Current Development

Our previous design aims to allow users to customize the space by going through the customization page before they start to use the main functions. However, many users found that navigating this page difficult and we also thought that this step is relatively redundant for now because the current “customized” effect was very limited (the color of the background changed according to the theme selected). We redesigned the entire application layout so that it highlights only the main feature of our application – providing videos for users to view and relax – while other functionalities, such as theme setting (changing the color of lights) is done “thoughtlessly”, for example, light colors change when the users switch from one category to another one. We aim to provide a simple yet interesting interface for the users.

Introduction

Motivations/Goals:

Our goal is to provide a platform that helps users relax by viewing videos and controlling the environment. By conducting the user testing we hope to uncover and discrepancies between what we may think is intuitive and what our users feel is intuitive. We also want to make sure that our users are relaxing while using our application.

Critical tasks:

1. Are the users actually relaxing?
1. Does lighting control contribute to relaxation?
   1. whether the color itself is soothing
   2. interface - Did you have any issues choosing a color?
   3. response of the environment to user input
2. Does video viewing contribute to relaxation?
   1. whether the video itself is relaxing?
   2. Is the video long enough to the point where it is satisfying and not overwhelming?
3. Is the overall environment relaxing?
   1. Do the gestures take away from the relaxing environment?
   2. Were you frustrated at some point while navigating through the application?
   3. Are you pleased with the design of the interface? Suggestions for improvements?
2. Is the application easy to user?
1. Are the gestures natural?
   1. We would observe repeated mistakes
   2. Note points of frustration

Hypothese:

Relaxation Hypothesis: Spaatify will provide a more relaxing environment by allowing users to have control over their environment while watching videos

Usability Hypothesis: Having all of the controls on one screen allows users to easily access different aspects of the application while also digesting the content of the videos.

Methods

Our Users:

One of the main issues when testing our paper prototypes and first function prototype was that our users weren’t ideal. For this round of testing we are looking for young adults who actually spend time bathing rather than showering. We also accepting people who seem to need some time to relax. Each member of the team is responsible for finding 2-3 users who fall into this category.

Data:

Besides observational information, we plan on giving the users a pre-and post-survey in order to note their preferences for forms of relaxation and their mood quantitatively. We will also have a short discussion for additional feedback and suggestions on the overall experience.

Tasks/Instructions:

After taking the pre survey, the user will have a few minutes to just explore the application. We will observe the initial reactions/actions to the application. This should help us decide if the gestures are as intuitive as we thought. The user will then be given a series of tasks to perform:

1. change the color of the lighting
2. make the video full screen
3. pick a video from a different category
4. ask what gestures seem intuitive for a certain action

Results

Recruiting Users:

Since our application targets at a broad range of users who use bathtub daily, we recruited our 8 testing users from different background, ranging from undergraduates, graduates, and working professionals. We did not intend to recruit a large number of users because it is important to allow each user to experience Spaatify in a relaxing setting, which we had to set up in d-school every time before the tests. Each user spent about 30 minutes to use the application on a 54-inch screen with the kinect and arm chair set-up at d.school.

Staged Testing Strategy:

Although this week’s theme is user testing, we continued to improve our application as we received some insightful feedback. To take advantages of the user testing in a most rapid and effective way, we decided to conduct the tests in two main stages: between the two stages, we can reiterate our design and implementation to fix obvious issues or improve the product based on feedback. Within each stage, we presented the users with the same UI design and functionalities.

Highlights of changes between two stages

1. In Stage 1 tests, users saw a static instruction page which described all the gestures used to navigate the application. However, there seem to be several issues with this approach: (a)Too much text on the screen make it hard to read (b)Users can't remember so many gestures at one time (c)Users try to follow the gestures while they are going through the tutorial, but some gesture will trigger the "dismiss tutorial" function before they finished reading. To address those issues, in Stage 2, we let users go through an interactive tutorial session: for each gesture, we use animation+text to illustrate the point. Moreover, users need to follow the gestures one by one and get them right, before starting to use the application.
2. We noticed the "zoom-out" gesture in Stage 1 is a hard one for Kinect to detect accurately, so we replaced “zoom-out” gesture by “joined hand” gesture to play and stop the video. This also reduced the memorization for users - since now "play" and "stop" video is just toggled by one gesture, which might be more intuitive.
3. UI wise:
   
   • We added description for the cover flow of each video, including: video title, introduction and duration of the clip
   • We noticed that some users didn't notice there is no more video on their right(left) and kept swiping, to give user better feedback information, we added small animation to indicate when the user hits the end of the cover flow.
   • We replaced the icons of categories with those by our design coach, Doug, which made the interface more pleasant and clean.

Originally, we planned to test Philips Hue with four users. Eventually we were able to get some preliminary work done on lighting by Thursday, and we took the advantage to incorporate lighting in two out of total of eight tests.

