Cristiano's Graduate Project Blog

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Here I have created a wiki to portray a story through hyperlinks and images. I have created it as a basic prototype for my app idea. I have created this to express how my stories will be designed to interact with the user. The user will make decisions as they go, and in essence have some degree of control over the story throughout. I created all the designs from scratch, including all characters and background images, I tried not to look at inspiration online for my characters so that they would stay as original as possible. I created simple characters as a basic starting point to the app, the app itself will consist of characters with more detail and personality.

This idea of the wiki was initially for functionality purposes of how decisions would be made throughout the stories, however after designing it I have learnt that I can also use it for user testing.

Have a try! https://sites.google.com/site/majorprojectwiki/

UserResearchPoster

Here I have created a poster displaying my user research findings. I spoke to ten people in total which helped me to gather some useful and interesting information. Although I accumulated more data I have chosen to demonstrate the main and most important results. This poster layout may have been naturally better suited for quantitative data, however I believe that it helps to display my findings with ease and clarity.

I chose to gather data from ten people as I believe that it should be sufficient for the current stage in which I am now. “Quite often tests of 5 to 10 people are quite sufficient…if one is looking for large effect, it should be possible to do tests that are simpler and faster than are used by the scientific community will suffice. Designs don’t have to be optimal or perfect: results that are not quite optimum or less than perfect are often completely satisfactory for everyday usage. No everyday product is perfect, nor need they be. We need experimental techniques that recognize these pragmatic, applied goals. “ – (Don Norman, 26 Nov 2010, Core77)”

I spoke to seven children, four boys and three girls who’s ages ranged from three to eight. I also spoke to three adults to get a more accurate account of what children like and dislike. My main objective of this research was to find out what children enjoyed about books, and which books were the most popular. I was able to find out that the most popular books that children read, and for most of the part the same as when I was a child. However new popular books have emerged such as ‘You Choose’ where the user interacts with the book.

I learnt that children like to interact with books, the more they can be part of a book the better, which is perfect as this is what my idea is all about. I mentioned my idea to the adults and children and I got very positive feedback, they really liked the aspect in which the user is able to contribute to the story.

Another aspect I thought would be useful to know is what kind of characters kids would prefer. From this research I was able to gather that creating animal characters would be a good safe option, however to make this a little more interesting I could create groups of animals, e.g farm animals, pets, exotic and wild, fish etc. The idea of fruits and vegetable characters was also a popular choice, which could be put into groups as well.could be a good idea, and I could also use the concept of groups.

Assumptions:

I assume that creating animal, fruit and veg characters will help to educate children, especially with names they are not usually familiar with.
I’ve made the assumption that creating characters in basic forms and vibrant colours will appeal to children. I did ask the children and adults and I was assured of this, however not every child is the same. But I presume that this will be the best option.