Week 13

Week 13! The end of the semester and a demonstration of our prototype!  The whole team were super focused and excited this week.  We all worked really hard and thankfully were rewarded for our efforts with an awesome presentation.

The week started off early with Hamish finishing off the installation, painted and beautifully finished.  What he managed to create far exceeded the expectations of all of the other group members, the set up is gorgeous and was all ready for Max to step in and make it even better with the addition of appropriate art.

The installation, painted

Max delivered shortly after with some sketches of characters from the story I had written.  More specifically Sir Metema and Sir Doujos from the fantasy section of the story I had written for the scenarios.  These pictures were brilliant and the design of having half their body on each side of the installation was brilliant.  This particular design problem really played to Max's strengths. I am very happy with the way that Max managed to capture a part of the story so perfectly.  

Max's initial sketches for the arcade characters

While all this was going on I was putting the finishing touches on the story and making sure that the storyline you finished on had an ending.  The final storyline was the one featuring Metema and Doujos and was six scenarios long, rather than three which the two previous story arcs were.  This, in addition to the fact that I wanted to keep a consistent storyline for this part meant that the storyline didn't diverge quite as much as the previous ones.  What I did instead is mainly customise the introduction to the next scenario, telling the user how they got to that part from where they were.  I also realised that it doesn't really matter too much where the user goes, since they don't realise the alternatives, the main thing being the response we get rather than the storyline.  That being said the story was important for immersing the user into the experience so a happy medium must be met.

Max, while making progress on the sketches, was also making progress on the textures, his final one for the fantasy one being particularly striking because it was, I believe, a very interesting interpretation of the setting.  He made a smoky/sepia type texture which I think both encapsulated the old feel of the scenario and the fire from the dragon.  I think, while he struggled a bit with how to do the textures initially Max finished strong and showed huge improvements on his texture making talents.

The texture for the fantasy scenarios

All this time Kyle was working on the actual program.  Especially considering this, hugely important, part was all his responsibility Kyle did amazingly well.  He exceeded all expectations the group had, creating a beautiful app which ran almost flawlessly, getting accurate height and weight measurements very quickly and having no bugs that we could find.  Choosing answers to questions was easy and accurate and the feedback page was well designed.  The feedback page allowed the user to press on each category to get an overlay telling them how well they did in each category.  I can't stress enough how impressed and pleased we all were with the app, especially since it can be the trickiest aspect to pull off.

The opening screen of the app

Max finished off, doing some beautiful colouring and highlighting, each image specifically designed to fit perfectly on the side of the installation.  I think that these pieces of art add a huge amount to the whole design, drawing people in by peaking their interest.  Overall this is a continuation of the excellent visual design that Max has been doing, particularly in the last few weeks.

The final characters

Max was also in the process of making silhouettes for the feedback page of the app, we wanted to make our own to avoid any copy write issues and to allow us to customise them with the aesthetic of the app.  He did a nice job with this, creating a set of silhouettes which easily conveyed the four body types: underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obese.

Silhouettes

We were on last so we had some time in the morning to make final refinements.  Kyle pointed out to me that some (most) of my scenarios were far to verbose to be put into the app as they would be both too small and also be too much reading for the user to handle.  I struggled with this a bit but soon realised that it wasn't about having a full and well rounded story it was about having short and snappy scenarios which communicated only the information we needed to get the data required.  After I had come to this revelation I made short work of cutting down the scenarios, making sure they were only two or three sentences each.  I was actually surprised how much of the story was preserved, despite their vastly shortened length in some cases.

Everyone was putting the final touches on our designs, including Hamish putting the final touches on the logo he designed for the installation.  The logo worked particularly well because it highlights the last letter of health and the first of venture, luckily the last letter of health is the same as the first so the highlighted letters initials of the app.  Hamish also effectively used textures, drop shadows and a range of other techniques to create a very high quality logo.

