Research Question and user group
I found out that working on a user test is mostly about the preparation, a good research question is the start of this. How the research question is formulated highly influences the outcome of the user test and how valuable these findings are. Because the preparations are so important we put a lot of time in it. This worked out but didn’t put enough effort in determining which user group would give the best results for our research question. This was mostly caused because we wanted to find users outside our own social environment (e.g. no students, designers etc). We chose to work with people who own a own house and home theater system. By going door to door in Woensel-Noord we didn’t had much choice in selecting the user group on age, gender, or experiences with devices like media players. This was a pity because we wanted to mainly test if the remote control and interface was intuitive and simple for people who weren’t used to work with these devices. After all we found 3 out of 6 users who didn’t had sufficient knowledge about these devices according to their own judgment. And the average of all users was 5.2 so we had a fairly good group to my opinion.
Usability and user experience
In this assignment we only focused on the usability of the device and the remote control, with a flawless usability we wanted to make the user experience as simple as possible. The device shows the movie or plays the song when needed and nothing else. The design also wasn’t designed to make the user feel happy, but to be simple. However we could have measured the user experience in different ways, for example in the questionnaire afterwards but also by documenting the behavior of the user. The last thing we did during this test but we didn’t analyzed it enough to say something substantiated about this. The user experience however is something which is very important for me as a designer so I should focus much more on this part of the user test.
Set up of the test
In previous user tests I didn’t put much effort in the set-up of the test. I was more worried about the product and finalizing and improving this before the user test. However in this assignment it became clear that a good thought process in the preparation phase can be much more helpful than a improved product. I learned to think more elaborate about the goals I want to achieve with a test and ways to accomplish these goals. Also concrete describing of the goals and how to measure this helps to get more out of a test. I think due to the guidance during this assignment we had a good preparation phase, nevertheless I can improve on this point by being more concrete and more complete for example including user experience goals in the set-up so this can be used in the development of the product. We chose during the set-up to have a very strict task division which was both very clear for ourselves but also for the users, only 1 person introduced the test and handled the questionnaires etc. which limited the chance on errors by miscommunication between us. In the future I would definitely use the same strict division of tasks.
picture during the pilot test with a fellow student
Paper Prototype
In the past I was always skeptical about paper prototyping, I always thought that using a working
prototype worked better because the user experience would be more real. In this assignment I found out that, because so much is undefined the user is much less distracted by the design and can focus on the product and the interaction. Also it encourage users to be more creative with the interaction or even think along in the development process because they can clearly see that the product isn’t finished yet. And this information can be really valuable for me as a designer. Also working in a early stage on a paper prototype helped me in defining what was important on (in this case) the remote control and interface. If I would only write it out on paper I couldn’t test it myself and would miss things which are hard to
implement afterwards on a more sophisticated prototype. After all I expected this remote control and interface to be very basic and unreal but after all there were 2 user who thought after working with the interface that the remote control was actually a working device (although they thought it was a bit lightweight).
picture of the remote control
Thinking aloud and Co-operation
I think that these methods can be very valuable for a user test because you can also derive data of thoughts people have and of things you didn’t think of yourself as a result of the test. But because the methodology has such a rich potential amount of data we didn’t got everything out of the method. This was mainly because we didn’t know what to expect and thus improved with every new user test we did. For example the explanation of what was expected from the user became more and more specific so the users had a good understanding of the method. In the co-operation the effect of what people thought was less present because people tended to only say something when they knew it for sure so mistakes weren’t less noticed because most of the times one out of 2 knew the right button to click and was first to mention it. But it showed that with a little help of a inexperienced person every task could be
completed.
co-operation session with the whole family on the couch testing our new designed interface
Consistency
In this assignment I performed my first real user test with non-Industrial design students. This made it more difficult to explain to the users what a user test was in the first place and what was expected from the user. We scripted the lines to explain this to the user, but due the differences in users I had to elaborate on some parts, which led to inconsistency between the information the users got at the start of an user test. Also during the user test some mistakes were made because the arrow appeared to soon or moved to soon and by this indicated the next step the user should take. This influenced the results and therefore we should be aware of this influences. I don’t think we would gather significant different results but in the future I want it to be more consistent especially for this kind of user tests with real users instead of fellow students.
highlights of the user test (dutch)
Future
User testing will be an important part of designing for me. This assignment gave me the theory basis I needed to develop myself further in this direction. During my upcoming project and eventually assignments I can use this knowledge, but I want to develop myself the most in how to test user experience, when I read articles on the internet the experience and usability are often confused with each other so I will look for good documentation about this before I conduct my next user test. Furthermore I want to use paper prototyping in earlier stages of my design process. In my current process this isn’t possible anymore, but in my next project I will definitely use the techniques I learned in this assignment.
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