Lights, Camera, Research!
(Psst, is the camera on? Ok, perfect! Three, two, one…)
*Ahem…*
It has been a long but eventful 2 weeks here at the Team Patent Pending headquarters (yes, we have finally decided on a team name, and yes, our team name is ‘patent pending’). From think-alouds to diary studies, our team has been hard at work conducting user research and we have started to synthesize our findings.
We know everyone is dying to hear about our research, so, without further ado, let’s just dive right into our first segment…(drum roll please)
A Television…that moves? (The Sequel)
We kicked off Sprint 3 by continuing our pretotype testing. We received a lot of feedback last week about our think-aloud activities, both from our faculty and from our classmates. In general, although we did make interesting observations, there were some areas in our methodology that limited our ability to obtain candid feedback about the television experience.
Initially, many participants were focused on the novelty of the pretotype itself, instead of the television experience resulting from the pretotype. People would say that our pretotypes were “cool” and “very interesting”, which were not very helpful. So, to get this “surprise reaction” out of their system, we extended the duration of the think-alouds by giving participants more time to watch and interact with our pretotypes, and asking questions thereafter.
Another thing we changed from last week was clearly defining what controls were available for the context-aware TV. By leaving the tasks open-ended, participants were unsure what they could or could not do with the pretotype, and hesitated to interact with it as they browsed and watched videos. So, before we conducted the study, we gave them a brief list of functions available for the TV.
With these two tweaks, the observations and data we got from our pretotypes improved significantly. Participants were able to accustom themselves to the pretotypes, and confidently control the TV using the methods of their choice.
In total, we had 7 pretotype sessions: 4 individual sessions and 3 group sessions. From Queen’s Gambit to Plizzanet Earth, we had a great time watching shows with our participants while also probing into their television experience. Personally, I loved watching iCarly with some of the folks during Saturday’s session, but alas, 45 minutes was not enough to binge through all 6 seasons… (unless…)
Now, we are consolidating our notes and findings, and have started to synthesize our data through affinity diagramming. Although we do not have insights yet, just from our observations thus far:
- All participants, whether they are in an individual viewing session, or a group viewing session, passed the Change Blindness Test (or, as we like to call it, the Aaron Test) when they were watching video content using our 3D glasses pretotype with spatial audio. Even though we made sure Aaron was standing within their field of view, all participants did not notice explicit changes in his appearance or position during the show. We inferred from this observation, based on prior research in change blindness, that participants were unable to notice these obvious changes because they were immersed in the content. (How amazing is that?)
- Conversely, when participants were moving around in the physical environment while using the context-aware TV, many said they were distracted by the moving screen and were not focused on the video itself. Some even added that they considered TV to be a “secondary task”, because they were focused on walking to a particular destination to sanitize their hands or pick up objects.
- Although participants had different approaches to controlling a remote-less TV, the majority of participants used a combination of hand gestures and voice input, depending on the function they wanted to execute.
So, as we begin to wind down from our pretotype studies, in parallel, we have begun a new series of studies as well…(drum roll again, please)
The Diary Study Saga (Prologue)
We here at Patent Pending know that think-alouds are not the only method of investigating and understanding TV experiences. Since our goal is to triangulate our data and understand people’s experiences with television and technologies, we will be aggregating this data with our diary studies and contextual inquiries as well.
As a team, we examined the participants we had screened and identified those who would be suited for the diary study, the television contextual inquiry, and the emerging technology contextual inquiry, based on the behavioral characteristics and demographic information they had listed in the screener. We made sure to anonymize participants as we were assigning them to groups, to avoid bias and ensure we had a diverse distribution of participants across each of our 3 studies. Of the 44 participants we had recruited (yes, that was not a typo- we have 44 participants!), 41 of them were eligible to participate in our research. From the 41 responses we received, we ultimately allocated 12 different participants to each of the 2 contextual inquiries, and 10 additional participants to the diary study.
9 of our 10 participants have already scheduled their kickoff sessions, and we have started scheduling times for our contextual inquiries as well. The diary study will officially begin next Monday, March 22nd, and we will be starting our contextual inquiries as early as this week. The grind never stops here at Team Patent Pending, and we are very excited to see —
*Phone ringing*
Oh, I forgot to silence my phone. Sorry, let me take this call.
(Hello, what is it? I’m in the middle of a medium post right now…What? One of our participants rescheduled their diary study kickoff? And it’s happening right now? Ok, I’ll be right there…)
*Ahem…*
So, looking ahead…
As we begin to pinpoint our insights from our think-aloud, and collect even more data through our other primary research, we are looking to identify some initial recommendations and suggestions for our clients at InterDigital through our research. We have had productive conversations with Interdigital about ways to integrate our data with their existing research into novel digital TV content, and we are looking to continue these discussions in the coming weeks as we consolidate our data and insights. This is Team Patent-Pending, signing off!
