Parallell design session

During this exercise we worked with parallell design, so we divided our group into two smaller groups and each group started working on separate designs; one regular and one "wild and crazy". The regular one was created by Alva and Sofia, and the "wild and crazy" one was created by Carolina and Lovisa. 

When we created our design we thought it was important that the prototype would be easy to navigate, to fit our target group. We also tried to find research that would help us make a prototype that is user friendly to our target group. As mentioned in the research article "Motivations and obstacles to smartphone use by the elderly: developing a research framework" (link here) it is important that the main function of the product is the most central and visible one. So, for our product, whose main function is an audio guide, it is important that the audio guide function is easily found and that other, less important functions are there only to emphasize the audio guide function. Another essential thing that the article adresses is to make the application horizontal, with few levels of depth. According to the source, eldery people often have issues traversing multiple menu levels. So remembering where to go is a common problem. Therefore, our prototypes are mainly of horizontal design. 

Regular design

Besides the features mentioned in the research above, we also wanted our regular prototype to include large buttons and large text, since elderly people commonly have physical obstructions, such as coordination of fingers. The most important buttons on each screen should also be the most emphasized ones. We also thought about different interface metaphors, such as color coding different buttons to put extra feature on their different functions. For example, a red "pause" button and a green "play" button, since those colors are often associated with labels such as "stop" and "go". We used neutral colors, such as blue and light yellow for the buttons that were not the main functions for the application. We also used interface metaphors for using symbols instead of text on a few buttons in our prototype, for example an arrow for the "play"-button (se picture below). We also wanted to have small amounts of text on the screen, since the article mentioned above specifies that elders often experience difficulties with busy screens, i.e. too much presented at once in menus/on screen. 

"Wild and Crazy" design
 It is quite difficult to decide what functions to keep, when your primary persona doesn't have much technical knowledge regarding apps. In practice this means that the difficulty of navigation is directly linked to, if the prototype is of horizontal or vertical design.

After a long discussion mainly regarding the problem space, we decided that in order for us to fully embrace the "wild and crazy" design, a person from our target group would be more like our secondary persona (more technical), so that we could add one or two extra levels of depth in comparison to the "regular" design.

What should it look like?

That being said, we still tried to keep the interface metaphors relativly simple/universal so as not to compromise the usability.  For example we still make use of the typical "play" and "pause" buttons, but instead of making them overly clear eg green and red buttons, we choose to design them as medieval shields instead.
In this prototype we have a menu "scroll" at the top of the screen from which you can access different type of settings, information about the museum's exhibitions etc. Our intention is that when clicked, this menu will "roll out" as if you're reading a parchment roll.

 For our color palett we tried to use colors associated with the medieval times, eg light brown, purple, beige etc BUT we made sure that the background colors were of the the lighter type so as not to make the concept too dark and dreary and enable easy navigation (well visible buttons).
Since this version has more "layers" than the regular design, we though of a sort of "navigator" at the bottom of the screen. So when you move "deeper" into the app the navigator moves further to the right. And when you go back to a previous screen, it moves to the left.

Building.