This week we continued working on our prototype on Marvel. The prototype would give us a chance to see how the users interacted with the app and help us see what we might have missed. They would test this out on the 8th and 9th of December. In the lecture, we watched ‘The five act interview’ by Sprint, which showed us how to set up the user testing. The five steps are:
- Friendly welcome
- Context questions
- Introduce the prototype
- Tasks
- Quick debrief
The context questions would be similar to what we previously asked at our client meetings which informed us on the direction we needed to go in for our prototype. We decided on creating an app called Plan A Lot where the users would be able to develop communities with different criteria for each level. As the levels increase so would the difficulty by providing more components to drag and other realistic limitations. We hope this app would allow us to open conversations between planners and the youth.
One issue we had with producing the prototype was that we would not be able to drag components onto the 3D plot to create the community. This was a major part of the app and had to look at other means of providing this feature. We were thinking of using either Microsoft PowerPoint or Keynotes to have a demo of the game. However we thought the users would be confused if were to switch from marvel to another software. We decided to print out a plot and get the users to use paper cut outs to drag on to the site, to replicate how it would work in the app. We would use Marvel to show our vision of the app.
We have two user tests. The first will be with the youth council and will be in the planning studios. The youth council will be familiar with this area as this is where we previously held our user interviews. If it was up to us we would have chosen to do it at a school so they would feel comfortable. The second interview would be with Sean Gallagher who works for Capita at North Tyneside Council. For this interview we will be heading to the planning office at North Tyneside which is what we would have chosen as an ideal setting. We decided that two people would talk while the other three would observe. On the second interview one of our members would not be present. Therefore we would have another member speaking on Friday.
We want to keep the user tests informal and just let the conversation flow naturally. We don’t have many questions to ask at the moment. However we hope that user tests will point out things we would have overlooked. There are still small details that we’re not sure of and we hope to get critical feedback to refine our prototype and concept.