A significant change in direction has occurred.
The past week has been an interesting one to say the least. A significant change in direction has occurred, and an important one at that.
On Wednesday 30th November 2022, I had a zoom meeting with Brendan who is the innovation Specialist / Design Lead at Scope (Aust). I arranged the meeting with him to raise my concerns about the VR app that I tested with a friend and a family member. In both instances, the users struggled to navigate through the system, even after I gave PDFs (guides) prior. As such, both users were unable to interact with the VR avatar and environment in a way that could provide data to assess the VR’s effectiveness to induce empathy. Moreover, I too found the VR experience not very intuitive, which, considering I am an eLearning specialists / coach at Monash University, reinforces that the VR system, in its current state is not ready for Scope Australia to adopt into their DSWs training practices. Especially, if we consider that the target audience are not known to be technically savvy. My concerns were not without merit, as Brendan confirmed similar outcomes with DSWs he tested and agreed that the VR system is not intuitive. The VR app appears to have been randomly introduced into Scope without any significant useability testing, and fact finding.
On Thursday 1st December 2022, I had a zoom meeting with my two supervisors to discuss this. It was agreed that the lack of usability testing meant that trying to assess the VR’s effectiveness to induce empathy is problematic, especially since end-users are struggling to learn and navigate through the VR experience. As such, we established that the study now needs to focus on usability analysis for DSWs since the VR app has already been adopted to some degree.