Mobile Media Design

Print screen of the prototype

This semester I’ve been taking a course called mobile media design at the institute of media and communication. As the course description says the goal was to be trained in exploring the possibilities for mobile media design, while gaining a basic knowledge about the main obstacles and how to overcome them, through a practical, project-based approach in which we would develop our own prototype of a mobile web application.

Scrum

I worked in a team of five people, three students from the institute of informatics and two from the institute of media and communication. The purpose of the this course was to learn about agile design and development methodology, such as SCRUM. The whole project was built around the Scrum-methodology, and since we did not have that much experience with scrum and we had to do the design, user testing and programming in parallel we had some trouble estimating the time. As a result of this we had to do some cuts in the product backlog halfway in order to have a potentially shippable product by the end of the last sprint.

Scrum Board

User testing of pencil sketches

Questionnaire

Usability testing

Idea

We came up with an idea about making a small talk app. We had all been in situations where the conversation does not go as smooth as one would like, this app would help us avoid these awkward situations and keep the conversation going by providing you questions sorted by context and categories.

The research question we wanted to answer in this project was:

“How can an app be used to enhance a conversation, and is it socially acceptable?”

This question could only be answered by trying out the application which made user testing extra important. We did testing throughout the whole project, from low fidelity pencil sketches to high fidelity prototype on iphones. The feedback we got from the testing helped us to map the user needs and gradually shaped the application. To answer the research question we tested the application on some fellow students in the cafeteria at the university. Some people made their friends aware of the app, while some tried to use it in secret. All the testers  used random questions from the app and did not select questions based on the context or category. After having tested the application we did some short interviews about their experience. The result was that some of the questions seemed a little bit weird and did not fit the situation, however whether the app was visible or not it did work as a conversation starter. For instance some people had a long conversation about cat vs. dogs. What was interesting about this was that most people said that they could have used the app, but was not sure they would like if someone used it on them. This brings us back to the research question whether it is acceptable to use it in a social setting. This is a hard question to answer, but we concluded that it all depends on the user and how the app is used.

The users framed the use of the app differently than we’ve originally planned, most people used the app out in the open, in stead of hidden, which surprised us. Why would they show it? One theory is that since it is a bit frowned upon to use an app to help you think of things to say. In stead they used it as a tool in the conversation, by saying things like «let’s look at these funny questions!», and that way they made it socially acceptable.

Individual paper

In addition to the project I wrote an individual paper, describing the work process and discussing design in scrum and Donald Schöns concept of reflection-in-action. Here is the paper if you are interested in reading it.

Promo

We also made a cheesy video we made for our presentation: