Author: b4041277

This week we were really excited to showcase our prototype to our user clients. The first user test took place on the 8^th December at the planning studios in Claremont. We received a lot of critical feedback that we hope to implement into our prototype.  This was with the Youth Council who we can proudly quote “would play with the app” after a few refinements. It’s really eye opening to have these informal conversations about the app as the youth council have reasonable and well thought ideas to further our app.

These include the rating systems for our leader board. We have a feedback box where users can state what they like or dislike about the design. However the youth council suggested we make it so other users can read each other comments to generate an interactive conversation between users. Another idea that came up was once the user had completed the design of the development they would then be able to place it into a geolocation. Such as placing the design in google earth or maps to show how their design would look in context. This would make their designs feel more personal and gives them a visual to see how their design would fit in and interact with the surroundings.

The second user test took place at the North Tyneside Council. This gave us an insight to how the planners and developers would use the app to open up conversations between them and the youth. We learnt that planners go into schools to give talks about planning to raise an awareness of planning issues. We questioned whether our app could be used for the youth to help provide an input in actual planning applications but were sadly informed that it wasn’t feasible. However by introducing our app Plan-A-Lot to the school children it allows both parties to have more open conversations and provides a more interactive experience.  We hope it provides the missing connection between the youth, planners and developers.

From the user tests we gained quite a lot of advice and suggestions which we plan to take on board. Some will be ideas for future development of the app and other ideas will be idea’s we can incorporate now.

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. They would test this out on the 8^th and 9^th 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:

1. Friendly welcome
2. Context questions
3. Introduce the prototype
4. Tasks
5. Quick debrief

From this we learnt that we cannot just simply ask them to test out the prototype immediately. Instead, we should ask questions in context such as; have they used any apps related to planning? How they felt about them? Although we already asked these questions at the User Interview at the beginning of the module.

Reinforced throughout the interview was to reassure the user. The user should not feel, as though they are at an interview as, this would lead them to believe there is a right answer. We want the user to think aloud to give us a better understanding of how usable the app is.

We realised that without a dragging feature on marvel the prototype would not help us assess how viable the app would be, how the client would interact with the app without us present. We decided the users would test it out on keynotes with the marvel prototype as a supporting model to show what we envision the app to look like.

During the seminar, we assigned roles during the user interviews. We would have three observers and two speakers. We will be showing the prototype to five people, which means 80% of any faults of our app, would be flagged up. Any other details would be minor details that would not affect the function of the app. Hopefully we would be able to get valuable information from the user testing.