Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation
“Introduction week 7 … Lecture: Learning about simulations … Testing with users … Final presentation … Reflecting on your work”
Summaries
- Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > 7a Introduction week 7 > Introduction to week 7
- Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > 7b Lecture: Learning about simulations > Learning about simulations
- Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > 7c Reflecting on your work > Benchmark video week 7
- Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > * Sofa Session - Reflection on week 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > Sofa session week 7
Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > 7a Introduction week 7 > Introduction to week 7
- Last weeks, Stefan van de Geer explained what a design concept entails and how to develop and evaluate concepts.
- Last weeks were all about developing concepts and deciding which concept to continue with.
- This week is all about creating simulations and testing your chosen concept.
- You will take your chosen concept and decide which key quality of that concept you will simulate with a simple model.
- By simulating a key quality of your concept in some form or another, you will be able to present it to a potential user group and get feedback.
Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > 7b Lecture: Learning about simulations > Learning about simulations
- In order to gain insight in the various aspects of your design, you can simulate these aspects with a prototype.
- You make this prototype mainly for yourself to help you understand what you are designing, but it’s also for your intended users to ask feedback and for your client to communicate your design.
- The last is form, if you want to study form details in true scale and in three dimensions, if you want to have feedback from intended users on the total experience, or if you want to convince your client and stakeholders.
- When you have determined the goal of your prototype you first need to make a plan.
- You choose your own materials and tools in order to achieve your goal as directly as possible.
- We prefer to use materials that are easily available, accessible, and easy to process with the available tools.
- For prototypes testing the usage of your design, your material choice depends highly on whether your hypothesis requires an examination of cognitive understanding or physical interaction of the product.
- In an early stage, visual two-dimensional interfaces can be prototyped out of paper or cardboard sheets that can be positioned in layers to simulate the alternating screens.
- For prototypes that aim to study the physical interaction body measures, locomotion and tactile possibilities especially need to be taken into account.
- Materials like cardboard, plywood and rod material could do the work.
- If your aim is to demonstrate the technical functioning of your design, then you need to abstract it to simple, insightful elements, often made out of sheet material and profiles.
- If the design has a more skeleton-based character, then rod materials out of metal, wood and plastic in combination with sheet materials such as cardboard, triplex and aluminum offer good possibilities.
- A plan consists of: side views with measures of length, width and material thickness.
- Your prototype might look quite different from your final design.
- Most of the time it is needed to make a specific drawing of your prototype in advance, before you develop your building plan.
- A hand-made prototype made out of hard foam can be built in layers, taking into account the various thicknesses of the available foam sheets.
- For free forms, guided by hand, you need to take care that you always cut outside of your lines to avoid unwanted holes in your prototype.
- Plastic sheet material, for example styrene, in different thicknesses is well-suited for the building of simple prototypes.
- You get the best result when the bonded surfaces are aligned and fitted perfectly and when the material is finished smoothly.
- You can find detailed production descriptions and ‘tips and tricks’ for all kinds of materials and techniques online and in guides.
Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > 7c Reflecting on your work > Benchmark video week 7
- Koen, are you ready? Sure I am, but I am also looking forward to test it with the final user.
- Hi, so the next step, let us think about the test and the prototype for this concept.
- Okay, so our concept is an application, but how are we going to test that? Well I have tested an interface before and what we used was a paper prototype.
- Oh okay, that is cool, but on the other side we are not really testing the impact then of the application.
- Maybe we can fake that in a way as well, so that we can also test if it meets our design challenge.
- For the usability test the app’s screens are designed, printed and cut out, so the participant can experience the interface of the application through a paper prototype.
- For our second part of the test we will fake the real functionality of the app, we will send the user mobile text messages during one week.
- For conducting our test we made a new appointment with our user.
- Accordingly we discuss the set up with the user of the second test.
- We made an appointment to meet again after one week of testing.
- Every day I send our user a picture of my breakfast, which he could rank, and then he could send me a picture of his breakfast.
- Fruit or Dare is an application designed to support efficiency seeking professionals to take time for themselves in the morning and to pursue a healthy breakfast routine.
- While testing this application we found out that our user was motivated to take time for himself in the morning, to eat healthy.
- Some aspects of the interface have to be re-designed in order to be fully understandable, and its redesign also has to be tested.
Week 7: Testing with users & final presentation > * Sofa Session – Reflection on week 6: Developing & evaluating concepts > Sofa session week 7
- Ok, we are now here in the Alps and we’re at a woodwork shop and the interesting is that he is the designer and also the maker of of this product, but he even grows the wood here in his own land.
- Last week I was talking about how you can come from a idea to a concept by more detailing the form and the details, like here.
- We also talked about you can combine different concepts to another one and it was very nice to see that [name], he really did this, he combined his first and second concept to a fourth concept and used the strength of these both concepts.
- The third concept was actually about smell, how smell can help you to be relaxed and then finally wake up in a relaxed way.
- Another concept of [name] is his first one, is wake app and the idea is that your friends are helping you to wake up which is a very nice idea, but it’s maybe also already existing.
- Next we have [name] and she purpose three chemical solution for some sub-functions, so these are not really complete concepts but sub-functions for different functions of the product.
- I think it’s very nice at all three concept, that they all meet some how her challenge, but she has the timebox, the missionspy cards and the task watch.
- Ok you are now going to select your concept and you are going to test it with your intended users.
- You can make a very detailed model, you can make a rough model, you can make some scale models or you just take your drawings and sketches and you ask for feed back from you intended users.
- Ok that’s for now and good luck with your last iteration for your concept, you final concept and also your final presentation.
