Contact 11.09.14

The paper prototypes that were made by our group were today's main focus in the contact class. Soobin volunteered to print the prototypes, and indeed came to class successfully with the prototypes. I think everything was good apart from the fact that we had a missing instructions page.

The first 15 minutes of class was spent setting up the prototypes. In this stage, im assuming what Lorna wanted us to do was come up with the tasks that we wanted our users to do and get the concept clear in each group member. In this time we also decided who was going to stay and instruct our application to other users, and who would be users to other groups. For the first thirty minutes, China and I left to give feedback to other groups while Soobin and Bill stayed back and shared our application to participating users. We swapped around after another 30 minutes.

Our paper prototypes (with additional drawn segments). 

The first thirty minutes:

China and I:

China and I visited a total of five other groups around the class during the first thirty minutes. The different groups we visited included:

- a game where users had to spell an animal's name by dragging letters to the provided boxes, based on the image of the animal. Its a bit like 4 Pics 1 Word but with one image of an animal. 

- a time based sort of game where users needed to order several different images of landmarks/locations based on their age

- a timeline with four different eras which provided information on different events, inventions or other concepts worth mentioning for the century

- a fish game where users (playing as the fish) eats smaller fish to grow and eventually dominate the sea. Each time the user eats a fish, information from the species will be provided 

- a stranger/more confusing application with multiple activities which include viewing images, viewing the calendar, viewing the map etc. on different things - all set in a room (each object in the room denotes an activity, e.g. globe = maps, calendar = calendar..)

I guess you could say that China and I gave a pretty decent amount of feedback back to each group. They all considered the ideas and feedback carefully which made me feel pretty special aha.

Soobin & Bill:

I managed to go through the feedback that was given back to Bill and Soobin when they organised the first session. Since the prototypes were rushed into making earlier today, the prototype that we had was not updated with our actual ideas and some elements were missing. Due to this, they attained feedback based more around the adding of the elements. Their obtained feedback:

- adding in a back button in the ranking & results page

- adding in a replay button for the sound hints

- adding in another hint (so there are two) for each level to ease the game's difficulty 

- keep the hints simple (dont overcomplicate the hints - dont provide long/hard articles or blurry footprint images)

- dont make any of the hints too similar to other hints 

- article hints may be too difficult for children 

- introduce all hint types in the instructions page (so users are aware that there will be sound etc.)

- adding in an option to connect to facebook and share the score (i thought this idea was really smart)

- adding in a skip button in a level that can only be used once by users. It will not reduct any points/lives and will act as a refresh option if users are too stuck (i also though this idea was really smart) 

 Sneaky photo of Bill, Soobin and some users (they werent even posing or anything and they actually look hard working, i mean look at their faces).

The second 30 minute session:

China and I:

I think we hosted a total of 4-5 users. By this time though, we improved on a lot more of the interface design (adding in all the missing buttons and actual questions and answers), so our feedback was a lot less detailed and was more positive (or people just got really lazy by this time). One of our users was actually really focused though, he gave a lot of ideas on improving the design and even asked us on our coding (which only Lorna has ever done before), so good on him. 

Our feedback: 

- having a login system where users will be remembered for their scores

- having the sounds with the answers so that users can trace back the location and footprints/sectioned body part of the animal - so the game is somewhat reversed

- manipulate the images from Trove if we can because apparently its possible to do, so we can alter the images a little (the images that are parts of animals as hints) to make it more enjoyable (?)
- randomise the hints carefully (this is more of a reminder/advice than feedback but thankyou anyway to the guy who said this). So dont have two consecutive hints or two+ of the same hints in a game as this will give users an advantage.

Soobin & Bill:

I have no idea what they experienced during their visiting times, but i do know that they got a little lazy and kept returning back to our table after visiting each group ahah.

The last part of class:

After all the moving around was over, we all reunited as a group and shared our feedback and ideas. I think today's class was pretty productive. I dont remember of any assigned work for next week's class but i do remember Lorna reminding us about our progress report thing which was due in two weeks..... it feels like the first document with pitch & poster was only due yesterday. Time goes by way too quick. Im not looking forward to another all nighter. Really. Lorna also advised us that we should back up our coding in case it all gets deleted somehow (like a group last year apparently). I was pretty distracted at this time so i dont know how were supposed to do this with our zones (?) but i think other people were paying attention so thankyou to those people who i will most likely ask in the near distant future.
P.s. A friend from another group noticed that our results for our document was out. I dont know if its any use mentioning on here but all our hard work paid off and we got a seven :) :) :) :) Most of our comments were just saying that everything was in a lot of detail. Yay, I'm quite happy since the uploading troubles meant nothing but yeahh i think my posts are getting more informal every week..

Anyway, think thats all for today's class. Bye.