Participants from the Institution of Vilar talk about their difficulties when interacting with multimedia applications by playing a board game
Publication date: March 17, 2012
On March 16, a brainstorming session was conducted in a day-care centre of Vilar. Then, the mechanisms of interaction with the email and instant messaging services were evaluated through the play of a board game and the integration of card sorting and other participatory design techniques.
Yesterday, at the day-care centre of Vilar, older adults played a board game designed by the SEDUCE research team. This game is composed by 39 squares, a set of instructions that determine the game progress, several tasks that integrate some participatory design techniques and a reward.
The participants chose each team taking into account the gender factor (female vs male), electing a responsible for dictating the final answer to the exercise. The main aim of this activity was to assess subjects' opinions and difficulties related to the interface of the online social community prototype. For that, the participants had to accomplish the following tasks: (a) add contact; (b) understand the metaphor of the opened envelope to messages to read or messages read of the email interface; (c) assign different interface elements to the caption; (d) be familiar with the first draft of IM interface; (f) send messages and attachments to the message.
This exercise incorporated the card sorting technique that aims to validate the terminology ysed in the interface. Then, the research field team reported the process.
“A set of cards were distributed on the table. Them, each participant was asked to associate the cards with a label to the ones with a picture of an opened or sealed envelope. This technique was combined with the Think Aloud protocol in which the group discussed the diferent possibilities, self-correcting [...]. The simulation of the Instant Messaging or the email interface used paper prototyping technique, which allowed us to detect some problems with interface elements, including its positions and metaphors.”- says the researcher on the field.
In the end, the team emphasizes that the presentation and evaluation of these interfaces encourage subjects' communication and their active participation.
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