User Focus & Perspective

By doing an observation at a primary school, I learned how to involve the user in an early phase of a design project and get quality results out of it by setting a goal and a strategy. For the project the goal was to get a better idea of a normal school day, the behaviour of young children and our user: the teacher. I did that by interviewing the teacher and by listing the activities of the whole day. Another thing I learnt was a new way of using the results in the project: creating a persona. The presentation of the persona in the report could have been better though.

Figure 1: Usertest to see if children accept a system (the white box) that chooses a winner.

“the product ekk Bounce has been well developed, in terms of user interaction and  user testing…” “Present your persona more graphically, e.g., as a poster that you could put up in your workspace, i.e., something you can easily refer to and that communicates also externally what your project is about.”^a

 J.B.O.S. Martens, coach

On the mid-term demoday experts suggested to do a usertest, to have an extra proof that our concept worked. We developed the knowledge of our users with a user test at the former primary school of fellow group member Wouter van Herk. This test focused on seeing if the children would understand the basic concepts of our product. Unfortunately the working prototype was not ready at that time, so we could not fully argument that our product could solve the problem of arguments between children.

I found this activity really fun to do and I learned a lot about setting up such a test. For example: defining the goals, thinking about durable prototypes for the test and how to translate the results of the user test in decisions for the project.

For the future I’d like to continue involving the user in the design process with user tests, but also with other methods like focus groups. I want to study more theory about user centred design, to analyze the results more structurally to get more information out of it.