During user testing, one project that caught my eye was the project that simulated a road trip. This project was very engaging because the user was given many options to choose from, leading to many surprising experiences. For example, I was very impressed by the night time option, which turned on your car lights, two strips of leds. I also enjoyed the extra thought into making the interaction more car like, in that the user needed to press on a pedal to start the experience.
Other projects that impressed me were a project that mapped your hand gestures to a processing canvas and allowed you to save or delete your sketch, and another hat project in which the user had to physically move up and down to eat jellyfish to gain points. The project that involved drawing in the air reminded me of google’s tilt brush and the game project’s graphics and presentation were very polished.
During user testing, our car refused to move, which did not enable us to have the fullest user testing. However, through demonstrating how our project was supposed to function, we received feedback that we’ll be implementing. Because our project is meant to be a software that initiates when a user is using social media, it is difficult to make its function obvious in a presentation setting. One student suggested that we include a page in the beginning that tells a user to browse facebook in a new tab. Another piece of advice we were given was that some projects reflected better on video rather than in a presentation setting, and that we should make sure to take a video reenacting how a user would interact with our project. A few people also mentioned to us to use a shorter cord and to make sure the cord wouldn’t disconnect from the computer, because our goal was to drag the laptop using our car. Marcela suggested that we put our laptop on wheels to make sure the cord did not disconnect.
One thing we also need to make clear is that our project is more a statement about how much we consume social media, and makes it tougher for users to access social media by penalty, physically dragging away their laptop, and admonishing users every time they open social media using gifs or self reflection tactics.
Post user-testing
I tried to debug what was wrong with our car for the past few days, recoding both at home and in the lab. I found it very strange that our project was not running as it was working in the morning, with the same exact code. However, I thought it was a serial communication code error, as I kept getting an error message about my port. Today, I debugged step by step and decided that my code was fine. By chance, I happened to reposition the battery and the car started working again. However, I retested a few times after, and got an error message again, and was also not able to reupload code onto arduino; there were problems with the usb port I had been using. After this debugging, I have determined that the errors in our project come from hardware rather than code.