Assignment-7

Interviewing Potential Users of “friend forever”:

For obtaining feed back of our application (friend forever), we interviewed 3 potential users of our product. We were quite cognisant in selecting people for interview. We wanted to select people from different categories in terms of age, professionalism, physic, and health.

We differentiated users by willingness for tentative product use, like users who are already willing or ready to buy such kind of products. Users, who need to be convinced for the use of such products. And patients, for them such kind of products are ultimate necessity not luxury.

Interview Protocol:

We tried to adopt peer to peer communication or interviewing protocol. This kind of protocol is used for knowing potential users and their response towards upcoming product. 

Although we are working in group of 4 persons but we selected 2 people who are quite good in communication and specially have reasonable patience for interviewing the users. If we go in group of 3 or 4 to users then users feel that they are more under observation than being interviewed. We have experienced this while interviewing users in assignment 5 that’s why we tried to overcome this flaw.

We prepared interview questionnaire before visiting users. We never wanted to ask random questions which may lead to fuss. We tried to address all potential aspects of our product about which we were required to inquire from users. And we were keeping on revising our questionnaire based on experience of past interviews.

Users Profile:

Sufian "the convinced user": Sufian, as his personality portrays, is kind of a person who cares a lot about his health and specially his physic. An unmarried, 26 years old Moroccan male and 5th year student of political science diplome, who loves to get up early in the morning and enjoy “Morning Walk”. To work in paper production factory as a part time worker is not difficult for him rather enjoyable, because his physic allow this and his job amplify his body building interest. Being a mentally and physically fit man, he tries to solve every problem in term of mechanics.

Wheelesa "the hesitate user": Wheelesa, a cooperative beautiful British lady, who has just spent 22 springs of her life, is quite happy on being a 4th year student of   information sciences in University of Bonn and feels proud of being part of an Astronaut’s family in Köln because she works for  an Astronauts Training Group(ATG) in Köln. The best part of her job is that her boy friend also works in the same institution and heavenly on the same project. You can’t see her without CHOCO`LATE and she never mind calories which she already have enough because she is sure enough that she is not a future astronaut.  She is quite careless about her health and never burned some of her calories. On the other hand she is worried about her weight and want to do something without being disturbing daily schedule.

Christiana "the welcome user": Christine is 64 years old German woman who has been retired from Deautsche Post and spending her retired life with her husband in Augustinum. The pleasant surprise of her personality is that she is fluent in English.  She is a diabetic patient and suffering from very severe problem of high blood sugar rate. She is not only taking care of her own diseases but also her husband’s high blood pressure problem. She is quite enthusiastic and willing for living healthy and wealthy life. She considers herself in 30s and believes that she will start feeling old, if she will stop smiling and enjoying.

Interview Findings

We started our interviews by giving short overview of friend forever’s highlighted features and showed our users the typical flow of the application. We also showed them Storyboards and discussed the scenarios, we addressed in storyboards.

We interviewed Sufian in his room on a Saturday which was an off day for him. He was sitting quite relaxed and was not in any hurry for anything. After giving him complete introduction, he was not quite convinced that friend forever should also teach the user different type of exercises interactively. He said, it is not a good technique and user may get confuse or may do it in a wrong way. So it is better to learn by the help of doctors or instructors. He has been working on diet plans and weight reducing exercises, so he had a better idea of this. He asked us to make a mechanism for recording daily based progress, not weekly or biweekly. He said that users may loose heart if they don’t see a big change after a week, so it would be a good idea to record progress on daily basis for diet and exercise plans and let them update their selves on daily basis.

We interviewed Wheelesa in her apartment on Sunday. She was there with her boyfriend and already waiting for us with prepared mind. We introduced her with the “friend forever”. She really liked the feature of selecting weight reducing exercises based on her favourite games and selection of diet plan among her favourite dishes. She was not looking convinced with idea of speech based inputs. She had reservations because she was not quite comfortable with the previous voice based systems. “Especially you have to speak again and again for letting the system recognize you”, she said. She was looking for other alternatives too. She was also very enthusiastic and said that it would be a good feature in such kind of devices if they just stop her for not doing anything against her diet plan by force.

We interviewed Chrsitiana in her apartment in Augustinum. Our interview contemplation some how started before scheduled time because we met her in bus. She was going back from market to home and we were on our way to her home too. As usual we gave her complete introduction about highlighted features of friend forever. Her husband was also interested in listening and participating so we also welcomed him.

She was very convinced with the idea of “friend forever” and especially the name of the project. The most favourite feature for her was emergency treatment based on the problems suffering at particular time. She was not very much interested in any other type of input mechanism but voice based. She said “if it is my friend then I should be able to talk to it not like dumb computers”.

When she suffered by high sugar problem, she has to take medicines in particular order and time intervals. But in that disease she said her mind doesn’t work properly and there are many chances of having wrong medicine. She wanted to have a feature and specially voice based for this problem. She wanted to give voice based command that she is having trouble or “high sugar” or some customized words and “friend forever” automatically displays and start speaking the list of appropriate treatments.   

She was not worried about user interface as such. She wanted her diet to be controlled, she wanted her exercise to be on time with tracking and she wanted an ultimate automated treatment.

Modified Design

After careful observations and criticism on our first proposal/design and welcoming feedback on our preliminary proposal by users, we made several changes. We realized that we are trying to address a very broad concept and trying to have over realistic features. Our original idea was quite wide, and we have tried to make it realistic. We are no longer stick with the idea of “friend forever EVERYWHERE”. We have made our domain focused on health supporting features only. We have eliminated many features based on user requirements and came up with new features as asked by user. We are no more supporting the idea of “exercise teaching” for normal users or patients. We are just including video clips for different exercises which can be used only for support purposes and interactivity feature has been removed.

The feature of friend forever which can help the user interactively in shopping health oriented food was not welcomed by users and that’s why has been removed.

The design principles of our revised proposal are directly based on the user’s feedback.

Friend forever will be such an intelligent application that it will treat a patient based on voice commands same as doctor treats in the case of an emergency.

We came up with this design principle because one of our users was very much interested in this feature or deign aspect of our application. In other words her main purpose of using friend forever was this.

Friend forever will not only be voice enabled but it will also provide users with alternate input mechanism like keyboard and touch screen.

The reason for these alternate inputs was that sometime people don’t feel comfortable with voice based inputs in terms of privacy or poor functionality or some reservations due to poor efficiency of existing voice operated systems.

Friend forever will be well-designed to track diet plans and corresponding exercise on daily basis. User can view and track the progress in terms of hours.

This was an alternation of an existing feature of weekly or biweekly tracking. It was a requirement of one of our users and we were quite convinced with idea.

Assumptions

Cost is a very big factor in success of any device or application but we are not taking care of this aspect because our major concern is interface design.

The size of the device for which friend forever will be designed was also a consideration from user but we are supposing standard handheld device like PDA for our application environment.