Wizard of Oz Summary:

We tested our nursing home wall idea. Two specific things that we were wondering and wanted to learn about with these prototypes were:

• Different ways to present instructions (text versus voice)
• Different ways to go from screen to screen (buttons versus swiping)

In addition to that, we also wanted to generally see what features users expected to be there as they interacted with our app.

The raw data we collected during the wizard of oz testing is below. Here is what we learned:

Instead, during our sessions with our mentor Brynn, we heavily explored the underlying needs of both the cadaver lab and nursing home users and came up with many unique approaches to solving their needs with gestures. Thus, we decided to deep dive into both environments for our prototyping and will ultimately pick one focus next week. The two areas and summaries of our resulting prototypes are below:

• When we presented information using voice, the user would try to respond with voice. If we want our app to be gesture based, then we might want to avoid using voice on our end.
• The gestures at each step weren't entirely intuitive. Even when we had explicit instructions on that same screen, people would spend time looking for what they should do. We should try non-instructional forms of indicators for the correct action (ie, something partly on another page to indicate scrolling over) or instructions that are big and animated.
• It should be easier to just call someone.
• There was a need for free video recording of memories and, particularly, bringing over physical artifacts and recording stories about them.
• In some nursing homes (though not the one where we did our needfinding), wall space is at a premium, so there might not be room for a large Kinect video screen.
• They want to learn more about their family (ie, see their facebook photos), but there isn't an intuitive technology to let them do that.

As a result of that, discovered that there were significant problems with each of the things we prototyped and, instead, we should focus our app down, eliminating most of the features and navigation required and keying in on the notions of physical presence of family members and the desire to see what's going on in family members' lives. We made another wizard of oz prototype of that new version, and that seemed to work much better.

Sample of data collected:

• Person 1
  • needs 'come closer to interact
  • seemed hesitant individually
  • seemed to want to use voice
  • need a way to know to drag the cap down on the medicine.
  • swiped medicine down before taking medicine
  • voice narration seemed effective
  • wanted to tap photos to edit it
    • wanted to add diary and notes
    • make a box that says 'record a new narrative' or something.
  • memories should be "your saved memories"
• Person 2
  • 'could i read this on an iphone?  no, because the text is too small'
  • didn't know to swipe over on the 'hello' screen.
    • can't get precision on where the dots are if it's far away
  • wanted voice "i'm done" or "read it"
  • wanted video messages
  • "where's the skype?"
  • "so I can only call my son if he's at the video wall?  I can't call him at work?"
  • "i don't have any photos -- I'm 82"
  • bring over artifacts and then record
  • there's no wall space -- so where's the center of the home?  
  • you need to be in the homes of their friends and stuff.  if you're small, kitchen, playroom, and bedroom of grandchild.  How many walls are you going to have?
  • granddaughter says 'do you want to facetime?'  and the granddaughter gets on facetime and then goes upstairs.  what technologies are there that you can basically just use?  
  • their kids pictures are on facebook.  how can they access that?  you have a cross platfor, multiroom multiclocation backend.  you grab every digital memory that their friends have and ultimate simplify that for the old people.
  • my son just calls me.  not on a fancy phone.  
• Photo album prototype
  • How to go back?
  • How to select user in a grid? (point?)
  • Who is actually there/available to talk? (animated or not – meaning)
  • pull down the screen? What does it mean? “a power button of some sort”
  • gestures: pointing, raising hand up. (issues pointing up)
  • old people use voicemail to talk as if you are there
  • old people just want to hear what you are up to, and share what other family members are up to (they don’t care to record videos of themselves)