Experience P'typing

The Restaurant Experience

Paying the Bill

Paying the bill could be made much easier by having a touch screen at every table listing what was ordered.  There could be a virtual table on the screen with seats around it and you could flick each item towards the person who had that dish.  You would also need to have an option for splitting a single item among two or more diners.  The bill would then come out for each person.  

This system could also integrate ordering the food.  Allowing diners to sit down and order their meal at their leisure.  The wait staff wouldn't be able to promote specials, but they'd still be on the menu.  This system would also help diners budget their meal, the bill wouldn't be a surprise at the end. 

Ambient Noise

One thing I've often noticed at restaurants is the noise level.  I've been in places were it is impossible to have a conversation and you spend the whole meal yelling at each other jut to be heard.  I think dining experiences would be greatly improved with the introduction of sound proofing of all restaurants.  Things like the shape of the room and the materials used should be played with the find the best possible environment to keep ambient noise down and allow all diners to have conversations. 

All Night Diners

I read a story recently where a couple sat at a table in a restaurant for six hours.  I am a fan of lingering over a meal (though six hours is excessive) but the story was told from the point of view of the restaurant owners.  So, what would be a good way to prevent people from lingering over a table which could sit half a dozen different couple/groups over the course of an evening?  Perhaps restaurants could introduce a surcharge (a percentage of the total bill, perhaps) when a group has been sitting at the table for more than thirty minutes after their last food item arrived.

Fast Food Ordering

I talked above about the idea of ordering food from a touch screen.  I think that this would be a really good idea for fast food restaurants.  Instead of having a server taking orders people could just navigate through a simple touch screen menu system.  This idea could be taken further and have it also dispense the food as well.  Maybe people get a magnetised/chipped card when they order and when the system says their food is done they trade the card for the food.  

Physical Interactions

What are some physical interactions that could be incorporated into the following systems.  Do not need to concern self with practicality with ideas. 

Email

• Have an object shaped like an envelope which you physically pick up and open to open an email. 

• Have physical cards to represent the emails, then a set of physical inboxes to represent folders - maybe a file-a-fax. 

• Scrunch up an email and throw it in a physical bin.

Twitter

• Tweets on index cards

• Post-it notes - you get a stack of them and then you have a corkboard to place the ones you like on, like keeping quotes or notes and pictures from your friends.

• Have little figurines which represent your friends/people you follow and you place them on a particular spot/stand to view that person's feed.

Super Mario Bros

• Have a trampoline to bounce on to get Mario to jump. 

• A seesaw you can jump on, rock side to side to get Mario to walk and jump to jump

• Have a physical puppet which you walk and bounce around.

Reflect and Rewrite

The Questions

• What did you think of the video?
• What things would you have liked to see?
• What was clear?  Were you able to understand the concept?
• What was unclear?
• What do you think of the concept/game?
• What things about the game did you  like?
• What things about the game didn't you like?  How could they be improved?
• Is this the sort of game you would like to play?

Reflection

I had intentionally left the questions very open ended.  The feedback I got was not very quantitive, and I don't think it would be very helpful for producing a report for a manager.  But, as I said this was an intentional move.  

What I wanted from this testing session was to gauge people's responses and feelings about the game.  I also wanted feedback on specific things that people liked and didn't and allow the users to suggest things they would like to see.  The open ended-ness of the questions allowed for this.  Perhaps if I were to do it again I might put in a few "On a scale from 1 to 5 rate your feelings." and mix that up with the open ended questions. 

I am happy with the wording of the questions.  I very carefully chose them so that people weren't prompted towards a specific answer.  I didn't reference any specific features of the game to help avoid this.  I perhaps could have asked more specific questions, like "What did you think of the mine detection system?"

Operationalising + Horizontal, Vertical and Diagonal P'types

Exercise #1 A Dashboard

What components are relevant to driving behaviour?

There are dozens of parts of a car's dashboard that are relevant to driving.  The steering wheel, the horn, the speedometer, the rev-counter, the fuel gauge, the indicators, the windscreen wipers, the windscreen, the rear view mirror, the side mirrors, the clutch, break, accelerator, gear stick, hand break, and even the hazard lights switch.

