So, the presentation…

The presentation went well, our planning was good and execution was good too (as far as I think at least)

Of course there were quite a few bumps and scrapes, Our timing was slightly over the limit (which was due to slightly more content that we should have had, but we needed to include all work done), some of our presenters were not up to par, I myself had a few issues as well.

The Presentation of the prototype seemed to go quite smooth except for the few stumbles with the projector and screen calibration but overall did give out the impression we wanted to achieve. It also covered more of how a system would be used in a real life situation, it certainly helped present the prototype to the class and also helped greatly in feedback  when thinking of further changes. If there was more presentations, it would definitely be something worth suggesting to other groups as it really did change how we looked at it.

information was quite even in terms of sections and we did spend a good time in discussion and making everything clear for everyone, there were ups and downs and we had to include a few laughs and smiles to keep the flow of interest.

We successfully got both the prototypes (Public and Private) to work, and it demo’d our updates really well I believe. Here are the links for the two prototypes: Public Terminal Prototype, Private Terminal Prototype. (Please give it some time as it takes a while to load flash files)

Overall, I feel satisfied with the presentation and I believe it has been the best presentation I ever took part in although, there still could have been quite a lot improvements if we had the time.. Who knows, maybe next year.

In the end, I believe we all feel we did a good job. Only one way to find out… bring on the feedback!

INDIVIDUAL CONTRIBUTION:

After analyzing the previous and current evaluation, I prioritized the problems found and came up with solutions and recommendations which will be included in the next prototype.

Lessons Learnt:

Based on what we have gathered so far with regards to evaluating users and giving feedback as an expert, there is no doubt to say system analyzing skills have leveled up.

There are a number of ways to go about making the next prototype. Making the same mistakes as before and confusing the user is not one of them. Some problems that were previously detected, fixed, and then incorporated again had to be reviewed and removed. Luckily, the prototype has far fewer problems as it gets perfected.

Group Work:

The tasks in reviewing test results and creating the presentation were allocated to each member of the group. It was now required to give our all to evaluating our newest prototype for the last time so that we could include the results in our presentation. Each member of the group then set out to contribute to the whole.

Individual contribution:

My contribution in this presentation was reviewing all that had gone before and what improvements we have made since the start of this prototype. It was my job to create the summary of  all that we had done. I took to the task with a slight anticipation as I was aware of the enormous amount of work it had taken to get to this point in time. I reviewed everything we had done, all the elements we had used, the theories we had implemented and the innovations we had incorporated and reiterated them in the summary section. In my initial run-through I went seriously overtime for something that should have simply taken 5 minutes. I did my best to outline our tremendous efforts in completing this long design process within a reasonable amount of time. Aside from this, I contributed in suggesting we make the Red Board system quicker to use to allow for fingerprint registration for existing user names.

Lessons learned:

After all the work we have done on this project, it is clear where the focus has always been, on the user. The user wants, the user gets, the user tests, the user suggests and after all is said and done, the user vets. After seeing the final product, the user feels upset. This is the cycle we are been following for what seems like ages. It seems all we have managed to accomplish is making the user slightly less upset each time. In all seriousness though, the experience gained during this project ensures future success with other designs. I should say though, the level of development we have put into the red board begs full production. Maybe this HomeMess system could be a fixture in people’s homes soon.

The final presentation showcasing the latest iteration of our prototype is now underway. It is the last time we have to do something like this all year. The first thing we have to do is conduct more tests to see what new problems present themselves.

Group work:

There were new tests that we had to do to see if our prototype could be improved further. In all honesty, whenever new tests are done, there seem to always be new complications. Arising from these are chances to make innovative new solutions that stymie all confusion, allowing for ease of use where the system is concerned. The tests we split amongst ourselves were those that included the users once more and observing them was once more the key to fixing any problems with our prototype.

Individual contributions:

The testing that I did with another of my group members involved getting users to test the latest iteration of the prototype and asking them to speak aloud as they were using the prototype. As always, users would voice their slight confusion as they navigated some of the deeper functions of the prototype. Aside from some minor new wrinkles in the functionality, there were far fewer problems then there were in previous tests.

Lessons Learned:

I learned that the more iterations of a prototype you step through does not translate into fewer problems. It is possible that the same problems will not occur. In fact, the solutions themselves could create more problems. Well, that is what testing is for I suppose.

