Reading Seminar 2 Conclusions

During this reading seminar we discussed the aspects of the evaluation process that are most relevant to our project. In particular we identified the following areas: Bias control, controlled testing, different evaluation methods and usability paradigms. In particular interest during the seminar was the area of bias control. To what extent ought we accept bias in the evaluation process? Can bias even be avoided?

As engineering students we are naturally attuned to abhor bias, it mucks up data and worsens not only our efficiency but also our productivity. However this was an eye-opening seminar for many of us as, in the field of  human-computer-interaction, avoiding bias, personal or user bias, is almost impossible. As such we had to start thinking about alternative models in which we not only acknowledge the bias but also work around it. In our case we are to let students from other groups evaluate our product and as such we are unable to get a truly unbiased evaluation (seeing as it is highly unlikely that our peers would speak their mind if they thought ill of our product) and thus our teacher assistant advised us not to waste our precious design-time worrying about bias but rather focus on making the prototypes better so that bias would be diminished.

Another area of discussion during the reading seminar was the extent to which already established frameworks could be applied to our evaluation process. As the efficiency and reliability of our evaluation process is paramount it seemed, to our group, that using a already widely tested evaluation framework would be highly fortuitous. Among the frameworks we investigated it was the DECIDE framework In particular that stood out accepted to our group as the best mode of evaluation and we aim to continue using this framework.

During the main introductory phase of gathering information about our target group we visited Fotografiska Muséet. The time of our field study happened to coincide with a rather idle period at the museum and therefore the number of visitors was quite low. This presented a problem for us since the idea for our product is mainly intended for periods of high pressure when there are queues and visitors might have a hard time finding a place to sit in the cafeteria for example.  Bearing this in mind, we’ve had to make sure that we kept the “intended” situation in mind when designing our prototype rather than the one we actually found ourselves in when conducting the research.