Tag Archive: questionnaire


Victory in Europe Day… ehrm week

Filed Under: Graduation Project
May.06, 2010

This week is an official holiday week in the Netherlands. The school is still open, but we had to subscribe to get in and the school is only opened for limited hours. It’s really deserted here. Luckily my office partner is here to have some talks once in a while. Like every holiday period, the process is a bit slow.

Last week I mostly worked on the context research. I finished researching itself in the end of the week. I’m really happy I have around 15 filled in questionnaires. I wrote down all off the interesting results from the answers I got. Most of the assumptions I had where right, but a couple of them where a bit different then expected.

Besides the questionnaires, I also went to experience the television environment myself. Hereby I documented the pictures of the television environment in a moodboard mock-up, categorizing all the details in a visual way (I may not say moodboard because Irene hates it). Irene also pointed me a while ago to a relevant course going on somewhere else on the planet, about field research for design (link). It is mostly about documenting and using results from field research in an efficient way. I used (and still use) the blog as a guideline for my research. A picture what caught my attention was this one:

User Experience Treasure Map

User Experience Treasure Map

It really goes in detail of a step by step plan for the process of defining the user experience, so I won’t use every element because of the limited time.

When I was finished with documenting the results, I started writing down keywords of my ideas, findings and inspirations. I have some ideas in my head how the system is going to work. Through brainstorming and writing everything down I want to structure my thoughts and come up with solid ideas. The next step is prototyping and testing my ideas, hopefully with some user testing.

start of writing down keywords

start of writing down keywords

Besides the usual project stuff, I went to the university library to get some additional papers for my supportive narrative. I found some relatively recent papers about embodied interaction and gestural interfaces. Reading is on hold for a moment, but they can prove useful in the future.

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Context research and progress

Filed Under: Graduation Project
Apr.26, 2010

The past one and a half week I worked mostly on my context research. I also continued reading some books instead of the pile of papers on my desk. The most notable book is Designing Natural Interfaces from Dan Saffer. The book itself keeps it to basics of gestural Interfaces, and its easy to read. It’s funny actually, a lot of sources mentioned in the book I’ve already found by myself. It gave me the feeling that on the I’m on the right way.

In my previous post I’ve said I’ve been doing two things; experience things myself and making a questionnaire.
I’ve been visiting people at home with my big friend the photo camera. I went searching in my near environment for contacts. I have a visited a diverse group of users, so I’m really happy with that. I can visit some of them in the future for user testing.
What I did is making taking pictures of the television area, I especially made pictures of the environment and relevant objects within it. Next to that I tried to document physical interactions with the systems. Interactions with the graphical interface was secondary, but still interesting, relevant to current systems like digital television and advanced media centers. Taking pictures of interactions was a bit harder, because you have to do it on the right time and it’s hard not to be intrusive. Next to this I asked a lot of questions how and why they use the systems. I’ve wrote a lot of stuff down to support the photos with a story. I only have to sort the photos and findings in a nice overview for future reference.

Secondly, I developed a questionnaire. It took me more time than expected to develop this. The most time went in testing, and formulating the questions in the right way. I also have send my questionnaire for proof reading to Lies Van Roesel, a research teacher at our school. She gave me some useful feedback, which I applied in the questionnaires.

At the moment I’ve have given the questionnaire to around 15 people now, some of the questionnaires I already got back. Its gonna take some time to document the results.

I have to rush a bit, because I’m a bit behind schedule. According my planning, for the next week I have to make some rough concepts. I have some small ideas in my head at the moment. I want to brainstorm with Post Its this week, to mindmap and organize all of my wicked ideas. My research I did should be a good base for this.

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Progress presentation Tuesday 13th of April

Filed Under: Graduation Project
Apr.14, 2010

Yesterday we all gave a small presentation of the progress of our projects. The supportive narrative (other word for the paper we have to write) was the core of the presentation. We started with showing the table of contents and a chapter where we had the most information of. At the end of the presentation we had to ask a question to the rest of the class. This question was about our stance within the supportive narrative, which subject was in our mind at the moment.

My paper is about embodied interaction; how human-computer interaction can be made more natural by using the body (working title!).

My question at the time was how far I should go with embodied interaction versus Graphical User Interfaces (GUI’s). The fact is that GUI’s use symbolics, metaphors and interactions based on our real life experiences, to make the interface intuitive and easier to understand (think about drag & drop, the recycle bin, the desktop, etc.). With this I want to say is that there is an extra barrier for the user; the user has to make a translation from real life to a graphical interface. A good interface does this translation well, but there are a lot of interfaces that don’t.

The first reaction on my question was that using the ‘versus’ stance is the wrong stating point. It is better to look at how GUI’s use real life metaphors and how they are applied in a system. With this, I can figure out which metaphors are the most widely used and understandable for users. I can use this as a way to reverse-engineer this back in the natural interface.

Another point of feedback was that I figure out how I can make a GUI easier to use by translocating functions to the input device (the natural interface) instead of showing it all on the GUI. Think about using a ‘pinch’ gesture to zoom in on a map or picture, instead of pressing a graphical ‘+’ or ‘-’ button on the interface.

Besides giving feedback on our papers, Irene also asked what our short-term plan was for the coming weeks. My plan is finishing my context research and document this in clear way.

  • Firstly, I’m visiting people at home, how they are watching television and what their relation is with the associated devices. I’m documenting this with photo’s. The core of it is that I experience the situation by myself.
  • Secondly, I’m working on a questionnaire how users themselves view their position of watching television. How they feel, physical position is, which functions they mainly use, their annoyances, and so on. I try to make this questionnaire a bit playful and visual. My interest is not cold hard data, but their user experiences. Feedback from Irene was to send this questionnaire to her and a teacher for feedback. I want to finish this questionnaire today.

Work work!

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