Brainstorming

It's time to start our prototyping!

This week our group performed some brainstorming strategies to inspire new ideas for our prototype.

We did some concept-mapping, random word association, and wild idea generation.

Today we're also meeting with Videon Central's CTO, Jim Condon, to present some preliminary
findings from our user experience and usability testing, and to get feedback for our prototype.

Later this week, we'll create some low-fidelity prototypes on paper.

Usability Testing

We finished conducting our aVia usability test on Friday.
The testing was successful with 11 participants and lots of audio & visual data to analyze!
Below are a few photos from the testing...


Welcome to aVia Testing!
Getting organized before the participants arrive.
The e-survey is ready to be completed.
Snacks!

Kate doing a great job facilitating the test.
Our participants in action!
The testing is done! Time to download all of the audio & visual files.

This week our team plans to finish analyzing the data and start on our prototyping.

Related Works: Part 2

As mentioned in Related Works: Part 1, our team recently reviewed previous literature related to media player organization, social networking integration, recommendation integration, and gesture-based controls to help us better understand current research studies in order to inform our usability test and prototype.

Part 1 covered media player organization and social networking integration. This part 2 will finish our related works overview with recommendation integration and gesture-based controls.

photo source: http://www.cityofsound.com/

For recommendation integration, there are many types of recommendation systems, which are complex, contextual, and continuously evolving. For example, there are Amazon.com’s product recommendation, YouTube's "suggestions", StumbleUpon's recommendation, and Pandora's playlists to name a few. For the purpose of this project, we focused on recommendation integration for front-end development and social-sharing. Studies have shown that most users do not want to navigate through genre lists, sliders, and other forms designed to generate preference data; instead, they want the recommendation system to be as "one-click" as possible (Gannes et al., 2011). This desire for simplicity and efficiency is important for our aVia prototype design. Furthermore, although real-life relationships are an important part of social networking and sharing, when it comes to recommendations, research shows that knowing someone in real-life is not a strong indicator of having similar preferences when it comes to online media. Therefore, recommendation systems use clustering, which puts users together based on interests, regardless of their real-life relationship (Gannes et al., 2011).

photo source: Kroeker, 2010

For gesture-based controls, research discusses the use of “proxemics” as a way for users to communicate with media devices (e.g., digital surfaces, portable devices, information appliances) using gesture-based controls in a fun, customizable, and interactive experience. This includes consideration for five key dimensions when designing these types of proxemic systems: distance, orientation, movement, identity, and location (Greenberg et al., 2011). Furthermore, other researchers have discussed the need to explore alternative interface technologies for gesture controls. Various alternatives include putting a touchscreen on the back of devices in order to allow users to use gesture controls without interfering with their view of the screen, using sensors to adapt to pressure of touch, and exploring other types of sensors, such a “scratch input” technique (i.e., user places a device on a table or surface and scratches the area near the device in order to control certain functionalities, such as adjusting the volume of a song) (Kroeker, 2010).  These are all potential design considerations for our aVia app prototype in order to increase the fun-factor of media player interaction.

See Related Works: Part 1 for an overview of the media player organization and social networking integration literature reviews or check out our full related works report.

Related Works: Part 1

Our team recently reviewed previous literature related to media player organization, social networking integration, recommendation integration, and gesture-based controls to help us better understand current research studies in order to inform our usability test and prototype.

photo source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/

For media player organization, researchers emphasize the importance of considering scalability and customizability when designing for media users because of the sheer volume of media consumed and because of the number of devices and personalized organization systems that users already use (Sease & McDonald, 2011). Studies also discuss the importance of the tangible experience of looking through physical media (e.g., CDs, DVDs, photo albums) because it enhances the user enjoyment by involving "the whole human senses" of browsing the shelves, physically touching the media, and hearing other customers talk about the media (Henze & Boll, 2010, p.3980). This helps to inform the design of media players by including album cover art and user commentary in order to simulate this tangible experience.

photo source: http://www.seo.com/

For social networking integration, research states that “object-centered sociality” leads to successful social media experiences because users prefer specific objects (e.g., music, videos, photos) to serve “as anchors for conversations” in their social media experience, as opposed to just discussing people or links to content (McCarthy, 2011, p.17). This type of research demonstrates an opportunity for aVia's media player to provide that object-centered sociality to its users.  In order to do this, several technologies have emerged to fulfill the need of media sharing functionality, especially on social networking sites. For example, cloud technology and DLNA are two widely used technologies for media sharing (Cui, Kim, & Lee, 2011). aVia currently uses DLNA; however, cloud technology is another area for aVia to possibly explore in order to support streaming media. Our team also believes that the aVia "flinging" function may provide a fun, social opportunity for friends to fling media between their devices so that they can co-view/co-listen to media together. This desire to co-experience media together was exemplified during our campus observations when we saw many users sharing headphones or huddled around devices to view and listen to media together.

Look for a post later this week about recommendation integration and gesture-based controls!

For more details, please check out our full related works report.