The logo

One of my favourite moments throughout this whole process was when we brought the installation into 313.  The gasps and excitement from the other students over our piece was very exciting and gratifying after all the work each of us had put into the work.   We managed to finish all our work several hours before the actual deadline which was great as it allowed us to relax for a bit before the actual presentation.  We were all extremely excited about completing the prototype and eager to get into the actual demonstration.

The completed prototype

The demonstration came soon enough and went extremely well.  We carried the installation into the room and set it up, next to the projector screen. This allowed us to follow along on the projector screen, making it easier for the markers to see exactly what was going on.  I ran the initial example adventure and explained, with Kyle, our concept, research and technical information   Max and Hamish interjected where necessary.  Most of the markers had a go on the installation and it seems as though they had a really great time.

We didn't get a huge amount of feedback which was mainly positive it seems as the markers seemed to really like our idea. Overall I'm very happy with what we achieved, everything went off without a hitch.  We've got a lot of work to do before the exhibition but we're all prepared to put in the extra effort to get our design to be even better than it already is, putting in a bigger screen, buttons for interaction and a wide range of improvements.  I'm excited to finish this off and have a beautiful completed product to show off to industry, fellow students, friends and family.

Week 12

Week 12 was a big week for the group, given that it was the week before our final demonstration was going to happen.  Everyone stepped up to the plate at this stage, producing a huge amount of content and constantly iterating on their designs.

Hamish started off the week strong with some designs for the feedback screen of the app.  I wasn't a huge fan of the way he quantified the scores out of five but otherwise I thought that the design was very effective in showing the user where they were in comparison to everyone else.  I also think that with the addition of some colour to indicate what's good and what's bad we'll be very close to perfect on this screen.

Proposed results page

Max also came out with some additional designs of the question area, the strengths of these were the well defined areas, breaks in screens, framing of the visual stimulus however they had a few weaknesses such as the lack of colour scheme and the underplaying of the visual elements.

Question UI prototype

From this I decided that I should do some in depth research into touch interfaces in relation to choose your own adventure games.  What I found was very inspiring.  The best example of a choose your own adventure had a very simple design, just using a textured background behind the choices and having large buttons, making them easy to touch.  I find this design very effective and suggested to the group the idea of using textures in the background of the question page.  This idea was received well, especially by Kyle who pushed for simplicity.

Screenshot of the decision page from "Underground Kingdom" by Visual Baker

After this revelation Max was assigned the task of designing the textures with the idea that each would be customised to the area that the story was in, for example a jungle themed texture for the jungle areas.  In hindsight I didn't go into enough detail with Max about what my vision was for this particular design aspect and he was a bit clueless of exactly what he was supposed to do, just attempting to make something without enough direction.  I later rectified this issue however my mistake meant that he wasted some time sort of guessing at what we wanted rather than just doing exactly it was that was needed.  At least this time allowed him to learn the techniques for creating textures which he would rely on later on.

We realised on Wednesday that we should have already submitted the prototype to the exhibition  Unfortunately due to a misunderstanding on our part (and particularly mine since I was supposed to be the one looking for this kind of stuff) we thought that the original submission to the exhibition was our own work only and we would submit our group work after the final demonstration.  Because of this we had to talk to onacloV about getting out work in the exhibition and she graciously agreed to let us have a change of still being included if we submitted our work to her before the demonstration  with adequate pictures and explanation to allow her to sell the idea to the other members of the selection committee   This inspired us to work even harder because we all really wanted the installation to be included in the exhibition.

While this was going on Hamish had finalised his prototype for the installation and was focusing on getting it actually built.  He did a great job of sources the materials by himself and building it at his own house.  While he was doing this Kyle managed to arrange with Anirban to get a ultrasonic sensor which would allow us to measure height far easier than any other alternatives we'd seen.  Getting the ultrasonic sensor off Anriban was a huge boon to our work as we were having difficulty sourcing one from elsewhere.

