The mid-semester break was an excellent opportunity for us to get on top of our designs and work on getting the design to a point where it was presentable to the industry professionals, tutors and lecturers. Kyle, after getting his part of the project to an extremely workable place with the weight sensor working left to go to the university games. It was also an opportunity to catch up on some backlog of work that I have left for myself. The main thing I did to that effect was to create this blog, allowing us a platform which we could customise and really properly display how our project work has gone to this point.
Early in the week Max got to summarising what we had so far, Hamish continued his research into the ergonomics and design of the actual installation. I decided that now as the time for us to move on from just researching and actually get into working on the prototype. I wrote a plan on the Facebook page which was basically designing the various elements of the prototype, limiting what we aimed to do so that it was achievable by the presentation next week but also outlining where we'd go from here. What I hoped to achieve was to design all the pages of the actual app and test them if we had time. Additional features was mainly being able to visualise the data we got from the application.
Then, since we realised that we had to meet face to face to nail down what the actual idea was, I arranged a meeting at uni which Max, Hamish and I would attend. Max also created a survey at the time which would inform our design decisions.
The actual meeting was hugely important to our design. We discussed the main issues with our design, primarily whether we ask questions that were hypothetical, and therefore more interesting, or not, and therefore more accurate. I proposed, that, from a design point, it would be better to ask hypothetical questions and get slightly less accurate results if it would make our design much more engaging. The theory was that we could give advice on how to be healthy, even if the person responded in a healthy way to all questions. What that means is that even if we are completely inaccurate of our assessment of them, and we will avoid this at all costs, we will still be able to give them direction with their health. The other benefit is that we would engage more people having a greater impact, regardless of the accuracy of our testing system.
Towards the end of this session, in which many ideas where thrown out and critiqued, Max suggested what he calls "Pokemon Theory" in which people are faced with problems and they have to make a decision in order to over come the problem. We suggested that by facing people with interesting and fairly random hypothetical situations they wouldn't pay attention to the fact that we were getting information about their health and would be somewhat shocked when the final 'results' screen came up, causing them to pay more attention to it. This design also allows us to engage more with the project, creating our own stories and involving additional skills like story writing or, in the case of Max, drawing.
Data about people's health would be gathered from these questions by assigning point values to each of the questions, in three categories, stress, fitness and nutrition. If the person makes bad choices about their nutrition but good ones about their fitness the results page will reflect this. We still want to incorporate the weight and height sensors and these will be able to either change the questions or the results page or both.
To further add to the idea I suggested some things such as the idea that we segregate the story of the game into different areas, such as the jungle, desert and city, allowing us to come up with diverse scenarios that will challenge the user to make the right health decisions. I was also thinking of divergent paths where one path would ask them more nutrition questions, another fitness and the last stress based questions. This would mean we got more data on one topic than another but we could use a formula to ensure that they had to answer questions on topics we needed more data on. Max also suggested a big pool of possible questions/scenarios which would alleviate 'cheating' and make the overall design more interesting.
At the moment we're really putting together the idea and hopefully what we have for Wednesday will really illustrate the idea as we failed to do this properly the last time around.