At this point we have done major work on the last presentation’s content. Zain is in charge of gathering all the necessary content with the aid of Arundhati to build the shortest compilation of all the data we have gathered and all the information we have derived at in the past. A short description of the prototype stages were also mentioned to show its progress.

Arundhati with help from Farid and Ibrahim, worked on planning and organizing the evaluation. Members of the group took part in the heuristics and also organized other evaluations. At this point, most of the evaluations have been completed by Arundhati, myself and Ibrahim. Gathering of them all together and putting them on the presentation template (created by Arundhati) was done by Arundhati and Farid.

Arundhati and myself started with the prototype but due to time pressure and problems faced, I took over.  The changes are slowly being applied. The plan on the method of presentation is still being questioned as we want an interesting approach to the prototype presentation.

Individual Contribution:

I created the prototype (at this stage the Public terminal only is available) and I am working out fine bugs in the system. Once complete I would work on the Private Terminal. The bugs are being worked on and I am following the requirements we had found. We decided to only show the modifications and changes we have done in a practical way.

I have assisted in the heuristics and did my own evaluation as everyone in the group, and then I helped in the user testing as well.

I started to organize the presentation and with the group’s decision, I am to start the presentation with a quick introduction and move into empty slots when they appear and finalize the presentation with a “thank you”.

Lesson Learnt:

“Practice Makes Perfect” said by someone, somewhere, sometime… but he was pretty darn right!

First of all, we have done evaluation a couple of times now, and at every iteration we get better at it and understand it much more. This time, Heuristics became a more clearer mode of evaluation, user testing was easier to accomplish because of our trials before, and cognitive walk-through was more thorough this time around as well.

At this point, skills to look at things at different angles and generate critical opinions also have improved.

Presentation skills have been improved with different approaches and thoughts we generated and it did open eyes to problems we have done in the past and gave us more thoughts to what we can do to improve on it.

We divided the workload for this week into two chunks before we set forth to do the tasks in hand. First, we were to use our evaluation findings from last week as requirements and build another prototype accommodating such needs. And secondly, after the development, we would test it on another set of users using triangulation and find a new set of evaluation results keeping a check on whether we managed to solve the ones that we had set out with at the beginning of this week.

Hand-in -hand we would also be required to develop the presentation slide materials as we have less than a week to set everything right and practice to deliver the best for the last presentation of this project. Thus we followed the work division decided on last week and set forth to complete the entire phase of interaction design (in its iterative cycle) the second time over.

Individual Work

Although working on the presentation slides was something I had been doing from earlier on, this part of the project proved to be the toughest to deal with in terms of the number of things that needed to get done. Predicting that creating the content of the presentation as well as doing the other tasks would be near impossible, I assigned Zain to put together the content for the Precap section.

In the first part of the week, I concentrated on working on the design of the interface for Prototype II weighing out the odds of using Adobe Flash against Director, since we wanted to have a part- functional impression of our device for this phase of construction and testing. Ihab and myself then added on to the *message* function and coding while sorting out any other aspects we wanted to demonstrate from the rectification of  previous evaluation results.

Check out our Prototype II implementation here:

• Public Terminal (Main Unit)
• Private Terminal (for personal use)

After construction, we used this impressionist system to evaluate our new set of sample users. Although the testing had been assigned to the rest of the group members, we found that we needed to step in to get things completed in time. Thus, I completed consolidating the results of the Analytical Evaluation and worked on the Field Study alongside Ihab.

Simultaneously,  I compiled our work for our presentation. This time, we ensured that there would be no interruption to the flow of delivering it by letting the group members control their part of slides. Hopefully, this change of method would have an evident change from all our previous ones.

Watch our fourth and final presentation :

HomeMess System: Prototype II & Evaluation

So, in the end. Did we find our way?

Learning Outcome

While this week taught me the true meaning of working under pressure on the level of learning from the module, I understood and corrected my knowledge of many concepts.

For example, my previous understanding of Heuristic Evaluation was wrong (which showed in the presentation 3) in terms of how the result was projected.

Similarly, I learned that not all techniques are appropriate for testing users when you want to find a wide spectrum of results. The target users also serve as an important aspect and deciding it from beforehand clearly helps at the later stage of evaluation and testing. Along with that, its also impossible to capture every aspect of user requirement and thus no design solution is ever a 100% perfect.

By having repeated the iteration just once, we were exhausted. But I understood the reasons for having to do so and also realized how important it was for the module to frame such an extended project in its coursework. Besides being fun, it gave us a taste of what was expected as designers in the real world.

