interviews | Ace That Interface

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First Cycle of Evaluation (Seminar 3):

As we mentioned in the previous post ,we used a combination of a cognitive walkthrough and contextual interviews during Seminar 3, we considered the participated students both expert cyclists (since they are working on a similar project and they use their bike on daily basis), and candidate users for our product under development.Also, we asked them to answer a simple survey contained some questions inspired by System Usability Scale (SUS), and a couple of questions to provide us with suggestions and comments.

The main goal of the survey was helping students to answer the questions in a way that they were used to , since they all came from Computer Science related fields, also we answered their questions, and gave them description of the interface and the system during that .The verbal feedback we received during this process was very helpful.

The Responses provided some suggestions and what they thought it should be improved.

Also we did an interview during the seminar to evaluate our prototype.

Second Cycle of Evaluation:

The responses and the verbal feedback we received during the short seminar, encouraged us to start a second cycle of evaluation, following a formative approach depending on the same qualitative methods (combination of contextual and cognitive walk through interviews), where the dialogue with the user is very important and gives more detailed feedback since we couldn’t get any reliable quantitive data yet.

One of the important points we received from the other groups during the seminar, was the ambiguity of Google Glass capabilities, and it’s limitations if we want to use it in conjunction with our navigation app,so we came up with the following prototype of a wearable glass, to overcome any expected problem from using Google product.

Prototype

We conducted 4 interviews using slideshow to guide the interviewees and collect their feedback and evaluation. (the interviews are linked at the end of this post)

based on the previous evaluation cycles we can list few positive points about the product:

Good overall impression of the whole concept.
Fun to use in some cases because of it is similar to the concept of video games.
Intuitive and provide a good level of affordance because they didn’t need help to interpret the meaning of the symbols and components.
Useful and could be used frequently if you are not familiar with the road.
Removed the need to check your phone for the map, which decreases the distribution that usually exists with our GPS based solutions.
Good positioning of the components in general.

From the previous points, we concluded that the design makes the affordances perceivable because the use of the material design icons which made the meaning behind it very obvious to the users since they are usually familiar with such symbols,and placing the components in predefined areas provides a decent level of consistency.

Since our AR Glasses should be a great example of an interactive product, and the main goal of the interaction design is to involve the users, or the expected users in our case,in the design process, we were more concerned about the flaws and complaints to improve our design, and we found these common issues and suggestions:

It was not very clear how to use the Glasses alone to set the navigation destination, the absence of a clear clue on how the user should interact with the product can be considered a major flaw on the interaction design level.
It could be too much unnecessary information for some users who are not interested in monitoring their heart rate or calories for example, or even the minimap for others, who are little bit familiar with the road. Such extra information might be distracting.
The need for customizing the interface, where the user can control what to display or hide of the components.Providing such option will enhance the level of the usability of this product.

in spite that the visibility is one of the most important principles of interaction design, and it should allow the user to figure out the current state of the system, some components (like heart rate and calories….etc), were trivial to some users that we interviewed, and the ability of hiding it will add more value to the interface for them, in other words , (less-is-more approach and more simplicity) will allow the cyclist focus more on the road while cycling.

The need for an alerting feature to notify the cyclist about the road condition like the traffic congestions, accidents on the road, obstacles and weather condition.
The navigation signals could be more interactive to drag the attention briefly like flashing or having a simple motion.

The last two points can be considered as good recommendations to add extra features and enhance the Feedback of the system,this can be done by adding several types of Feedback, like more catchy visual signs in case the user turned off the auditory notifications to listen to music, or adding vibration to the edge of the glasses to give the cyclist tactile feedback when a car or other moving object comes close to him.

We will try to follow some of the previous points to enhance our final version, for Seminar 4, while the other issues could be considered as future work. For example, we proposed the idea of using a simple mobile application that can provide the user with more control and customizability to enhance the overall usability of the glasses and allow them to set their destination, and hide the components that they don’t think it is useful for them.

A simple prototype of the mobile app interface will be presented in a separate post.