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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 - Emil Westin

For this seminar we were supposed to read chapters 6, 7 and 8 in the course literature. These chapters explain and process the basic tools and methods for HCI design, both for different brainstorming methods, refinement and prototypes and product developing. Throughout the entire HCI industry most of the designers agree that the design process often starts when the designer starts to design a prototype. It's at that step that the product is concretized and become reality; it's the step from thought and sketches to physical form.
  When you have a prototype, you'll have a bigger chance of detecting problems that you might not have thought about before, problems that can not be seen until you actually try to use the product. It could be functionality problems but also things like sizes of buttons, colours and choose of fonts; you can more easily see what works in reality and what doesn't. There are different kinds of prototypes. A designer could choose to create a more lifelike, high-fidelity, prototype, i.e. programming an app in code, or do a more primitive, low-fidelity, prototype, i.e. draw on paper/the computer and then simulate a user session by showing different slides depending on "where the user clicked" on the paper slide.
  I think that our project could really benefit from a prototype, as it is a way to see our work in real time, though I think that a real programmed prototype would mean lots of work and time spent. A conclusion I draw from this is that we should do a more primitive, but still lifelike, prototype, i.e. digital pictures that we use in a simulation.
  Saffer also writes about some guidelines that a designer should think about, when creating adaptive products. These guidelines bring up the importance of how a design should be designed in such a way so the product feels personalized for the user. The designer should help the user to learn by combining doing with understanding, but try to not steer the user in the right way. Rather, the designer should set up a path in such a way so the user can choose to follow by choice. It's a fine line to not steer the user and at the same time "push" them in the right direction so that they can learn the product easily. Another guideline of importance tells about sensitivity and responsiveness. The designer should try to focus on making the application personalized for each user, and that each user should feel as if the artefact is alive and responsive. This, I think, is of great importance in a modern design. As the technology is sprinting ahead and we, the users of todays applications, are used to products that respond for every click we make, it should be one of the main focuses of designing a product. Personalization and responsiveness are two key terms that I think my group should keep in mind when we design our product, which as of today, looks like it's going to be an application for a mobile phone.

/Emil

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.

Group meeting 6 october 2014

Today we prepared for exercise 5 and continued to brainstorm on our concept ideas while trying to come up with new ones. We made some progress by discussing and trying to visualize our different ideas. In our visualisation process we used photoshop to gain an idea of what our different design concepts would look like. The idea that is the most interesting idea for us at the moment is an idea that we call MuseumPool(BUBBLA!!...???!). The idea is that people that do not have anyone to go with can find people with similar interests and problem of finding somebody to go with. The service will provide an easy to use interface where you easily can find somebody to meet up with and share the experience with. Our current design is some kind of bubbly interface where each bubble represents a person and different colour schemes depending on availability. The bubbles size indicate match of interest, a big bubble means a good match.

Secondary Persona - Lena Johansson

Secondary Persona

Name:            Lena Johansson 

Age:               34

Hometown:   Stockholm, Sweden

Background

Lena is born and raised in Stockholm. She works at Blackeberg Gymnasium as a curator; a job she really enjoys as she thinks that she can make the students lives better. Lena currently lives alone in a small apartment near Kristineberg but dreams about meeting the right man to have children and start a family with.

 Lena has a lot of female friends that she hangs out with. The highlight of the year is when Melodifestivalen starts and they all gather to watch and talk about it. They also travel together once a year with charter to spend time together.

Personality

Lena is a very social person, she loves to meet and get to know new people. She always has a smile on her lips and she finds it easy to laugh at almost everything. However, she has difficulties in finding a life partner. She has had some problems with relationships previously in her life and has a hard time to commit to someone.

 Sometimes her work can be stressful and overwhelming. When this happens Lena usually has a hard time handling those situations when they occur. To prevent this, Lena tries to be as structured as possible in her work, though she’s not the great planner she thinks she is.

Today

Every morning Lena reads the morning paper to keep up with the information flow in the society. She sees herself as fairly well informed about culture and the society and she thinks it’s important to have knowledge that is up-to-date. Lena is also a frequent user on facebook, though she doesn’t post so much. She mostly follows friends and looks up pages of things that she thinks is interesting. Her phone is her second source of finding information.

