a. Describe your partner
Throughout our conversation with him this time in class, we notice that he relies much on his mother about everything. When we are doing user testing of our prototype to him, he responded indirectly to his mother, and then his mother translates the sign language to us instead of trying to communicate directly to us. Most of the time, he is sitting and observing our communication with his mother as an observer. We then decide to have a conversation with him without his mother. In twenty minutes, we type in sentences on the computer and ask him to reply on paper. The conversation carries out very inefficient since it is hard for him to understand the grammar of a sentence. Therefore, we need to paraphrase a lot to confirm he understand our words. Also, he has limited capability of writing Chinese characters and link them into sentences. We spend much time guessing the meaning by applying body senses. After the conversation, we still think he has a strong inner desire to communicate and experience the outside world more. However, since his mother cares too much for him, it seems that he always wants his mother to help him overcome all the obstacles. Moreover, according to his mother, he likes to play computer games and watch online series at home when he is alone.
b. What are their desires/challenges/difficulties?
When we are communicating with him, we notice that since he is used to relying on his mother so much, he is not comfortable communicating with us directly. He also has little language sense, especially for reading and writing. In our WeChat chat, his mother records and describes how he uses the computer to play games and watch TV series. However, he can hardly control the keyboard using his left hand. We categorize the desires/challenges/difficulties for him in the following points:
1. Relies too much on his mother
2. Lack of language senses to communicate with others
3. Want to build a romantic relationship
4. Computer sometimes crashes
5. Difficult to click the keyboard with the left hand while playing the game
c. What is your project? 1 paragraph description + Pictures or Photos or Videos
We abandon our previous idea after the first prototype and user testing since it could not engage him to communicate independently with others, as he says. Therefore, by checking his needs listed above, we think addressing no.5 will be most helpful for him. We are thinking about to build a special keyboard for him to press the key using his feet instead of his hands. For most of the game his mother lists in the group chat, they require the use of four keys to move the figure. Therefore, we may design a five-key keyboard with four direction keys and one function key. We also want the user to customize the key function to make it applicable to more situations.
d. Development process. Include photos and video(s)
This is the prototype for our first idea last week. We abandon this one later.
We have a conversation in the WeChat group. This is the website where he usually visits to play online games.
We then visit this website and plays for a while. Indeed, some games require using the left hand to press keys and the right hand to control the mouse.
We refer our idea to an interactive game Dance Dance Revolution. It demonstrates that feet are capable of controlling the game.
Since we get the information and ideate it a little late, we have not started to prepare materials. However, we do want to test his performance while using the regular keyboard to play games on the computer, and his sensibility of using his feet press the bottom.