This just in!
“Technology allows more people to tell more stories in more ways. Storytelling knows no boundaries.”
― Donna Talarico, Selected Memories: Five Years of Hippocampus Magazine
Our kick-off meeting was an astounding success, everyone was super engaged and open about their thoughts and experiences with digital television (DTV). While certain preliminary questions were answered, we had even more questions that needed digging into. We began by casting a wide net, aiming to understand how users interact with their television, in what capacity does the television play a role in their lives, and what are some spaces within their day-to-day that the television could occupy?
To continue the ball rolling on our engagement with our clients during the kick-off meeting, we set up a standing weekly meeting to discuss upcoming questions and relevant topics as we progress through the project.
We hit the ground running with our research by planning out our remote research plan. Our client traditionally finds value by starting from the nascent technologies, which is in stark contrast to our work, which will aim to find value starting from the users. It was important for us to demonstrate the value of this alternate mode of need-finding and the validity of its methodology to our client.
The methods of choice for our remote research were a pair of contextual inquiries (one for DTV and another for emerging tech) and a diary study. The DTV contextual inquiry aims to gather stories of lived experience with DTV and understand motivations within context, while the emerging tech contextual inquiry aims to examine experiences and impressions with nascent tech, also within context. The diary study serves to collect user interaction patterns with DTV and various technologies over multiple days. This will give us a view into the roles of digital content in conjunction with their lives and where it doesn’t.
During all of this, we also delved into the making of our pretotypes, a kind of pre-prototype that would allow us to extract valuable information about the end goal by loosely replicating the parts of the end-experience that convinces or dissuades us of its validity. We decided to base our pretotypes on the results of a reversing assumptions activity that we had conducted with our clients. Our explicit goals of the pretotypes were to explore the reversed assumptions, investigate factors of immersion within the television experience, and examine them all in a social context. Though these pretotype designs were loosely inspired by emerging technologies, our focus is not to investigate the user experience of these emerging techs, but the television experience that they can afford.
Our first pretotype is a Context-aware Television. We have a person controlling the “TV”, which is actually a projector mounted onto a wheely chair or longboard that is then used to follow the user around the space. During the experiment, feedback will be provided based on user input through a Wizard of Oz methodology. We will ask users to describe their thoughts and actions as they are performing the tasks, and, once the tasks have been completed, we will ask users a series of post-task questions where necessary to understand their thoughts on the television experience compared to what they are used to.
Our second pretotype is a complete immersion experience where the users are provided 3D glasses and two synchronized audio outputs are choreographed to match the 3D video.
These pretotypes aim to see what elements of these experiences enhance or take away from the experience of television, and also to examine how users consume the experience in conjunction with everyday comings and goings.
That is all for this week, make sure to stay tuned for more on the results of our studies and insights as well!
