Solutions for the problems found in the first interview - Suping

--LED information board instead of Swedish broadcasting

When we are travelling, the most important thing is to make sure that we on really on our way. This sounds like nonsense but things may go wrong when you are not clear if there are multi-destination of the ferry you took.

                                                               Notice with only Swedish on it on the ferry

On the ferry, we first introduced a Swedish couple carrying their kids to the amusement park. The ferry was very crowded at that time. For that reason, it is also very noisy in the ferry.

For this interview, we set up some questions before. Thus it is quite a semi-structured interview so that it will be more flexible. And for the consideration of triangulation, we interviewed parents from sweden and from tourists travelling to Sweden who can not speak Swedish. As for the method for data recording, we chose the audio recording. And for the ethics problem, all the interviewees are informed that the audio recording will be published.

                                 

                                               LED information board that can be changed each time

We first ask them their purpose to take the ferry instead of bus. They think that they choose to take the ferry mainly because of the fancy view. But the space is usually quite limited on weekends. As can be heard from the audio recording, the background is quite noisy so that it is hard to hear the speaking from others and the broadcasting. We first interviewed a parent from sweden. He told us that, they should always be aware of the broadcasting, because there are several destinations for this ferry. They have already taken off at the wrong destination twice. Since there is quite noisy inside the ferry, it is not that easy to always concentrate on what is broadcasting. The next parents who also have this trouble are from Korea. They speaks little Swedish. But the broadcasting on the ferry is all in Swedish. So they feel that sometimes they will be quite confused. What is more, there is usually only one stuff on the ferry so it is hard to find someone to ask about the information.

In order to solve that problem, we suggest there should be a LED board in the ferry. Because the destination of the ferry is not always the same. So it is a good idea to have a board can not only shows a fixed information for the destination. Ofcourse, it is better to show the information not only in Swedish since Stockholm is quite an international city where a lot of international tourists are visiting.

In China, in the train or boat, we usually have a LED board to shows the information including the destination and the notice for the passengers in Chinese and English. So that even if it is very noisy or crowded, people can still know the important information. And it is easy to change the destination information or the notice for the passenger.

Reflection for the reading seminar 2---Jinchen Liu

Chapter 13:

The aim of the Evaluation is to integrate whole design procedure, it will combine the information from the users ' experiences about the related process. Evaluation also focus on the usability of the whole system, such as how easy the system is to learn and to use. Sometimes designers may invent products based on their own preference, evaluation enables to help them check whether the product is acceptable by wider user population or not.

Depend on the evaluation goals and the researcher's or evaluator's expectations,  the methods for evaluating can be changed a lot. Frequently, it involves observing participants and measuring their performance.  To sum up, different methods are usually showing the different perspectives in the range of the study.

Finally, ethical problem about how the participants are treated and theirs rights to privacy should also be taken into consideration. The more comfortable and nature we set our evaluating environment, the more accurate and reliable information we will get for developing the product.


Chapter 14:
The main aim of this Chapter is to introduce the laboratory evaluation studies and field evaluation studies, which are controlled experiments and natural settings respectively. Usability testing always takes place in the labs which enables evaluators to control the test parameters. This approach focus on testing how usable the product is. The users will be given specific requirements or tasks and the evaluators collect data from their responses to examine the product.

Before the testing begin, we need to form the design of the experiment. A concern in experiment design is to divide the different participants condition individually, which result in different experiment design. Each of them has their advantages and drawbacks. Finally, result analysis always use statistical methods such as t-tests to gain the probability of a result occurring.

Field studies is conducted to evaluate the user experiences. Although the naturing settings always tend to be messy and constantly interrupted, this follows the people real reaction for using products therefore the result should be more realistic and meaningful. But sometimes the findings are unexpected.

Chapter 15:

In this chapter,  the main content is to further introduce the evaluation methods,   these methods are based on understanding users through knowledge codified in heuristics or data collected remotely, or modes that predict user's performance. They are called inspection evaluation methods. The most different feature compares to the other methods is that they will not require users to be present during  the evaluation. The two common methods, heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs, offer evaluator a structure to guide the evaluation process.

Heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method. It collects the feedback from the professional point of view based on the certain design principles.
The cognitive walkthrough is to make sure that how easy the task can be carried out.  This method could be very funny. For every step of the process of the evaluating procedure, the user could be stopped by testing whether the users be aware of what is going on.



Questions:
1. How do evaluators deal with ethical problem during evaluation procedure?

Exercise 3 - Design [Group Post]

Brainstorming Exercises

Parallel Design

For exercise 3 our team split up into 2 groups and we were to identify the pain points , personas and scenarios identified during earlier exercises. Then we had to write one word or a phrase in each post it. During the initial stage we had to fill up as many post its as possible and paste them on the wall so that its visible for everyone. Initially some of us had some problems identifying what to write and ended up writing very long phrases. We had to perform word association where we had an object, design action and an attribute. By doing so we were coming up with a conceptual design where we craft an outline of what the users can do with the product we are designing.

After 15 minutes we had to switch over and the 3 of us working on a set of posts its with some ideas had to swap with the other half of the team. Of course each group had to take a photo to keep note of what our initial idea was. Then after swapping we begin playing with the other team's post its. This is a form of collaborative iteration where one group came up with initial ideas and then the next group builds up on the previous ideas left behind by the previous group. 

Seminar Two: Reading Reflection by Hui Pang

Chapter 13: Introducing Evaluation

Evaluation focuses on both the usability of the system and on the users’ experience when interacting with it. It also enables us to check that the design is appropriate and acceptable for the wider user population. It can either involve participants or not. Some of the same data gathering methods are also used in evaluation. Which evaluation methods to use depend on the goals. 

Formative evaluations are done during design to check that a product continues to meet users’ needs, while summative evaluations are done to assess the success of a finished product. 

There are 3 broad categories of evaluations. These are controlled settings involving users(e.g. usability testing and experiments), natural settings involving users(e.g. field studies), any settings not involving users(e.g. inspections, heuristics, walkthroughs, models, and analytics). A key concern for deciding is how much control is needed. Also combinations of methods are used to obtain a richer understanding. 

Evaluation can also be opportunistic, done early in the design process to obtain feedback quickly and confirms whether it is worth proceeding to develop an idea into a prototype. They are informal and do not require many resources.  

It is important to ask for participants' informed consent and not to over-generalize findings from an evaluation. 

Chapter 15: Inspections, Analytics, and Models

Evaluation can also be done without users to be present. Instead, experts, who are knowledgeable about both interaction design and needs and typical behaviour of users, will provide feedback. 

Inspection methods typically involve an expert role-playing the users for whom the product is designed, analyzing aspects of an interface, and identifying any potential usability problems by using a set of guidelines. 

The most well known are heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs. In heuristic evaluation, experts, guided by a set of usability high-level design principles known as heuristics, evaluate whether user-interface elements conform to tried and tested principles. Walkthroughs involve walking through a task with the product and noting problematic usability features. 

Analytics involves user interaction logging, which is usually done remotely. 

Predictive models involve analyzing various physical and mental operations needed to perform certain tasks and operationalizing them as quantitive measures. 

One of the most commonly used is Fitt’s Law. It predicts the time it takes to point at a target. 

Questions: 

1. Which evaluation method will better serve our design purpose? 
2. How many evaluators are needed to carry out a thorough heuristic evaluation? 

Summary of Seminar 1

During the first seminar we agreed on our chosen route, target group and themes for interviews. We also brainstormed possible requirements of target group as a guideline for field studies.
Below are the summary of our discussion. 

Chosen Route

Our design task is to improve travelling experience of ferry passengers from Slussen to Allmänna Gränd. 
We will conduct the field studies during the trip. 

Target Group

We will focus of families travelling with at least one young kid, and we have set our characterization as follows. 

By “family” we mean at least one parent or adult relative who serves as a guardian; 

By “young child” we mean any child whose age is below the adolescence age group, which is less than or equal to 12. We will approach families with children seemingly at this age group and ask their guardians to confirm this. 

Brainstorming of User Context

Our target group has 2 mostly likely needs: care for children and plans for leisure(as most families taking this route do). Therefore, we had a brainstorm session to propose possible context of use.

