Varun Khanduja - User Experience
USABILITY METHODS, PROTOTYPING AND TESTING
A 6 month coursework involved practicing Usability methods like focus group, affinity diagram for user research, diary study, rapid prototyping using foam and paper. These methods were assigned as a part of project to help international students new to a city explore events around the city. The end result was a hand held device having map functionality known as Hand Easy. A usability report was compiled after testing the device on international students. The entire coursework involved group projects.
FOCUS GROUP
Focus group was conducted with 5 participants from various graduate and undergraduate programs at Indiana University Bloomington. The participants were screened based on their age and an attempt was made to ensure participation from students hailing from different countries. Matt and Robert (team members) were the moderator and assistant moderator for the session respectively. I was the observer and notetaker for the session. The session lasted for 45 minutes and a major insight from the participants about their involvement with night life was that they wanted to go and enjoy during the night but didn't know the right places to go. We initially had a hypothesis that International students don't involve in the night life because of safety problem however the data from focus group seem to have differed from this hypothesis and thus proved the value of user research.
AFFINITY DIAGRAM
Once we had data from focus group, ethnographic studies and contextual enquiry we had the challenge of consolidating the data to arrive at design insights and also initiate concept generation. We had affinity diagram exercise as a group exercise and some of the major insights from the exercise which lasted 5 to 6 hours were the design should have ability to translate languages, ability to display books available in library and also show the social events on a map. Based on these insights we progressed to the concept generation phase and here is the point when group decided to go ahead with Hand easy as a design for the International students to help them in library and identifying social events during the night time.
TOOLS
Post-it notesContextual enquiry
Sketching
PAPER AND FOAM PROTOTYPING
The prototyping for the Hand-easy interface was divided into two phases, the first phase involved a individual prototyping session by every team member and second involving a group prototyping session. This individual session was meant for paper prototyping and the group session was for prototyping using foam. At the end of second session we were ready with the Hand Easy interface and prototype.
USABILITY REPORT
With Hand easy ready. We decided to check the prototype and interface with the users from target group. The prototype was tested in-situ for an environment it was designed for i.e. library. The library was chosen since contextual enquiry was conducted at multiple places like library, sports complex etc. and the presence of International students was found most prominent at the library. The interface served its intended purpose of helping international students to search for books in library, however some points of consideration for future redesign include that the map section lacked affordance and thus confused users.
TOOLS & DELIVERABLE
On-site testingPre-test questions
Recruitement
Post-test questions
Usability report (pdf)