Notes for Reading Seminar II

Chapter 11 - Prototyping

Using for example scenarios and prototypes to simulate the user experience of our product will help us to reflect over basic user needs during our development pocess. Low fidelity prototyping fits our project the best; it is flexible, cheap in manufacturing effort and easiest if we want to iterative over both our conceptual and physical design. During this continuous iteration, we have found that the scenarios are very handy to apply. They really boost our discussions. We have also been disucssing the fuctionalities of our product and how these are related, so the initial conceptual model is well underway.

Chapter 13 - DECIDE framework

The DECIDE framework for evaluation describes how to go about evaluation of our system.

First we need to figure out what we want to find out from our evaluation - why do we want to evaluate? Then we must break down our questions (about users, their attitudes to the problem we are trying to solve and so on) into subquestions, to properly be able to explore these in our evaluation. Later we must choose a method to carry out the evaluation in a practical and effective way. Time resources, setting, number of participants - all of these must be taken into account.

Handling people is something of an art, as ethical issues always arise. Therefore, it's very important to properly inform the participants in any activity of what's logged and what may be publicized. Protecting privacy is important.

Lastly, all information can be analyzed, interpreted and presented. This information is what will help us to renew our designing process, so this is perhaps the most important part of the evaluation. However, faulty evaluation methods will inevitably reslut in falulty data and interpretation - so we should be very thorough.

Chapter 14 - Natural Setting Evaluation

This chapter first discusses evaluation in controlled (lab experiments) vs. uncontrolled (field studies) settings. For example usability testings can vary a lot depending on the location of the study. Testing mainly generates in quantitative results such as how long it took to complete a task, while observation of a user can generate more qualitative data. Field studies are very important, as they show us how our product would actually be used 'in the wild'.

Question

A more controlled situation, or less? How good should our physical prototype before we ean evaluate it with live participants instead of simulating scenarios? Is a more, or less, controlled situation better in our case. (And how do we effectively manage our time?)