them again if you create a group or decide to visit a museum.
- A system for showing information about museums in the area. They will pop up like a list of museum icons sorted after your preferences and which museums/exhibitions you've visited before.

Roy - Scenario 1

Roy - Scenario 1

Roys girlfriend Emma has decided that they should do something special together this weekend instead of just hanging around at home. Emma propose that they go to a museum, something they haven’t done together before, and she suggests that they go to Fotografiska muséet. Roy isn’t too happy about going to the museum, he feels uncertain about whether it would be fun, because for Roy museums are something you had to go to back in grade school. Roy would rather go to the movies and see “Guardians of the Galaxy”, a movie he has been looking forward to seeing for some time. Going to the movies feels more like something that will assuredly be fun, whereas a museum feels way more uncertain. After Emmas persistence in her suggestion, Roy decides to look up what a visit to Fotografiska would mean.

Roy finds the museum website, which displays pictures from what he presumes are the exhibitions, these don’t really affect him that much, right now he’s focused on finding out where the museum is, what you do there, opening hours (hoping it will be closed!), prices and what it offers. He has to click around the website quite a lot to find all the information, but in the end he feels that some of his questions are left unanswered, mainly what the visit would offer and what you really do there.

Roy begs Emma to go to the movies, but she counters his proposal by telling him they went to the movies two weeks ago to see a movie of his choice! Roy gives in and they go to the Fotografiska. At the musuem, Roy is positively surprised and he and Emma spend almost the entire day there. Seeing the images in this environment feels entirely different from watching them on the website. He and Emma talks about the visit all day and both agree that it was worthwhile. Roy feels like he certainly would visit again if there was some new exhibit or perhaps even visit another museum. Although he feels more positive towards museum visits now, he feels that visiting another museum might not be as rewarding as this one was.

Overall, Roy is positive about the experience, but he feels that the the way to the actual museum was hard. He felt like his initial investigation of the museum didn’t do it justice and that easier access to information about not only that museum, but all museums in the area, might persuade him to visit more. He feels his newfound interest for museums is decreased because of the cumbersome activity of researching the museums.

Lena - Scenario 1

Lena - Scenario 1

Lena has a date and her date wants to go to a museum of her choice. This makes Lena a little uncomfortable, but she wants to make a good first impression, so she agrees. But Lena doesn’t go to a lot of museums and doesn’t know which one to go to. She decides to look for information about different museums in the Stockholm area. She decides to use the internet to find information, but finds it really hard and tiresome to find information about the museums and what they offer. She feels like she just gets a bunch of links to the museum websites which take time to navigate and some of which are even too hard to find relevant information about.

In the end she decides to just go to the Naturhistoriska riksmuséet, where she has been before, but she doesn’t feel like it’s the optimal choice for the purpose. She and her date find that they have quite a good time at the museum, especially Lena is positively surprised, she didn’t expect it to be so enlightening and fun to see the exhibits.

She finds the museum experience something she’d like to do again, but perhaps at a different museum, and she’d like it to be easier to find a new museum and relevant information about its exhibits. She’d like this to be something you could find on facebook or a single website or app which has information about all museums in the area easily available. She wants it to tell her about the museum, what exhibits there currently are and other information that might be relevant or interesting.

State-of-the-art analysis summary

Our state-of-the-art analysis can be divided into two different groups. One with applications that you use before your visit and one with interactive technology during your visit. Our target group (people who usually do not visit a museum) must recieve information before the visit to attract them and we also conclude that it might benefit if there were some kind of fun, interactive way to experience the exhibits.

We looked at Tekniska Museets website, Rabble and Event planners to get an insight how one might attract our target group to visit. From our analyses we draw the conclusion there might be a need for an information platform that does not send the user to other webpages that may or may not be easy to use, but instead displays relevant information in a visually appealing fashion.

Rabble uses special offers to attract people to different restaurants, stores and experiences, such as massages. We think that this could work to attract people to museums but not with the discount offers, but rather through relevant information.

There are a lot of different event planner websites, some working better than others. One that stood out was visitstockholm.se which had a clean and easy way to find information about specific events. We think that this type of design could be implemented more in future web pages since it gives a very good first impression to the user.

Another perspective of attracting people to museums is the actual interactive technology at the museums. We analyzed an audio guide and an interactive smell game to get a better insight interactive technology.

The visitors at the museum are usually not aware of the existence of the audio guides or the games that exists. They are introduced to the concepts when they arrive. We think that it might be a good idea to highlight these technologies at a web page or an app to attract more visitors.

Our project is starting to head more towards some kind of technology that is combining solutions to attract people to the museums with interactive solutions at the museums. We have begun brainstorming about combining existing “games” at the museums with an easy to use mobile application that also contains relevant information about the museums.