In the meantime Max was working on the textures, primarily communicating with me in order to get feedback on his designs.  With feedback Max's designs improved rapidly and he tried a wide range of techniques in order to get the effect that we wanted.  There was some debate in the group about what was required, Kyle thinking that a texture over the whole background was the way to go and with me thinking that a default dark grey texture with an intrusion by an element of the area the user is in being the way to go for greater visual continuity.

A later prototype showing the themed texture for the whole background, in this case some moss from the jungle

A later prototype illustrating the default texture with an element from the area, in this case some moss from the jungle

I also went about figuring out exactly what needed to be done and who would go about doing each task. This breakdown was very useful as it allowed us to figure out exactly what we needed to do and who would go about doing it, allowing us to help each other out in the case that one member was overloaded with work.  As it happened it worked out fairly evenly naturally which was great.

The to do list on the 25th of October

I also worked on the feedback for the application, writing it so that it was customised to both how well the user had gone with the application questions and their own BMI.  We decided to split the users into four groups based on their BMI.  These groups were: underweight, healthy weight, overweight and obese.  We also split the results into three different ranges, depending on how well the user did in each category.  The user could get a good, medium or bad score.  This meant that for each possible combination of score, category and BMI I wrote a customised response, resulting in a total of 36 possible pieces of feedback, with three being shown at one time, one for each of the categories (Fitness, nutrition and stress).  As far as the advice went I decided that giving a few pieces of practical advice such as telling the user to go for a run or eat more fruit would be far more useful than the generic doctor's warnings.  I didn't want to set out an exact health plan for the user, just give them a few tips to get them on the right path and trust that they'd be able to do the rest themselves.

The week ended with Max and I expressing our concerns about the look of the app.  We were worried that the clinical and downplayed textured backgrounds could be incongruous with the overall look of the outside physical set up (which we planned on having art on) and the questions which were fairly out there.  We discussed this with the other group members and came to the conclusion that we should see if we could make the interface more fun but if not the designs we had would still be quite effective as they were very visually appealing.

With only a few day to go till the demonstration we've got lots of work to do but it's all coming together now and it looks like we'll have a great product to show off on Wednesday.  I know the group is very excited about getting our work to the highest standard possible and showing it off to everyone in the class!

Week 11

Week 11 started off a bit slow, we decided to stay at home and work on our respective parts of the project, instead of coming in to work on it in class.  This is due to the fact that we didn't need any help from the tutors or lecturers and we felt that it was easier for us to be productive at home, rather than in the noisy classroom.

We decided at this point that we should have a arcade cabinet for the physical set up as this allowed us more artistic freedom and the ability to theme the set up to the scenarios we would have in the app.  We were also discussing the viability of buttons at this point.

We all started working hard on the Wednesday and posting our work up to the Facebook page so we could get feedback and advice on how to improve it. Max posted up a rough mockup of a potential title screen for the application, embracing the arcade-y direction that we now wanted to explore.

A potential title screen

At the time this was going on Hamish was redesigning the physical set up, Kyle was working on the programming - especially getting the weight and height sensors working and I was working on writing as many scenarios as I could for the app while keeping them high quality and getting relevant data.

Max also wanted to explore his animation ideas and posted up an animation mock up.  This was quite well done however I was sceptical on whether it was viable to have animations throughout the application without us running out of time or having to sacrifice some quality in order to get them in there.  After some discussion we decided that animation was an additional feature that would be added if we had enough time.

I then brought up the idea of buttons as we had limited time to put buttons in if we actually wanted to use them.  Kyle was of the opinion that we didn't have enough time to implement buttons at this stage and I was inclined to agree with him, despite my own personal desire to see them implemented.  So we put that on the additional features pile too.

Hamish then shared with us his designs, throwing out a few prototypes, including a few more traditional looking cabinets and a few out there designs.  These designs obviously had a long way to go but they were certainly a step in the right direction and got us closer to achieving the aesthetic that we now wanted.

Rough Sketches of the physical set up.

Shortly after that Hamish came up with some much higher 3D models of the potential installation.  These came much closer to what we wanted and were based on the dimensions of human beings that Hamish had done thorough research on in the proceeding weeks.

