User Testing: A Walk Through Time

I have conducted the user testing for the project, and the reactions were very positive. Most users understood the main idea right away. When the clock hand moved forward, they saw it as time moving forward. When it moved backward, they understood that time was reversing. This was a good sign that the core interaction is intuitive and does not need much explanation.

The gesture control also made sense to most people, but a few were unsure at first about which sensor to wave their hand over. To make this clearer, I decided to laser cut simple icons for fast forward and rewind and attach them to the ultrasonic sensors. This small change makes the mapping between gesture and action much more obvious.

One interesting issue that came up during testing was the behavior of the plant mechanism. The DC motor pulls fishing wire that extends a telescoping plant, and it collapses when the motor goes in reverse. Some users kept reversing time for too long, which caused the wire to unwind so far that it started rolling in the opposite direction. This made the plant rise again by mistake. Another related problem was users sending the plant up too high until it almost reached the motor.

To address this, I am adding a failsafe to the DC motor logic. The system will now prevent the motor from spinning in the same direction for too long. This will keep the fishing wire from fully unspooling and will protect the telescoping structure from being pulled too far up. This fix makes the physical system more reliable and safer for open interaction