Week 9 was interesting week in development as it was the week immediately after a new design solution was proposed. This meant that my primary job this week was selling the idea, to both Kyle, Hamish and the tutors and lecturers. Thankfully the idea is a good one so that wasn't too difficult of a job.
We managed to catch up with Kyle on Tuesday morning before other classes we had. In this brief time we managed to bring him around to the idea and he managed to contribute a few ideas of his own. The most important of these ideas was grouping the questions/scenarios we present to the user into categories which would be calculated in order to give feedback on each category. For example three fitness questions could be calculated together to generate an overall fitness score which would be used to give the user feedback. We also brought up the idea of visualising the data we received.
In the Wednesday class we presented the idea to the tutors and lecturers in the class and it was well received by all, being a significant improvement on our previous ideas. We also took the opportunity to plan our next few moves as a group, asking what research we'd like to do and how we'd like to present our UI. We also began to design the questions for the new product.
During the class Kyle also showed off how his software for getting weight from a Wii balance board was working. It was important that he had reached this stage as he is away for the whole of the university break with The University Games in Queensland, playing basketball. That was all working well which is great, Kyle has been doing good work with the programming side of things and hopefully should be able to make the IR sensor function properly too once he's given access to one.
On Friday Max and I got together to do some research on the problem. First up max did a heuristic analysis of the problem using Jakob Nielson's ten usability heuristics. This revealed many things, including the fact that, for our system, we'd have to break some the usability heuristics, such as the visibility of system status because if the user figured out what the information was getting at then they may try and game the system, skewing the results. Overall however the system revealed many interesting things.
I did some research on the actual question design, getting some valuable information on how to write the actual questions and how to design them such as in games (including the walking dead and Bioshock) in order to entertain as well as gather information. Looking into the psychology of the person being questioned is very interesting and revealed things like the fact that players will make a decision based on what they think other players would make.
After that Max did research on UI design and cognitive bias. Both of these areas will help us design our questions in a way which is well presented and makes our best attempt to avoid any bias to the questions the user would experience, ensuring that we get the most accurate responses possible, increasing the overall quality of our project. While he was doing that I was working on research about alternative health threats, which I found primarily came under the heading of "stress", which encompassed lack of sleep and working too much, without getting enough down time.
With our research nearly complete I'm hoping that the next week will primarily be about development of the idea, getting the project to a stage where our work is presentable next week. This will be a big challenge but I plan on keeping the project scope for the time being manageable and focused, just getting what we can get done and worrying about all the bells and whistles after our initial presentation.
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