We’ve just gotten back from Christmas break, and we got off to a running start with our first formal usability test today. You can check out all the details by reading the usability report PDF, but here’s an overview of what we were looking for and what we got out of it.
Our goals were to:
- Decide whether to project the installation on the floor or wall.
- Assess the most natural gestures for the adding, moving, and deletion of points on the musical grid.
We had five students who had never had contact with our project before come in and check out a black-and-white projected wireframe. We told them each that the outer space of the project was the higher notes, the inner rings the middle notes, the center circle the bass, and that they could place notes as desired within each section and an invisible metronome could activate them. They weren’t allowed to watch each other participate, and we asked each participant to show us what gestures they would instinctively want to use to add, move, and delete points, and whether they thought the project would be better either with more directions, or less directions to allow for experimentation.
Before we even started the test, we ended up deciding to go with projecting the installation on the wall. Because the wall projection won’t need to accommodate feet, it can be smaller, eliminating an extra projector. We also won’t have to deal with hanging expensive equipment upside down, and can eliminate potential shadow issues by projecting the installation from behind a screen.
After the test, we figured out the following:
- We’ll be using a swipe gesture to delete points, and a “press-and-hold” gesture to select and move points. Each participant used a different gesture to add, so we will need to decide which makes the most sense to us – we’ll likely go with a simple pointing gesture.
- We noticed that participants used their shadows to point to the sections they wanted. We want to incorporate a sort of cursor that will indicate where the users’ hands are while using the installation, since ideally there will be no shadow interference.
- Our participants unanimously agreed that they felt the installation would be best if users got just a small tutorial ahead of time but were allowed to mostly figure it out for themselves. We’ll be aiming to keep our instructional posters minimal.
Tomorrow, we’ll be discussing some of our milestones for the rest of the quarter.
