#user evaluation

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[robtieben]

Wiggle the Eye (in development)

The schoolyard of a highschool in Eindhoven: five new benches, and a streetlight with a mysterious globe. During lunchbreak, hesitant teenagers take place on the benches, and discover that they can wiggle and balance with their peers. The globe appears to contain a moving light: when it is looking towards a bench, the bench suddenly starts to vibrate – to the hilarity of the teens. Wiggle the Eye is an interactive installation at a schoolyard, with five wiggle-benches and a streetlight. By sitting, and wiggling occasionally, players can influence the behavior of the light, and let each other’s benches vibrate. The system’s behavior changes on a daily base; social and physical play is required in order to discover how one can influence the Eye. Wiggle the Eye is being evaluated at the Rooipannen VMBO school in Eindhoven, in a four-week user evaluation. Initial results show vibrant and enthusiastic wiggling by the teenagers. More information:

Short movie of Wiggle the Eye | VIMEO

News article in Cursor (in Dutch) | URL

News article in ID-zine | URL

[robtieben]

Course: games in the swimming pool

35 students from 3 education programs, 40 teenagers, a swimming pool, and 7 interactive games in the water: the course swimgames.nl was a great success! In this course, developed and lectured by Menno Deen and myself, our students designed and developed interactive games in the swimming pool. Cameras, RFID readers, buttons: it was all added to the Tongelreep swimming pool, and evaluated right away by eager teenagers. Hart van Nederland, a national news agency, also covered us in a news feature. More information can be found at Swimgames.nl More information:

Video overview of 'in-progress' concepts: Vimeo

Video overview of final concepts: Vimeo

Hart van Nederland news item: HvN

Course website & overview results: url

[robtieben]

PlayFit Student Explorations

In the PlayFit project, I am - and have been - coaching several students projects at ID TU/e and Fontys ICT GD&T. In these projects, students design and develop prototypes to motivate teenagers to be physically active, based on the principles from the PlayFit project and my design-research. The pictures show some examples of student's explorations:

the LightScribe app, a mobile app that allows light scribing - painting with light. By Hanna Zoon.

dotMirror, an interactive mirror that visualizes your silhouette in a enhancing way. By Troy Reugebrink.

Bomb It, an installation in the swimming pool that records user's jumps and bombs, and displays them on a large screen. By vd Bogaard, Donkers, Jacobs, Leenders, Verhoeven and v Woelderen.

Tea Seat, connected seats that allow playful sitting: movements on one seat, such as tilting, are translated to the other seat. By Al Abdeli, Janssen, Kersteman and Scheffer.

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Don't Underestimate The Importance Of User Evaluations

I have recently carried out a Task Based User Evaluation on a Smartphone application prototype I created, and I was surprised by the results.  Concepts that seemed intuitive and made complete sense to me completely baffled the majority of my user base.  Don't misinterpret this, I am by no means suggesting that they were 'dumb users'.  This was a real eye opener as to how when developing a concept, your ideas are always going to seem intuitive to you.  They're bound to if you think about it, you had them.  This is where so many systems go wrong, be them software based or not, what seems intuitive to the developers is not always that intuitive to the users.  In the case of my prototype, I had used a number of metaphors to represent various functions.  I had come up with these metaphors and so they made logical sense to me, but all my users disliked one metaphor in particular.   Each user separately suggested the use of a common metaphor, they all knew what they wanted, and they all wanted the same thing!

Remember, dumb users don't exist, there are just poorly designed systems!!!