Seminar 2 - Summary

Recollection of discussed topics during seminar 2

• We have learned the importance of evaluating, but sometimes it is hard to user-test something beforehand (scale, patents, secrecy). We also discussed ways to circumvent this.
• For testing our own design, we could use testing in the wild: adding markers and prototypes to the SL stations, and have people try to accomplish tasks (getting from A to B while using our prototype app). This would be testing in a natural setting involving users.
• We could use people from Copenhagen (which has a similar system in place) to heursitically evaluate our prototype and tell us what they feel are the good parts and bad parts of our system when it is adjusted to Stockholm.
• We could also take Stockholmers to Copenhagen and let them see what they like and don’t like about that system, and see how they compare it to stockholm.
• This would be be a kind of triangulation: we see the problem both from the perspective of users who have used it for a long time, and users who are using it for a first time. Their combined heuristics would give us a better view of the actual good and bad sides of our idea.
• Also, Opportunistic Evaluation is a thing that we can actually, practically do (not assuming infinite resources etc). We could even ask the group we’re presenting to what they think, since they are almost surely users of the public transportation. We can also interview people in the subway and present our design to the, ask what they think.
• We discuss how we should evaluate the different parts of our designs, since it is quite broad. It might be good to evaluate each part on its own, ut we also need to evaluate the whole together since we need to know how well the prats cooperate.

State of the art analaysis - Summary

Doing our state of the art analysis’ we had a broad perspective to try gather as much diverse and useful insights posible to what might be useful for our own project. This made ofcource that common ground for all of them was hard to find but a few topics that was brought up in most was regarding information.

            What information are available for the user?

            Is the information easy accessible?

            Is it well presented?

            Is it useful?

A repeated opinion during the interviews was the frustration when forced to make a choice without any information i.e. when there’s major delays, should one wait for the train or try an alternate itiniary, if so which one? Two of the state of art analyses regarded interaction design based on real-time information and both have shown good results in user satisfaction. The information is often times already acessable for the designers such as precise locations of transport because necessary technology is already in place. The issue lies to transform the data to a user oriented purpose. The most critical information for users must be accurate and easy aviable.

It might also be fair to compare the SL app to more generalized travel applications such as Google maps. What SL lacks is the integration of other means of travel such as riding a bike to the train and when leving the train show a map to the destination wished for. To make the app useful doing things that naturally combines with travel might increase satisfaction with the app.