A mock-up in Maya of the installation

Max wrapped up the week with mock-up of what the interface could look like if we went heavier on the art.  He used place-holder art to avoid wasting time.  I liked this art but I was worried about it being too full on and detracting from the questions.  I think it could be quite effective if we toned back the design.

Overall I'm happy with the progress we've made this week.  We've all worked hard and have got most of the early prototyping out of the way, meaning that next week we'll be able to get even closer to our design goals, improving on what we have this week.

Week 10

Week 10 was the week of the presentation, which changed so it wasn't worth any marks, meaning that the main use of it to us was as a feedback tool.  It was really important for us to spend the first half of the week making sure we put together something which would allow us communicate our idea as effectively as possible to ensure we got the highest quality feedback as this would allow us to further refine our idea.

To ensure the communication within the group was as strong as possible and everyone knew exactly what they were doing we organised a meeting on Skype in order to make sure everyone was on the same page with the direction we were taking the idea.  The Skype went well and we talked for almost an hour.  I find that talking, whether it be face to face or over the Internet  is a much more effective communication tool than pretty much anything, the fact that people take in all the information and are required to respond to it is great for making sure that all the information is understood and getting any issues people have dealt with.

After the Skype Max started doing some work on the UI, Hamish did more work on human sizes and disability standards and Kyle continued his refinement of the application.  I realised that our previous user groups were inappropriate given that our new idea was fun, gamified and a bit off the wall, making our original target, socio-economically disadvantaged people, an less effective user group than the alternative.  The alternative being young adults.  I did some research on them and it turns out that from 15-24 to 25-34 is the most significant jump in obesity of any set of two age groups.  This means that raising health awareness and forming healthy habits in this particular age group can be extremely effective in staving off future problems.

The Health summary page from the app

In the lead up to the actual presentation I started organising with the group as to which bits of the presentation we would each be responsible for.  I would handle all the beginning bits, that is to say the design problem, user profile, additional research and design concept, since I was well versed in these areas and there was no point jumping from person to person and breaking the flow.  After those bits were talked about Kyle would handle the Demonstration of our prototype, Max would talk about the UI and Hamish would show his proposed physical set up.

At this point Max was proposing some updates to the UI which included including art, as in the image below.  At this point we felt like this style of art was quite a good match for the overall design aesthetic of the actual app, with out there questions and the like.

An Early UI mockup

As the app and presentation were taking shape Hamish started coming out which his sketches for what the actual installation would look like, primarily based on the research he had done into the size of humans.  This meant that his designs were extremely usable in terms of arm distance to screen etc.

A user interacting with the system. Shown is a height sensor up top, an Ipad and a wii-fit balance board for weight. 

After this we did the actual presentation, which went extremely well.  I managed to talk without hesitation or stuffing up any of my lines for which I am extremely proud and the rest of the group followed suit.  We managed to communicate all the information we needed about the installation without missing any important points.  The feedback we got was minimal, partially because the idea was sound and partially because our group was the last to present, meaning that there were less people listening and they were a bit more tired by that point.  It was suggested to us that we ask the same questions twice to ensure that the user was giving an honest response, indicated by them answering the same way twice.  The key piece of feedback that we got was that we should make the physical installation less clinical.  Our app was fun and frivolous but our actual physical installation was kind of over designed, it was very bare boned and didn't fit with the overall feel of the application.  Martin suggested that we redesign it to be more arcade-y.

In the days after the presentation the group discussed the idea of making the app and installation into more of a arcade based piece.  Max in particular was excited about the idea, suggesting a range of ideas such as a gamepad, animation, timed questions, visualisation ideas and music.  A lot of these ideas were great however had to be reigned back a bit for our final demonstration due to the fact that they were too much work for us to properly execute for our final product.  We all agreed on focusing on minimum viable product, which meant getting the core of the app together and not worrying about the 'extras' until we were sure that they wouldn't detract from the overall idea.  His ideas were just initial concepts so they are something we can definitely work on as there is a at least a core of a great idea in each.

