Week 13 - The real test (user testing)

Weekly summery

after the session on Sunday and a meeting with Maya, we started to test our first paper prototypes. We decided to test two kind of pretotypes:

1. Radio-like machine that is on the table and is playable by pushing buttons.

2. Piano-mat (similar to the movie Big) in which you play by jumping on the keys.

We created a few customs made, altered songs to test our participants (for example we knew choose songs that our participant liked and change the tempo and changed a few notes to simulate a real player that send them a song).

Before the each experiment the participant, psychological form describing his/her relations at work, and the current environment. the premise of the game was explained to each participant: “this colleague from work played this sound on the game and sent it to you to guess, you will need to play it as the game instruct and afterwards you will listen to the song, if you guess correctly you and your colleague will earn a point.”

then each participated play the game and after they answer a psychological questionnaire and an experience questionnaire (examples for the answers are in the end).

https://forms.gle/b6EbF7WMU9dPtDRv9

https://forms.gle/jHhHyNRtR9GdGKMg7

in the technological standpoint we faced some issues with timing the music with the LEDs and using non-blocking libraries in order to play notes in parallel to the lights and connect it to the buttons – we ironed out most of the bugs.

On Thursday, in our meeting with Oren, after more consideration regarding our original goal and problem which is “creating a meaningful interaction in the workplace” we understood that our solution might not solve that problem, and we made a pivot to creating a new musical instruments that will allow 2 or more co-workers to play together simultaneously from different location and without prior knowledge of music.

For that we needed to design a couple of different instruments each with particular sound and unique way to play:

· Percussion instrument– to allow for a certain bit to be played.

· Melodic instrument – preferably wind instrument (for a more personal feeling).

· and perhaps more instruments to come.

Our key design principles are:

1. It should not resemble any known instrument – in order to remove any preconception regarding it.

2. Anybody – regardless of their musical knowledge should be able to play this game.

3. It should work simultaneously of close to simultaneously.

Next steps – testing our paper prototype / first design – is it playable, is it fun, what can we add or change in order to make it better?