Evaluation

Overall Evaluation

We set out to design a product using a User Centred Design approach.

The following outlines how we applied the process to the design of our idea.

Idea Gathering
We brainstormed and rationalised all the ideas we came up with. The main contenders were a wheelchair for elderly, a training suit for children that would use kinetic feedback. We did this using whiteboard mind maps.

Idea Selection
We created personas, namely Reg and Ethyl, to try and envisage which idea would have the most strengths and how we could develop it further

Information Gathering:
Problem Definition
Elderly people have difficulties with technology and are less mobile in general, we were trying to minimize the effects age might have on peoples mobility and independence.
User Needs Analysis

Realising specific needs of the end user and taking these into consideration in our design.
Task Analysis

Finding out how end users perform given tasks and how our design could change this. We recorded videos setting out different scenarios as part of this.
Scenario Analysis

We conducted this on our personas, to see if we find it reasonable that the personas created, would benefit from our product
Further research into developed technology was carried out throughtout the process. We also researched potential future technolgy.

First Generation Prototypes
Creation - we designed prototypes different aspects of our interface. We purposefully did not collaborate on these so we could benefit from seeing several different designs and using different methods (paper/powerpoint/html/flash). We compared the results we got.
These were evaluated using:
think aloud evaluation
cognitive walkthrough evaluation
heuristic evaluation

Final Prototype
We discussed improvements after first generation and then decided on a overall design (coloursheme/buttons/...) of the prototype. Powerpoint was selected as the method of implementing this. We joined individual parts together and used a questionnaire to analyse what our personas and people typical of our personas, thought about our design, to help with the next stages of refinement.


If We Had More Time.....
One element we would have liked to have expanded was the use of questionnaires. In an ideal world we could have written a questionnaire shortly after the adoption of our chosen project, to receive some feedback from members of the target audience as to the viability and usefulness of the expanded wheelchair system. It also might have been helpful to have used some questionnaires after the adoption of our initial prototypes. We had, in fact, planned to do this, but we simply fell short of time and as such used a range of HCI related evaluation techniques to refine the initial prototypes.

This leads on to a second important change we would have made in the design process, namely more focus on the analysis of prototypes. Using questionnaires to gain feedback is certainly an element of that, allied with more exhaustive evaluations and real user input. The final prototype, while subjected to some questionnaire feedback, could probably have used the input of users in the target group, particularly in something like a think aloud evaluation. For example, a female in her 40s who is a wheelchair user participated in part of our evaluation at the initial prototype stage, but such input was not, in fact, as useful as exposing the prototypes to someone much closer to the target user group. The response which best illustrated this was her comments that there wasn't a great degree of flexibility and customization in the menus - the point we are trying to make being that while she fulfilled part of the user group in requiring a wheelchair, she did not fulfill the other part, namely being elderly. The prototypes were of course designed with this in mind, not for someone who is confident with computers.

A final task we would have liked to have had time to carry out was greater statistical analysis of the questionnaire results from our final prototype. A certain degree of low-level analysis was performed, but further analysis could have been insightful, particularly given that we did not test our final prototype on potential end-users.

Problems We Faced

The main problems we faced in this project revolved around our personas. We found it quite difficult to design the personas and think like a persona especially when it came to the evaluation of the prototype. We have all been children so could remember that time in our lives but obviously having not reached old age, it was harder to design for this group.

The second main problem we faced was putting the prototypes together. The first prototype was difficult to put together because we all designed a separate section of it in our own style. This then meant that designing the final prototype was problematic because we had five different design styles to combine whilst taking into account the strengths and weaknesses of each that had arisen during the evaluation phase.

Thirdly, we faced problems regarding the design constraints. For example, the colours of buttons and the layout of the keyboard that we needed for various parts of the system. We needed a keyboard with full punctuation for the email / internet section. However, we wanted the phone section to be simple, therefore didn't include any punctuation in this keyboard. This meant that both looked different and may have confused the user. We also wanted specific colour schemes for different parts of the system but this was difficult to decide on if we were to consider possibilities such as colour blindness and associations that people make. For example, associating red with “stop” and green with “go.” We eventually made decisions that attempted to satisfy as many of these criteria as possible.

Conclusion

We took the user centred design process and used it to design our wheelchair.

We faced quite a few difficulties along the way but found that user centred design is crucial when designing a product that is hopefully going to be mass marketed. A lot of the things we take for granted such as usability and colour schemes cannot be assumed with older people. Therefore using user centred design when designing for a specific market is not only sensible but necessary as well.