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
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
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.