Before boarding:
schedule planning(free maps, traveller apps, etc)
tickets
parking for car drivers
rest place and pastime when queueing


During trip:
better ways to enjoy views
safety for children(guard fence, belt for strollers, etc.)
toilets, vending machines
interactions with other passengers
social media to share travelling experience

On arrival:
when to get off board
destinations and activities

Method

We will use semi-structured interviews and direct observation to conduct our field studies. 

We will approach possible interviewees during the ferry trip. 

Due to the schedule, we will divide into two subgroups of three and choose different day of the week(both weekdays and weekends). 

We will introduce ourselves to be master students of KTH, and that we are working on a school project to improve traveller experience of the ferry trip. We will ask for their assistance to help us with the interviews, and their informed consent to use audio recording as our means of data recording. 

Themes & Questions

Who are you?

Where do you live? (local residents or national/international travellers?)

What do you do? 

How old are your children?

Facts on Travelling

On what sort of ticket do you travel? (SL monthly? single tickets? 72-hour city pass?)

How did you plan your travel? (check route and timetables)

How did you get to Slussen? What is your destination in Djugarden? 

Have you been there before? How often? 

Do you share experience on ferry through social network? 

Feelings

Why ferry? What do you consider to be the decisive factor? 

What do you enjoy about a ferry trip? 

What do you dislike about a ferry trip? 

Anything you can think of that poses as a threat to kids? 

Are the staff helpful? 

What do you do when waiting for/riding on a ferry? 

What is convenient/inconvenient about the ferry? 

Any improvements you suggest? 

Administration

We use Facebook group and face-to-face meeting to discuss our topics and Google drive to store and share data and materials.

Reflection of seminar 2-- Suping Shi

Chapter 13

Evaluation is introduced in this chapter. It is quite an important in the process. It is integral to the design process. Evaluators collect information about users’ or potential users’ experiences when interacting with a prototype, an app, a computer system, a component of a computer system, an application, or a design artifact such as a screen sketch. Evaluations usually involve observing participants and measuring their performance – in usability testing, experiments, or field studies. In the evaluation part, we usually will creat a prototype to evaluate a new design to enhance precision by system analysts and users. Prototyping serves to provide specifications for a real, working system rather than a theoretical one. Prototyping is an essential part of designing as it allows users or testers to evaluate design of a product interactively and also test its feasibility.

Chapter 15

Two methods of inspection which are heuristic evaluation and walkthroughsare are introduced in this chapter.

In theoritical, a heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface (UI) design. It specifically involves evaluators examining the interface and judging its compliance. It is guided by a list of usability principles, such as visibility of system status, match between system and the real world etc. Usually, in the inspectation part the expert is the one that will be engaged istead of the user.

Cognitive walkthrough is task-specific, whereas heuristic evaluation takes a holistic view to catch problems not caught by this and other usability inspection methods.The designer will woek together with some experts in this process. The Pluralistic Walkthrough is a usability inspection method used to identify usability issues in a piece of software or website in an effort to create a maximally usable human-computer interface. In this method it will engage the users, the experts and the

Questions:

1. In our project, if we want to create an interface for the visitors of the ferry, do we need to create a prototype first?
2. How can we collect the data of how the people feel when they are interacting with the product when prototyping?

Reflection on Prototyping

Generally, there are two types of design- conceptual and concrete. Conceptual design involves create a model on how the product works and what kind of responses it gives when a user uses it. Whereas a concrete design concerns the structural details of the product such as menu interface, haptic response, physical widgets etc.

Prototyping is an essential part of designing as it allows users or testers to evaluate design of a product interactively and also test its feasibility. Sometimes it might be difficult to visualize how a product might be used, and thought prototyping you might uncover lapses you had to not planned for initially. Prototypes can be made from easily available items such as food carton, shoe box, paper etc. Due to the advances of 3D printing technologies, nowadays its easy to 3D print objects and even moving parts.

Low fidelity prototypes are cheap and quick to produce and allow the designers to explore ideas with much agility and less worry about the cost. Storyboarding, sketching and Wizard of Oz are different  kinds of low fidelity prototyping.

Depending on whether we are creating a software application or a physical/tangible product, the flow of operation may vary. Storyboarding is a technique where a designer sketches the various steps or scenes involved in interacting a with a product or interface. The sketch doesn't necessarily have to look pretty. As Greenberg et al mentioned, "Sketching is not about drawing. Rather it is about design"

Wizard of Oz is another low fidelity method of prototyping in which when the tester interacts with the mockup of a software, an operator simulates the response making it look like its a fully operational software.

