Week 8 - Basic interface testing

Exercise:

What is the existing experience (Restaurant Dining)? From different stakeholder P.O.V.?

Sit down with friends/family, scan menu, order food, wait for the food, eat the food, ask/wait for the bill and pay.

What external/internal factors impact on the experience?

External: weather, financial situation, social situation, education level etc

Internal: the wait for the food, the menu and how easy it is to read/understand, the ambience

What aspects of the existing experience could be enhanced/augmented/supported with technology?

Pressing a button on the table to seek attention from restaurant staff (this is already implemented in some restaurants), interactive menus, technology to enhance splitting bills more effectively.

How would introducing technology into this context change the experience?

It would make the process of ordering->eating->paying for food more efficient. For instance, being able to split the bill with technology and reduce payment time and ease financial pressure (people won’t have to owe others money).

What experience scenarios might you test with the technology?

Get a group of friends to eat at a restaurant together, order different items each and make the order complicated and not easy to split.

Continuation of basic interface prototype:

Following from last week I managed to also implement the alarm system for the prototype. This is outlined below:

1. When the zipper reaches the end of the zip, this triggers an alarm event. Before it alarms, it decides if the person is the owner or a thief. For the purpose of this prototype, this decision is made randomly:

2. Once the event is triggered (setOffAlarm), it initialises a timer for 0.5 seconds, and initialises other variables such as the beeping sound. Then it listens for when this timer ends:

3. After 0.5 seconds the light object alternates between black and red (to simulate flashing), with a beep sound every time the light is red.

Working demo of alarm system and the final prototype:

This week we had tested our prototypes in the workshops to gain some feedback. The testing involved getting the users to interact with the prototype, directly observing their behaviour and asking questions afterwards. Through direct observation, it was noted that some people interact with the zipper differently: some dragged the zipper quite quickly and others more slowly. This also reflects the different ways people open physical zips. This means that in constructing a physical prototype, the system would need to be able to detect movements in the zipper at different speeds. The alarm system was also quite loud, and I observed the testees to be slightly shocked when the alarm sounded - this is a desired outcome, as the point is to attract attention and perhaps even surprise.

Some of the questions that were asked at the end were:

How easy did you find it to use the prototype?

Do you think it effectively encompasses the product’s interactions?

How could the prototype be improved?

Overall the feedback indicated the the prototype was intuitive and easy to understand, it would deter the thief and a companion app works well with the rest of the system. Some had suggested to make the alert more piercing, to further deter the thieves, however this should also be tested in-situ.