week#3: Who did what?

Alexa: paper prototyping

Nizar: paper prototyping

Stephen: organising the meeting, paper prototyping, pictures

Aouatef: questions and task for user testing

Change is imminent

We got great feedback from our testers, we will summarize the important points and derive changes to the prototype:

• User want to what is on the other sides of the cubes, to make better decisions for their turn.
• Buttons for changing the rotation mode are not optimal, the users want to use natural gestures like swipe or rotation of their wrist as command to chnage the cube.
• Selection with the left hand are not optimal: When the user is moving the selection changes, they want to make a selection with a command and disable the selection with a other command.
• The initial goal is not clear to the user, when he sees only the cubes.

What we decided to change for future prototypes:

• Implement some kind of goal, which implicit communicates the kind of interaction. This will make the interaction more intuitive and removes the buttons from the UI.
• Find a way to make the overall goal clear for the user (Interactive Tutorial, Scorecounter etc.)
• Implement swype gestures for rotating the cube.
• Implement a command chain for selecting and deselecting a cube.

The changes for the paper prototype are minimal but significant in their impact, we removed the two buttons from the UI and changed the laser pointer selection to a gesture selection. When the user is pointing on a cube the cube is selected. Now the can use swype gestures to rotate the cubes. When the rotation is complete the user can make another gesture (undefined at this moment) and return to the selection mode.

The selection indicator

The indicator should be aware what are the other sides of the cube and visualize them to support the next decision of the user.

Let the games begin!

We invited twodifferent people to test the prototype, a male and a female.

A in-depth summary of the test will follow, first we need to get the permission to publish photos of the users, which we forgot to ask during the test.

Take a look at our finding a post above.

Our first paper prototype

We started with the extraction of the UI-elements:

• The cubes
• The Marker, which indicates the current selected cube. 
• The selection buttons for switching the rotation direction.

Then we decided how we want to create a those things as a paper prototype. The first idea to visualize the cube was to use Post-It's on a flip chart with different colors and change the the Post-It whenever the cube would rotate during game. In our game idea, the user selects the current cube through holding the left hand in the direction of the cube. We decided to simulate the selection with a laserpointer. The buttons are simple piece of paper and an arrow for indicating the current selected mode.
We build the necessary elements and put them all in place, and there we discovered that the post-it's do not give a required visual feedback and do not represent the cubes well.
So we started to build real cubes with colored sides and succeeded greatly.
Here are some pictures of our prototype:


In the center you can see the the cubes, the have all the same color combination. At the start of the game the shown color combination is randomly determanted.

An Overview of the prototype

The two buttons for changing the rotation mode

A close up of the cubes to see some of the other sides