Rabble – State-of-the-art analysis

Rabble is a smartphone app designed to notify its user of discounts or sales and deals nearby. It uses GPS to see how close they are and display relevant information about the sales such as what it applies to and for how long. Rabble has been used as well by companies to make their locales more visible to the target group (smartphone users).

I'm thinking that a similar solution could be applied to our target group, people who don't go to museums often. I Rabble helps people find new places to do consuming, then you proboably could make an app to help people find museums and information about them.

The idea would be something along the lines of an app which either notifies the user of discounts on certain museums and exhibits, or instead act as an easy way to get an overview of the museums nearby and what they offer.

Problems for Rabble’s users might be that they often get what they need, but few times get exactly what they’re looking for. I might, for example, be interested in a certain kind of headset for my phone, and find that Rabble has a discount on a similar, but decidedly different headset. I will get something similar, but not exactly what I wanted in the first place. For consumers this might not always be a problem, but if we would apply it to an app for museums, it might work differently!

Museums, as opposed to consumer electronics, are vastly differenty. No two museums are the same! You can’t expect to reach out to people who might be interested in a certain exhibit at a certain museum by ordering them after which have a discount or which are near you. You would rather have to order the museums after preference or similar attributes at first.

Interview by Anton 22/9 at Tekniska Museet

Interview by Anton 22/9 - 14 at Tekniska Muséet

Subject: Man from Austria, 20-25 years old. Was recorded.

How often do you visit a museum?

- Not very often, one time in five years

Why do you visit a museum? What is it that appeals you to visit?

- Now the trigger is that i’m on vacation, and normally I go to technical installations because I find it interesting, but I don’t like art. And the trigger… I don’t really know the trigger. With friends or family and on holiday/vacation.

Is it more appealing when it is interactive like here (GAME ON 2.0 at tekniska muséet)

- I don’t have an answer for that.

Can you think of something that would make you visit a museum more often

- Mm, that’s a tricky question.¨

Is it more appealing when it is interactive like here (GAME ON 2.0 at tekniska muséet)

- Maybe… I don’t have an answer for that.

Do you visit by yourself or in a group?

- In groups, always in groups.

Could you imagine using your phone in an interactive way when you’re at the museum?

- I don’t have a smartphone, but maybe. I think QR is a bit lame.

Would you if it was something more special than just at QR-code?

- Possibly

Do you have any special memory from a visit to a museum that’s more prominent than others? If you do, then why?

- Last memory was the Vasa museum because it was very big and memorable, but I think the Vienna technical museum was the best because there you saw the first computer and I’m a computer student so that was very interesting. The intrest makes it memorable.

Seminar 1 - 18/9 - Thoughts from the group discussion

Today was our first seminar with Vincent, our group supervisor, where we discussed chapters 2, 4 and 5 from the Designing for Interaction book.

We started talking about what we've been reading and something that caught all of our attention was the Genius Design approach that was mentioned in chapter 2 in the book. At first we discussed that it’s was probably a bad idea to use this approach in our group project but after some discussion with Vincie we decided that a combination of genius design, the UCD and ACD would suit our needs. He made us realize that we're also are a part of our target group and that we should think of our own needs and desires when designing. The target group that we've chosen to work with is people that don’t go to museums or who rarely visit them.

After that insight we started asking ourselves when we last visited a museum, why we went, what we thought before and after the visit and so on. This information will make our questions more relevant to our target group. Another interesting thing that came up during the discussion was that when we talked about our museum exhibition on monday, we concluded that we were really looking forward to it, even though none of us have been to a museum in a long time!

Reading seminar 1 - Anton Sivertsson

The chapters in the book go through a lot of the steps you take before you start the real designing of a product, for example how to attack a design problem or how to do proper design research. One of the things I found very interesting was the different ways of attacking a design problem that was brought up: user-centered design, activity design and genius design, which were all very different in their approach and where to put the focus of usage in your product.

The later chapters we read were about how to make proper research and how to treat both researched subjects and interviewed people as well as what NOT to do. A lot of focus was put on the importance of this stage in the design process and how much could be accomplished if the research stage was treated correctly as well as how it could help in getting an overview of the problems that you will be faced with in later stages. Formulating a problem seemed to be one of the most important aspects of pre-design, however different kinds of design approaches treat design research differently. For example user-centered design relies heavily on it while genius design relies very thinly on it, if at all.

If I relate to our own project, I think we will have great use of proper design research both in the beginning and maybe even more when we start to reach a concrete concept. We proboably will have to include users in the design over and over if we are to acheive a user-friendly concept.

The other texts were two ISO-text, one about user-centered design in general and the importance of user-centered design and one about a specific example with ergonomic standards for working with a visual terminal. There was also a text about key principles of user-centered design which brought up several interesting things. One was that user-centered designing of products often was left to only one person in the design group instead of being considered by all throughout the design process. This is all the more interesting since in our project the whole group will work from an entirely user-centered design perspective.

My question is: is genius design the most effective doing design research or without?