Since Lena has difficulties in finding a boyfriend, she is using some dating sites and applications to try to meet her life partner, but she thinks that it’s hard to find new places to go to; it gets monotonous to always go to a restaurant or a café. Lena wants to get a more active lifestyle as well as extend her common knowledge about everything she finds interesting. She wants to meet someone who she can share her thoughts with, as her friends doesn’t share her interest in more deeper discussions, rather than to talk about plain gossip.

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.

State-Of-The-Art Analysis by Emil

Tekniska Museet - Usability on Webpage
I'm going to try to do a state-of-the-art analysis of the Tekniska Museum webpage. First, I'm briefly going to analyze who the target group is for the webpage, and who actually uses it. Second, I'm going to analyze what worked well, and what didn't work well based on my own experience and based on a test with assigned tasks I asked a testperson to do. Last, I will present the tasks and results that I assigned to the testperson together with screenshots of the website.

Who is the target group for the webpage?
From what I understand from using the webpage myself, it’s relatively easy to find basic information of the museum, such as opening hours, prices, exhibitions and so on. It’s harder to find what else this page contains, such as questions you can ask to the staff, and information about, for example, inventors.

  Therefore I believe that the target group the developers had in mind for this page probably is a medium technical skilled person, a person that is used to more interactive webpages and links. It’s probably persons between ages 15-50 that can find information from the website with ease the first time they visit them since I assume that these people use highly interactive technology daily.

Who is using the webpage?
Those who actually use the webpage are probably, for the most part, parents with small children and maybe teachers who's looking for information about visits from schools. I would imagine that the former has more experience in using these kind of website, and that the latter are having a harder time with the webpage. (Presumably because I think that they for the most part are older and non technical...). I also think that the people in the target group fits into the users of the webpage, though the youngsters might use the app instead or as a compliment.

What is working well on the site?
There is easy access to most of the site in just a few clicks! The top menu is the shortcut to almost everything that possibly would want to find. This was proved in the test I did with a test person.
  The front page is presenting all the relevant information that you need, though there is a lot of links and pictures which could drag attention and confuse the user from concentrating on his/hers assigned tasks.

What is working bad?
Things that is not working well on the page is the search function which isn’t presenting the results in a clear way. The user has to scroll down on the resulting page to find more results than the two that are shown directly after the search. This wasn’t obvious the first time I and my testperson used the search function.
  Another thing, which I discovered from the test tasks, is the questions that you can ask to a specific exhibition. The design here is clearly not thought through and it was hard to see where the questions were, and where the user could ask a question himself.
  The font and the titles on some pages made it hard to see what and when information was presented, as in the example with the exhibition questions.
  Also, as the test showed, the top menu wasn't designed for a small computer screen like mine. There was no indication that you could scroll down on the extended menu to get more accessible links. You can see picture examples of this in the task test below.

Tasks for the test person:
1. Find the opening hours.
This task was easy. The test person found the opening hours in just two clicks. There was a direct link from the top of the webpage, but hidden in the top menu. It can be accessed as shown in the picture. (The opening hours is displayed at the bottom of the page at all times, so you can always scroll down to find them.)




2. Find future exhibitions.
This task was also relatively easy for the test person to achieve. She found a link for this information from the same top menu as the opening hours could be accessed . See picture above (link is down to the left).

3. Find the GAME ON exhibition and write them a question.
As previously, the test person put the mouse over the “Besöka” button on the top menu to get the extended options for that choice. When you click on “Utställningar” you get to this view:



She then clicked on the GAME ON picture to get to the GAME ON exhibition, and the view changed to this:



After some trouble, she managed to find the questionnaire at the bottom of this page. But it was hard to see when the questions started and that the text you saw actually was user generated questions. In the picture below the user generated questions can be seen at the bottom.



It was a long scroll down until the questionnaire showed up, and this was hard to understand for user due to the design of this page.

