sem 5

I think the paper written by Ylva Ferneaus and her colleagues was quite interesting. The interaction with artifacts must not always be the most intuitive way; bottoms must not always be the control to the artifacts. Sometimes an artifact could be more playful, fun and perhaps even more user friendly by different kind of interactions. I would like to see some kind of study to user experience on the kind of prototypes that is suggested in the paper. To see if a user in practice think that the artifact are fun and practical, or if its boring or to time consuming etc.

Question for seminar, I think it was interesting that Ylva and her colleagues get inspiration to the interaction from fashion and comic. What other fields could it be interesting to get inspiration from, and why those fields?

Some reflections on questions:

How can media technologies be evaluated?

I think the paper written by Haibo Li with his colleagues was evaluating media technology in a good way. Media is much about the interaction between a human and devices (often technical), and it is therefore important to evaluate the experience that the users have with the devices. HCI is an important part of media technology and I think the paper evaluate things like effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction in a good way.

What role will prototypes play in research?

Prototypes could have a big role and is good in order to evaluate things and ideas. I think for example the idea to use vibration to render live football was really interesting. However it is a good thing to explore other people thinks it is a good idea, and if so, how it should work. It expansive to develop a complete product, and it could also be very expensive if the complete product most change a lot, because the user didn’t like it. But create a prototype much easier and cheaper to develop than a complete product. Even if the prototype is not the same thing as the complete product, evaluations on the prototype could and will often bring data that could be important to the development of the final product.

What are the characteristics and limitation of prototypes?

Prototypes are made for somehow show an idea of a product, how it will look like or how it will work. The meaning of prototype is to evaluate the product under development, in a cheap way, but still in a good way to get data that is valid for the final product. The prototype could however be very easy. Like if a computer program is under development, the prototype is not necessary going to be a look-a-like program. It could be papers with illustrations that could give the test-user an idea of how the program will work. The test user could react on thing that the user think is smart, or weird and the developer could use the data in the development of the real product. However, a prototype is not the real product, and some data for the final product could be hard to get. It will be for example is hard to do the study that Haibo Li and his colleagues did with only papers. It would be hard for a user to imagine the felling on how the touch would work and therefore it’s hard for them to give a good response.

How can design research be communicated/presented?

Once again I think Haibo Li and his colleagues did a pretty good job in presentation of theirs design research. First by using references and theories they come up with a design that could work for the product. They build a quite advanced prototype of the product, which could be evaluated by some test user. They present all the things they evaluated by surveys. They in a clear way showed the data they obtained, and correlations between different data. They even try to explain some reasons why the result was as it was, and emanation some factors that the data could depend on. However I think they only use quantitative methods, but it would also be interesting to see some result from a qualitative method, for example an interview with a user that was interested in football and an interviews with someone that where not so interested.