For our project, we might be creating an interactive interface for the visitors of the ferry terminal. So we might be to use storyboarding for planning our design. Moreover, if we are using tangible smart objects to interact with our interface, we might have to add physical prototypes too.

Exercise 2 - Personas and Scenarios

Persona 1:

Mariana

Mariana with her 2 year old kid Juliana and husband

who works as a manager in a Swedish Restaurant

Background: She works at Spanish Embassy, as a cultural manager. She can speak Spanish, Swedish and English. Her kid was born in Sweden. She lives in Farsta strand with her husband. She has been in Sweden for 8 years. She studied at Stockholm University and met her Swedish husband there.

Personality: Fun, social, and outgoing. She enjoys going out with her husband and kid. Having been stayed here for many years though, she still missed the warm weather and sunshine in Spain. She spends her weekend with her family visiting parks and going for fishing whenever possible. She is a physically active person who works out every morning in the neighborhood gym. She loves to cook and is well-known amongst her friends for cooking seafood paella.

Today: Today is Saturday. She is going to Skansen with her husband and kid by metro and ferry. She is used to going out with her baby in a stroller. It is unusually crowded compared to her daily travel. She usually has this kind of trip once a month, but this time is a little special, she is bringing her friend Susana from Spain and her husband as well.

Persona 2:

Zhen zheng with his wife and 10 year old child

Zhen Zheng

Background : Zhen Zheng is a teacher who works in the Beijing Jiaotong University. He also graduates from here and his research focus is electronics.  His wife Lei Li is a primary school teacher, their children named Hao Zheng is 10 years old and She is a very active and restless girl. All of them are on their summer vacation and they plan to travel around the Europe. Now they are staying in Sweden, neither of them speaks Swedish but Zhen Zheng and his wife know the basic of English. This couple have a profound interest in culture and history, and they expect to visit as many museums here as possible.

Personality: Zhen is a teacher who works a lot for the most of his life. He is a very outgoing and man who like to travel a lot in China. This is his first international trip with his 10 years old daughter. He believes that it is good for the child to explore the world at an early age. He fancy taking  elfies for the whole family to share through social networks.

Today: They planned their travel to Djugarden island according to the free map and brochure.

The daughter wanted to go to Gron Lund, while parents wanted to visit parks and museums. It is essential they squeeze as many activities as possible to make everyone satisfied.

Pain Points

 As described by the team members...

Suping shi:

People are sometimes not sure about the destination of this route.

They need always be aware of the broadcasting. The broadcasting is only in swedish. Tourists sometimes get confused.

Mengdi Huang:

There is no stroller belts on ferries

The windows are small so the lighting inside is bad

Hui Pang:

posters only about ferries, not about current activities in Djugarden

Timetables of commuting trams, trains, buses, tubes

   

Agneev:

People look for toilets in the ferry

Children look for activities while waiting inside and while in the waiting queue

Excess crowd during weekends

Jinchen:

Maybe a Vending machine for selling drinks and snacks.

Wifi is not necessary, but it is better to have.

Pavithren:

Swedes are generally and shy therefore they do not engage in a conversation with strangers.

People are generally happy with everything they are provided. I am not sure if they are just being shy.

Seminar 2 -- Mengdi

Chapter 13 An Evaluation Framework

Evaluation is conducted to promote user experience by negotiating between designers and users. But real world constraints play an important role on shaping the evaluations. First of all, goals need to be determined. By setting the goal properly, we will naturally know the scope of this evaluation.Then questions need to be explored carefully, by partition a general one into several fine-grained ones, which enables us gain the intrinsic reason of a certain phenomenon.Next, evaluation method is to be chosen, depending on what data is needed to answer the questions and which theories or frameworks are appropriate to the context.While conducting the evaluation, practical issues such as budgets, schedule, appropriate participants needs to be taken into account. Ethical issues cannot be ignored either. We should always remember respecting participants' privacy. Do not reveal their information while reporting unless they consent, do not feel trouble explaining the aim of this study etc.The last step is evaluating, analyzing and interpreting the data. Reliability, validity, ecological validity, biases and scope are the key words of preventing us from a bad evaluation.