4 Find information about swedish inventors.
This task showed to be the most difficult one. This was probably due to a design problem on the extended view from the top menu.
  This is how the menu looks like when you move the mouse over the “Veta mer” button at the top:



As you can see, the menu doesn’t show swedish inventors. But if you scroll down while keeping the mouse on the extended menu, you’ll notice that there are more clickable options on this menu. One of those is directing you to the swedish inventors page. It took some time until the test person found out that this was possible. Instead of scrolling down on this menu she tried to search for “svenska uppfinnare”. The search result presented the link “svenska uppfinnare” as the third result, which was not presented until you scrolled down on the webpage.



(this is the search result for “svenska uppfinnare”. The link to the page “svenska uppfinnare” is just below the second result visible on the screen. The test person did scroll down, but didn’t see the link. She continued to search for the inventor page using different links and methods for a while until she noticed that it was accessible in the “Veta mer” menu as described above.)

5. Can you buy food at the museum?
This task was also easy for the subject to find. It was accessible from the top menu and she arrived to the right page in just 2 clicks.

6. Can you buy SL-tickets at the museum?
The last and final task went smoothly aswell. She first went to the Ticket page, but here there was only information about the museum tickets. She then went to the “Hitta hit” page where there was information about the museum selling SL-tickets. This information is also presented in the “Butik” page but the user never thought of going there.

/ Emil

Interview by Emil 22/9 -14 at Tekniska Museet

Interviewee: Woman, 25-35 years, not from Stockholm. Didn’t want to be audio recorded.

How often do you visit a museum?
- ”Very rarely, once a year perhaps.”

Why do you visit a museum? What is it that appeals you to visit?
- ”Wow.. what a difficult question! I don’t really know..”

Is it more fun to visit a museum if there are more interactive things, like there are here at GAME ON?
- ”Yes, this exhibition (GAME ON) made me come here because there are a lot of games, and I guess that’s it’s more fun when the exhibition is as interactive as it is here. But it depends a lot on the exhibition.

Can you think of something that would make you visit a museum more often?- ”Ehh, that depends.. I don’t know.”

Do you visit by yourself or in a group?- ”It varies from time to time, but today I’m here alone.”

Could you imagine using your phone in an interactive way, when you’re at the museum?- ”Yes, probably, if it were something that really enhanced the experience; maybe to get more information or something like that. But otherwise I don’t think I would.”

Do you have any special memory from a visit to a museum that’s more prominent than others? If you do, then why?- ”Difficult question.. I visit museums so rarely so I don’t know. I’m happy with the GAME ON exhibition, this visit gets more fun when you are allowed to interact with things.”

/ Emil

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 - Emil Westin

In these chapters the author discuss and inform on how to prepare a design process in the best possible way.
In chapter 2 Saffer writes about how to approach interaction design. He speaks about what to think when you accept a design job and that there is four major roads to design by. The User Centered Design (UCD), the Activity Centered Design, the System Design and last but not least, the Genius Design. Genius Design is the most popular and used design method because it’s not necessary to do a lot of research when you work in this way, but Saffer points out that this method is best suited for those designers with a lot of experience. A new designer should work with UCD or the activity centered design methods because they let the designer to know their audience and to think of the design from a users point of view, and that is really important if you would want to make a product that is usable.

In chapters 4 and 5 Saffer talks about how to do an effective and qualitative research and how to best analyze your data so that you can work with it later on. It’s a good thing to look for patterns when interviewing subjects. If an answer is said once, it’s a phenomenon, if it’s said twice it’s a coincidence and if it’s said three times it should be looked on as a pattern. Patterns are easy to work with and reflects what subjects think about things and how they use certain products. Saffer also points out that when you ask questions you should really think about not to say them in a leading way, and that you should be as neutral as you can be in your interviews. And most important of all, write everything down for future analysis! 

After you have collected your data it’s time to evaluate it and to try and see what the problem really is and how to solve it with design! Saffer thinks that it’s a good way to materialize your data, to make it physical. It can be a challenge because you usually have all kinds of different places to store data in different formats. He brings up four different analyze methods that you can work with when you evaluate your data. All of them seems to be good and I think that it’s a matter of taste and maybe what your projects goal is. The most used method is probably the ordinary analyze method, but to know what method is most effective could be hard to know from beforehand.

In chapter 5, Saffer also talks about Personas and what an important role this design tool is. To make a virtual person that the designer can have in mind when designing a product for that target group. For small projects it’s best to keep the number of Personas on a low level.

/ Emil