On a personal level, I learned what I was truly passionate about! This module served to be most successful to me because it reassured me of my interest in the field and my pursuance of the subject later on.

In this week we had met up and sat and had an open discussion on where we stand.

We brought out our feedbacks and discussed what went wrong and what needs to be improved.

We identified the problems we had, and in particular the heuristic evaluation methods. We planned on the changes we need to apply on to the prototype:

1) Adding help on main panel

2) Accessibility options

3) Improvement on shortcut bar

4) Improved changes to messaging

5) Public and Private terminal creation

6) Log-in methods

and finally, we discussed and planned how the prototype was going to be presented.

We then planned on the type of evaluation we would have to do to on the second prototype and we decided upon using cognitive walk-through, heuristics, and user testing.

We allocated tasks for each individual and a plan to have most of the work done by next week where we prepare for the presentation.

Major categories were: Recap of all the previous work by Zain, Evaluation (with individual tasks for group members) by Arundhati, Prototype by me. Ibrahim and Farid worked on the remaining parts among which are spread accross the recommendations for a third prototype, conclusion, presentation of results, building statistical data from evaluations, etc.

Individual Contribution:

After identifying what were the problems with the last evaluations, I suggested that we go back and attempt heuristic evaluation again because we need to understand it better, do it better, and it seemed to be the best expert testing for our project.

I pulled all the major points and changes of the prototype, noted them down and discussed them with the group members.

At this point, me and Arundhati started to plan (rather vaguely and non-final) who shall be taking over which part in the presentation. We appointed work to people who shall present them but there might have been changes.

Lesson Learnt:

At this point, we haven’t started a lot of work aside from initial planning and allocating tasks. What I learnt was the problems we faced with the previous presentation and evaluation based on the feedback, and with more research understood what has gone wrong and why we came through to that point.

I learnt what needs to be completed and what would be the right path to get it done.

Another important factor was presentation skills, we had sat down and discussed what went wrong and I was able to identify a few traits we keep repeating and improvements we can make to have a more professional and presentable presentation.

Presentation: Review & Reflect

After successfully carrying out different evaluation methods over the last two weeks, it was time for us to present our findings this week in our presentation. This proved to be harder than anticipated given the complexity of data in hand and our limited expertise in compiling such data into concrete evaluation findings. However, with a bit of research and reading we were able to tackle the situation in hand. Of course this by itself wasn’t without flaws since we did go wrong in our showcasing of Heuristics Evaluation. But given that we had understood what we were doing and just represented it incorrectly, we took it as a lesson that would be rectified in the next phase of evaluation of our developed prototype.

Watch our third presentation – HomeMess System: Evaluation of Prototype I

Lessons Learned

Besides our in-class feedback and questions, we ourselves reflected on what had gone wrong with our presentation so that we would avoid doing the same thing for the next one.

Group work, as usual was not up to the standards we had set out for. The deadlines were barely met and the designated tasks were not followed due to the lack of discipline which we have failed to enforce even after the third phase of this project. In turn I realized that, given our next presentation task requires much more work, we would have to allocate work from this week according to what the members prefer and follow up on their individual deadline. By doing so I’d be aware of the current status of work being done and would not need to force everything to be done in the last minute.

Practicing on the presentation skills, although greatly improved from the first presentation, still lacked the fluidity and completeness of a team in it. We would be working on that too which would hopefully add to the *spark*  of the presentation in week 23.

Foreword :What’s Next

Over the next week we would be developing a further enhanced  design solution (i.e., Prototype II) that can be critically evaluated by asking the following set of questions:

• Does the application allow fulfilling the main user tasks efficiently?
• Is the navigation model clear and intuitive and consistent?
• Is information and content presented clearly?
• Is the language and terminology familiar to the user and used consistently throughout the application?
• Are controls used consistently within the application and in relation to the platform style?
• Does the application provide relevant feedback to the user?
• Is information entry made as easy as possible?
• Does the application guide the user and provide help if necessary?
• Does the application cope well with error situations: are they easy to understand and can the user recover easily?
• Is the design simple and desirable – does it include everything necessary but nothing extraneous?

The division of the presentation topics were thus:

1. Introduction- Ihab
2. Summary of our entire process till now (Precap)- Zain
3. Demo of Prototype II- Ihab, Arundhati
4. Results of Evaluation- Ibrahim, Arundhati
5. Recommendations for further development- Fareed
6. Conclusion- Arundhati