Week 4: Contact Session Exercises

In today's contact session we were presented with more about different types of prototypes:

• Low fidelity / High fidelity
• Exploratory / Experimental / Operational
• Horizontal / Vertical / Diagonal
• Global / Local

These all are different ways to clarify the various goals and scope a prototype has.

After the explanations of each of these types of prototypes, the class was tasked with 2 exercises:

Exercise #1 Car Concept 

What are the functional components?

Our group listed, in no particular order:

• Dashboard controls, speedometer, tachometer, indicator/wiper controls
• Keys, Seats, Steering Wheel, Pedals, Hand brake, gearstick, mirrors, seat belt
• Radio, AC controls, window controls, seat adjustment control
• Displays, controls for the the display, GPS

Replacing a functional component

Our group discussed a few ideas, such as replacing steering with a trackball, or even using brain waves. The concept we chose involved replacing a car's accelerator pedal with a control based on eye-tracking and monitoring driver concentration. When a driver is looking to the road, this enables the car to accelerate. When the driver takes their eyes off the road, for example if they become distracted by their phone or fall asleep, this prompts the car to slow down and even stop.

Uses facial recognition to analyse the driver's level of emotion/concentration, and this could controls the speed. 

Low-fidelity prototyping
Our group decided the purpose of the prototype would be to test the driver's tolerances of concentration and their current behaviours. For example how long would a driver look away from the road to check blind spots, or check for other traffic. A lo-fi prototype could be a video shown on a monitor place in front of the driver, when the driver looks away, the tester would take note of what they were doing and for how long. Another idea was a driving simulation game, where the user was in control of the steering, but the tester was in control of the speed. The tester would watch the user, and whenever their eyes went away from the screen, the tester would slow down the acceleration.
Another idea I had, which is not entirely lo-fi, but it could use a special car with brake/accelerator pedals on the passenger's side (like those used by driving instructors). The driver would only steer, and the tester would only be watching the driver's responses to inform the acceleration/braking. This would have to be done in a controlled environment though. This way it could be easier to test in other scenarios, such as different weather conditions or time of day.

Exercise #2 Smart phone alarm clock app

The last task for this session was to the design a horizontal, vertical and diagonal prototype each for an alarm app which:

• Can set, edit & delete multiple alarms
• Can daisy-chain alarms -if one is allowed to ring out, another is activated automatically
• Can set different tones for different alarms
• Shake phone to snooze

Horizontal prototype:
A horizontal prototype basically shows the wide range of features, but without any of the functional deep interactions. This prototype could be the home screen of the app, it would show the button for creating a new alarm and would list any existing alarms and their details below, with a link to edit and delete these. Of course there would be no functionality, it would only be used for showing the front end "dashboard" a user would see when they first open the app on their phone and the possible points for which they can possibly interact with.

Vertical prototype:
A vertical prototype is essentially the opposite of the horizontal version, where it only really concentrates on showing one feature, but delves deeper into it's interaction and functionality.
The alarm app vertical prototype will focus only on the functionality of daisy chaining alarms. The prototype will start the user at the home screen, the user will create a new alarm, then choose the "daisy chain" option. They then can create the first alarm, choosing it's settings. The user can then add another alarm choose it's settings again and again until they are satisfied. Once this is done, the daisy chain of alarms will be added. The user can then see this from the home screen and edit or delete it if they choose. All the other app functions would not be available to the user.

Diagonal Prototype:
This type of prototype is a mix of both horizontal and vertical, but doesn't have the complete functionality of the final app. It can be used to follow a particular task flow.
The prototype could expand on the home screen functionality, with the ability to explore different sections of the app, showing the user interactions with the various interactive buttons and other elements. The user will be given a task to complete, for example choosing a tone for the alarm. They can navigate through the different features of the app to find where they can complete this task, but the functionality would not work for all of these, only the settings to change the alarm tone.