What are the interactions of those components with the driver when driving?

The steering wheel turns, the dashboard has readouts, the indicator makes a noise and flashes a light, the clutch/gears can be determined by the sound of the engine, the responsiveness of the car and the rev counter.  Most of the feed back is visual with some auditory and some physical (the wheel, for example).

What would I test?

If I was changing the setup I'd play with the pedals.  I'd try and make it so a paraplegic could use the car (I know there are options on the market already, but it's the thing I'd want to change.)  I'd maybe try having something where you squeeze the steering wheel for acceleration and possibly move the horn to make room in that space for the break.  Maybe something voice activated?  Maybe it can detect when you turn the wheel and adjusts the speed accordingly.  I don't know, that's what I'd play with. 

How would I test?

Rather than making a whole car I might make use of a driving simulator on the computer.  I'd make a console peripheral and test these ideas with that.  I'd be probably try get a higher number of people who've never driven before to test the system so that they don't spend so long just doing thing automatically. 

Exercise #2 Alarm Clock

Horizontal

A horizontal prototype for the alarm clock might be a p'type to test the shaking motion to snooze the alarm.  You could set up a Pringles container with some rice in it and get people to shake that to test the concept. 

Vertical

A vertical prototype might be setting up a daisy-chain of alarms.  In high detail you make it so you can set many alarms, but don't worry about anything else. 

Diagonal

A diagonal p'type might be creating a system which you can use to set and alarm, change the tone on it and then edit it before deleting it.  This tests a series of interactions, but doesn't have full functionality of the finished product. 

Mixed/Augmented Reality P'type

An augmented reality prototype is a prototype - something to test an idea - within the physical world using virtual reality technology.

An example of this might be a shower, you want to test the best way to turn on a shower (or, at least, another way).  You have several ideas, but you don't want to physically build them all, so you create digital versions of them and place them within a virtual environment which you can then interact with using something like the oculus.  Using this method you could test many different ideas very quickly without having to physically build anything.  Continuing with the shower idea you could create a VR wall mounted touch screen, then as you are testing you could change the interface between tests without having to go in and fiddle with the display.

You could use augmented reality to prototype out a work space.  You can set up a virtual computer desk and move things around the space easily - you can have different desks with specialised sections for different items and swap the desks out between tests.  You can test what the best place for the scanner is and if you should have a shelf that slides out or a hydraulic lift that rises it up out of the floor in a glowing mist of niftiness without having to build or create anything physical - which might take lots of time and money for an idea that proves ridiculous.

VR could also be used to plot out a garden or landscaping project.  Moving tons of dirt around can be expensive, choosing the plants and putting in features such of fountains would be a big waste if  you end up not wanted them, so why not build a VR version of the garden to walk through before you spend all that money creating the real thing.

What is Prototyping?

What is a prototype?  On the surface this is a fairly easy question, but one that when thought about terns out to be much more complex.  I used to think that a prototype is like a draft, something built to show what the final product is going to be like.  It uses cheaper materials, perhaps it uses plastic instead of metal, and it's a bit rougher than one might expect.  Have you seen the first Iron Man movie?  Of cause you have, everyone has seen that movie, it's a good movie.  When Tony Stark first built his Iron Man suit in the lab (not the one in the desert, thought that, in hindsight, is also a prototype) was what I pictured a prototype to be.  Something that's nearly fully formed, but is still a bit rough.

Obviously this image of what a prototype is is very limited.  A prototype doesn't have to be as fully formed as that, it doesn't even have to have physical form.  It is basically anything which a person can use to test an idea.  It can be telling someone about the idea over coffee, all you need to do is have it testable - and all you need to test an idea is to ask someone what they think (in the coffee scenario).

You can also test an idea by building something, testing the physical thing that you've built.  You could build a car and test it by driving it around and making sure the physical components don't explode, you could test a cat toy by creating something and giving it to a cat and watching as the cat completely fails to cooperate, you can test a website by scribbling it on bits of paper and having someone pretend to use it as though it were real.

Anyway, that's what I think a prototype is: something testable. A terribly broad definition, but there it is.