USER TESTING – TRIAL 1
I asked my friend to try out my program without giving any direction of what the person should do. To my surprise, they did not struggle at all and found this experience to be very engaging and fun. They were able to figure almost everything out on their own. The only prompt I would give them is that ENTER key should be pressed to take the picture first. The manipulations of hat and animal images were fairly easy, as well as inputting their own name and pressing SUBMIT button. Finally as they were happy with the result they figured out to press the CAPTURE button to save an image. I feel that the confusion with the ENTER button happened because I do not state it anywhere on the screen nor on a paper. Therefore, I decided to incorporate this detail in the code. Moreover, one major feedback I received from my friend was to allow people to take a new selfie if they wanted to. Therefore, I decided to make a reset function, so that a person engaging with my project might change their selfie if they do not like it.
USER TESTING – TRIAL 2
After building my box, and making the reset function, I decided to test my project again. Although I had specifically stated that the person should press / to begin on the screen, they did not understand it in the beginning as their attention was captured by the CAMERA image. Moreover, as I did not have any labels on the box, they were not able to identify which button and potentiometer stand for what during their first trial. Therefore, I decided to put labels on my box under each button and two potentiometers. However, as I told them that they can press a button to reset, they figured out how to use controls on their own.
Also, I would just lead them anytime I saw they were a little bit stuck. I do not think it is an issue with labels, because all the buttons are clearly labeled in p5. I think it is a matter of understanding the whole process, for which I will have additional instructions. Moreover, I will press / to connect the serial port myself, so participants would not need to worry about this text appearing on the screen. They would see no text when the port is connected.
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IMPROVEMENTS
1) I will print out the instructions for the users, so that they could first read them and then engage with the project. They could also look for the additional instructions during their engagement with the project, so that I do not need to explain it several times.
2) In general, after some time, two of my participants in the user trials were able to understand how the controls work. Nevertheless, they need some time to figure out what each control does. Therefore, adding labels to my buttons and potentiometers would help eliminate this problem.
3) Because people do not get to see their final badge of the ID and it saves directly to my laptop, I decided to have a table where participants can write their net id and the name on the badge. So, after the IM showcase, I would be able to go back and send all of the badges to the users.
4) During the second user trial, the user mentioned that they did not want the hat, so they placed it directly on the animal. This was an interesting observation, however not all hats would suit an animal. Therefore, I decided to have more animals and more hats to choose from. As my program is working fine now, I feel that participants would find my project more engaging with a bigger choice of hats and animal images.
5) Also, I wanted to incorporate other images like sunglasses or jewelry, however, as I was doing trials, I understood that people take photographs from different distances from the camera. Someone would take a picture pretty close and some would take it far away. Therefore, I decided not to incorporate these features. Moreover, I was suggested to have an additional potentiometer to control the size of an image, which could resolve the problem I stated above, however, due to time limits I was not able to incorporate this feature. This could become a future improvement for this project.