Chapter 14
This chapter extends the topic of environment settings in last chapter. In usability testing, it mentions that time and number are important measurements of users' performance, such as  time to complete a task, number of errors a user made for per task.
Usability lab is a traditional way to conduct evaluation. The settings of the lab mimics the real environment where a certain product is to be used. Also, distractions are eliminated. But maintaining such a lab costs lots of money and labor. Then mobile usability testing equipment is a trend since mid-90s. Video cameras, laptops etc. are temporarily set up in an office. Another trend is conducting remote usability testing. Users interaction with a product is logged for evaluators to analysis.
The experiments are conducted to verify a set of hypothesis, which are proposed based on theory or previous research. Normally, the hypothesis is to find the influence of some factor to the usability. The factors are independent variables which can be manipulated by evaluators, the others are dependent variables. Those irrelevant variables will are set to be a constant to avoid potential influence on the experiment result. 
Participants are also a concern of experiment design. Same-participant design is letting all participants performing all the condition settings. This decrease individual difference to different settings, but participants may be trained by previous condition, which may effect the behavior in latter experiments. Designers should also pay attention to use counterbalancing to decrease the bias of order-effect, which means the order of condition may effect the performance of the participant. Different-participant design is allocate different condition to a participant randomly, each participant only experience one experiment. This design method has no train-effect or order-effect but requires a lot more participants than same-participant design. Matched-participant design pairs participants by their characteristics like gender, expertise. But matching may neglect some important variables.

Chapter 15 Analytical Evaluation

In this chapter, it mainly talks about two inspection methods, heuristic evaluation and walkthroughs, and a few predictive models such as GOMS and Fitt's Law.

Experts instead of users are involved in inspections. Heuristic evaluation is guided by a list of usability principles, such as visibility of system status, match between system and the real world etc.  But depending on different products, not all heuristics can be applied, normally 5~10 of which is enough.

In cognitive walkthroughs the designer and several experts conduct the evaluation together. The evaluators walk through the action sequences for each task, placing the context of a typical scenario and imagine will users know what to do, how to do, and understand from feedback whether the action was correct or not. Then evaluators and designer discuss together and revise the design.

In pluralistic walkthroughs, each expert pretend to be a typical user in a certain prototype screen, which focus on user's tasks at a detailed level.

GOMS, stands for goals, operators, methods, and selection rules. Goals refers to the particular state the user wants to achieve. Operators refer to the cognitive processes and physical actions that need to be performed in order to attain those goals. Methods are learned procedures for accomplishing the goals. Selection rules is to determine which solution to use if multiple solutions exist.
KLM provides numerical predictions of user performance so that different features of systems and applications can be easily compared to see which might be optimal for a specific kinds of task.
Fitt's Law is used to help designers decide where to locate buttons, what size they should be, and how close together they should be on a screen display.

Question:

How to ensure ecological validity?

In pluralistic walkthroughs, how to choose typical users from a various range?
Is there any principle of choosing different participant-setting design?

Seminar One: Reading Reflection by Hui Pang

Chapter 7: Data Gathering

Data gathering is a central part of establishing requirements, and of evaluation. With requirement activity, the purpose is to collect sufficient, accurate, and relevant data so that a set of stable requirements can be produced. There are 3 main techniques for gathering data: interviews, questionnaires, and observation.

Interviews involve an interviewer asking interviewees a set of questions, and we chose semi-structured interviews so that we can guide interviewee when necessary. We use direct observation, which involves spending time with individuals observing activity as it happens.

We set our goals to be improving travelling experience of the ferry trip, and identified participants to be families with kids. We asked for their informed consent for using audio recording as means of data recording. As for triangulation, we conducted interviews under different weather and day of the week. 

Chapter 8: Data Analysis

Since most of data we gathered are qualitative, we will do a qualitative analysis to provide a more comprehensive account of the behaviour being observed. 

Qualitative analysis focuses on the nature of something and can be represented by themes, patterns, and stories. There are 3 simple types of qualitative analysis: identifying recurring patterns and themes, categorizing data, and analyzing critical incidents. We mainly used the first during our by gaining an overall impression and to start looking for patterns. 