After he had shared these ideas I decided that the whole group deserved a few days off, in light of all the hard work the group had done in the lead up to the presentation.  No one complained about this suggestion!

On the Sunday I sat down and tried to figure out exactly what we needed to do in order to achieve our project goals.  This came down to: Discussing the arcade idea, Designing/prototyping all aspects, testing and iterating and actually building the app and installation.

The end of this week has put us in a great postion.  We've got all of the big details hammered out and now we just need to figure out the finer details.  I think we'll end up with a really great product.

Semester Break

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.

Week 9

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.

Week 8

Week 8 was a week of change, with our original idea being thrown out.  The week started off well with Kyle telling the rest of the group that he was progressing well with his work to get the Wii fit balance board working to measure weight.  Then came Wednesday.  I was, unfortunately, struck by food poisoning and was unable to attend the first half of the day.  In this time Max and Hamish had decided that our original idea was too boring and generic and, with help from the tutors, had decided to take it in a new direction.

Once I’d come into class I was informed of a few things, firstly that we should use an IR sensor rather than a Kinect and secondly that we needed to redesign our idea.  I was happy with both of these suggestions because I had been feeling like the idea had been getting pretty stale, too.  Because Rob had responded so well to the idea of insulting people by calling them fat we decided that we could harness this idea for our system.  Max and Hamish had also talked to the tutors and they had suggested taking a more “adult” approach to talking with adults and we thought that this was the way to do that.

We brainstormed in that class on ways to achieve this, throwing out ideas like an app that throws out random insults about your physical health.  We developed these ideas until we came to the idea of having a syntax for sentences that could be insults or compliments, depending, so changing a couple of the words in the sentence based on a person’s current weight and performance.  For example the sentence “You’re fat and don’t do enough exercise” could be easily turned into “You’re fat but you do enough exercise”.

We then talked to Somwrita who was very interested in the idea of customising feedback for the user; we talked about generative advertising and promotion in order to get people involved in their own health.  In this time we’d moved more away from the insulting factor to the customisation that we had found in our brainstorming surrounding it.

After our meeting I set up our next few steps, which were: Talking to Kyle about the idea, as he had been unable to attend and workshopping our idea until we managed to figure out exactly what form our solution would take.  To this effect Max and I agreed to meet on the Sunday of the week in order to work together on the problem, brainstorming possible solutions.

After this I summarised the Health literacy as a public health goal paper I had been planning on summarising the week before.

On the Sunday Max and I were thankfully able to get through a huge amount of work.  We realised that our system in its original form was still interesting, just the first stage of the whole process, that is the obtaining of information from the user, was boring and undeveloped.  In order to remedy this we threw out a huge range of solutions to this problem.

The main theme of our ideas, which interested Max and I greatly, was choose your own adventure games.  These ideas took several forms including getting given a character based on their height and weight then when you try to make it the character you want it tells you how to get fit, story where, in order to beat the dragon you have to go for runs, eat healthily etc. (in game clicking button) bad choices could even have short term benefits with long term consequences., General story where the user makes choices and the win or fail based on these choices then feedback is given.

The point of all of this was to a. get information from the user on how they lived their lives and to b. give them feedback on this information, pulling through the customisation stream we decided to follow earlier.  The user’s feedback would be customised to their own lifestyle in order to give them advice they could actually act on.

What we ended the day on was that the input to the set up would be “A choose your own adventure game which using choices between easy with short term benefits and hard with long term ones highlights health issues as well as getting information from the user in order to highlight their own person potential health issues. We can extend this by using the data gained in the game create visualisations etc.  Not all choices are black and white and we could highlight this.”

We then organised to meet Kyle on Tuesday morning in order to get his feedback on the idea as Hamish was away until Wednesday on a sailing Regatta (which he, again, won).  That all went well but I’ll cover that in next week’s blog post.

Overall we’re heading in a much better direction at the end of this week.   Hopefully we can really realise our ideas in the next week and pull it all together, with the approval of the whole group.