Presenting the results is just as important as analyzing the data. 

Chapter 10: Identifying needs, Establishing requirements

A requirement is a statement about an intended product that specifies what it should do or how it should perform.  

Personas are rich description of typical users of the product under development that the designers can focus on and design the product for. Usually a product will require more than one personas and it may be helpful to choose one primary persona who represents a large section of the intended user group. 

A scenario is an “informal narrative description”. It describes human activities or tasks in a story that allows exploration and discussion of contexts, needs, and requirements. Often scenarios are generated to help explain or discuss some aspect of the user’s goals. They can be used to imagine potential uses of a product and to capture existing behaviour. 

Questions: 

1. How can we translate results of data analysis into needs and requirements?
2. How can we know if we get it right? 

Summary of the State of the Art analysis

Information passing is immensely important and that's what the state of the art analyses have focused upon. Whether it be the information on travel or the view outside. One of the most interesting outcomes of the individual SOAs are the interactive advertisements which make use of different techniques to obtain the real-time updates like camera, tactile and auditory feedback. Some of the captivating ones are available here.

It can be seen that different countries around the world have different way of presenting information to users. While some focused on the travel options like the City Mapper, Baidu Map and the SL app.

The design of the applications depends on ethnography of each country. Increasing number of applications leverage on the open data provided by the government to create apps which can work across multiple geo locations. But the ultimate success depends on "glocalization" in which the application is customized according to the needs of the local users.

But the travel is not just the en-route spots but it is more of a journey. While removing of the wooden panes is a unified thought, those being replaced with acrylics or custom interactive windows are other opinions. However, interactive LED boards and the motion capture interactive boards are ways to enough catch the public attention. Finally, it is important that we are able to deliver the most important informations in the best possible locations like in this video.

Our main aim is to improve the user experience. For our case, we can try to make a memorable, simple yet special adventure for all the ferry commuters.

Summary of interviews and direct observations

We conducted interviews during the ferry trip from Slussen to Djugarden in order to get data to improve travelling experience of ferry trip. These data will help us understand the need of possible customers in the design project.

We conduct interviews as participant observers and we use audio recording as our means of data recording. Since we did not do interviews on the same day, many conditions vary, such as weather, number of people on board, day of the week. Furthermore, we use interviews as technique for data gathering, so the data we obtained falls into the “qualitative data” category.

We have interviewed six families travelling with their kids, plus the captain.

Out of the six families we interviewed, only one of them are international tourists, the others are all local to Stockholm or at least local to Sweden. Most of them travelled with an SL card, either monthly or daily, and had their tickets dealt with before reaching the ferry platform. The main reason for almost all families chose the ferry trip is because their children enjoy the view, Another one is that taking ferry is faster than the other transports.

Most families we had interviewed suggested that a toilet on the ferry would be convenient, since unlike adults, a ten-minute trip is terribly long for children with call of nature.

However, when we interviewed the captain, we were informed that this debate had been for years, and the cost-benefit analysis suggested that it is not worthwhile to add a toilet to a ferry with such short trip.

Before the interview, we had been concerned that a belt to fasten strollers might be needed. However, during our interview, only one family agreed that it would be necessary. We used to have that idea because we can usually see one in the waterway transportation.

We can see from one interview that, some people said the destination is a little bit confused because there may be multiple destination for a ferry. They mentioned that they should be aware of the broadcasting all the time. And if it is on weekends, the ferry will be really crowded and noisy. Thus it may be hard for them to catch the broadcasting. Definitely, this phenomenon is more severe for the tourists since the broadcasting is just in Swedish.

Most local families did not exactly plan their travel -- they just get aboard to Djugarden to see what’s there to offer today. This way, it would be helpful if there are posters of current activities in Djugarden, rather than information on the SL ferry route.

Several families got to Slussen by public transportation and likely went home the same way. it would be more convenient if there is a LED screen updating timetables of commuter tubes/buses/trams etc.

There were one family demanding somewhere that sells food and water on the ferry. Maybe vending machines selling sodas, snacks or even souvenirs can be added.

Requirements after 1st Iteration
schedules of ferry and commuting vehicles
activities in Djugarden
vending machines
better ways to enjoy the view
interaction between passengers