Organization of the results:

There are three main kinds of data collected:

1. observations by team members during tests (qualitative)
2. feedback from semi-structured interview (qualitative)
3. pre- and post-test survey results (quantitative)

1. Functionality Aspects
1. Lighting:
   • We observed that the users were very impressed by the lighting component of the application.
   • to get the full effect of the lighting we need to build a enclosure for reduce light from other sources.
   • One user reported that she was not aware of the color change for the categories because the space was open and other lighting was present.
2. Video Viewing:
   • Most users raised questions about the volume for the videos.
   • During testing, users asked about the duration of the videos and the content of the videos.
   • Users suggested changing some of the content of the videos, as they might not be very relaxing to view.
   • Users liked viewing short clips, rather than long videos.
3. Feeling of relaxation
   • We observed that, initially, many of our users felt uncomfortable with the gestures or were confused so they did not feel relaxed. Later on, when users started to be able to navigate through the content, we observed that they smiled and showed easeness, especially while viewing the videos.
   • Users told us that once the gestures were learned the app was very relaxing.
   • Users also like the fact the app is video based, which required minimal work from them once the video had started. They could sit back and just relax.
   • The purpose of the survey was to get a sense of the user’s mood before and after the test. The following are the results for the user responses in the form of bar graphs.
   • Survey: We created a survey at stanforduniversity.qualtrics.com. This is a site that is similar to paid online survey service software, such as survey monkey, avaliable to Stanford students. Based on the results from the qualtrics survey questions we created 4 charts to compare the user responses before and after using the application. For each chart we noticed an improvement in the users' mood. After using our application users felt happier, calmer, and more relaxed. They also were not as tired which means that gestures did not take away from the relaxation. Majority of the before-test responses on whether they felt relaxed fell into the "somewhat describes my feelings" or below. The after-test responses were either somewhat describes my feelings or better.

     • Survey results of 8 users about happiness before and after using the app

     • Survey results of 8 users about relaxing before and after using the app

     • Survey results of 8 users about tiredness before and after using the app

     • Survey results of 8 users about calmness before and after using the app



2. Usability Aspect
1. Gestural Interaction
   • We observed that the main gestural issue was closing and opening a video. Users would accidentally switch categories when they wanted to play a video
   • Some users used both left and right hands while navigating the app, while some used only one hand most of the time.
   • There were times when users would use voice control to play the video but that was not a feature of our app
   • Gesture tutorial page
     • - Users seemed to forget some of the gestures after exiting from the tutorial pages
     • - Users initially did not read through the whole interactions pages
     • - to exit from the instructions page you have to swipe up and frequently users would just try to swipe to change categories before swiping up so they were stuck for a while.
     • - Multiple users suggested showing some instructions for the appropriate gestures when the app was in use
     • - Users wanted to have the option to refer back to the instructions page
   • Users tended to execute the joined hands gesture for stopping/playing a video at the same height as swiping through the videos.
   • Users said that it was not clear that the gesture for playing/stopping a video should be below the shoulders, while swiping should be above the shoulders.
   • The app seemed to be over sensitive about users' hand upward movement which would trigger toggling the menu. It was over-sensitive about swiping movement too.

Discussion

Challenges in Testing:

There are several challenges in conducting user tests for our app. First, our app aims to provide the users with a sense of relaxation, a feeling that is abstract and hard to measure. Our team is aware of this issue, and have adopted several measures to enhance the user experience and data collection. For example, we used a standard script to help the user to understand and relax themselves before they started the test. We used the pre-test survey both as a buffer to collect data and get user into the relaxing mode by making them think what relaxation means to them. Also, we compared quantitatively the user’s happiness, tiredness, calmness, relaxation level before and after the test.

Second, although we have tried exploring and brainstormed different on-campus facilities to mimic a bathtub environment, we experienced difficulties in asking users to actually go into a bathtub and try the app. To mitigate the issue of not being able to set up in a real bathtub, we set up every test in d. school, which is spacious and well-equipped with big projection screen and arm chairs. We invited our testees over to d.school, and blocked off their schedule for at least 30 minutes to conduct the test, such that they felt that the time was used exclusively for testing.

Moreover, there are several different kinds of feedback the users would received as they interact with the app. The user will see the main page of the app changing as they navigate the app, watch the video, listen to the audio from the video clips, and also see the light color changing according to video selection. The setup of the test is challenging in order to provide the user the full experience. Due to limited time and resource constraint, we could not set up the audio and lighting fully, but these two aspects will be addressed in our tests for prototype 2.

Data Collection Discussion:

We designed the tests such that they answer the two big hypotheses we had: 1. Is using the application relaxing? (functionality) 2. Is the application intuitive to use? (Usability) We think that the approach to break down the high level hypotheses into several sub-questions is effective. This helped us to organize users’ feedback and our observation into meaningful way which can directly inform our design.

When evaluating the gestural interaction aspect of the application, we noticed that there was a steep learning curve of performing the designed gestures. Several users saw the team performing gesture calibration prior to their tests, they seemed to get the gestures faster and were able to use the application smoother than others. Having some users seeing our gesture demonstration might have enhanced their learning of the right gestures, and might cause an unequal starting level across different users.

Discussion of the results

1. Design of Lighting:

   In the last two user tests, we implemented the Philips Hue lighting with one bulb only. However, one user did not seem to notice that the light color was changing colors when she selected different categories. Another user noticed the light color change half way into the test and was amazed by this. We were not able to get sufficient and rich feedback regarding the lighting because the users did not notice it.

2. Video Viewing Experience:

   We found that the users in general like short clips, however, not all of the short clips were entertaining or attractive to them. Some users were not interested in the content of the videos and they just quickly “flipped” through. This might be due to the fact that the video cover flow present little information about the video and users had to guess the content, and also the nature of the videos themselves. Users also considered audio as an important component to the experience as well.

3. Feeling of Relaxation:

   Our results for relaxation were based on the survey results and feedback from users. We originally set it up so that the users would let us know how they felt at the moment and they also ranked activities based on how relaxing they are. After much thought we decided to stick with just the main four questions because the ranking return insufficient data.

   At first, we did not intend to analyze the survey results separately for Stage 1 and Stage 2 users. We gave the same survey address to every user and the results for different users are aggregated automatically by the software. We can't differentiate between the specific users so we just evaluated the survey as a whole. Based on the survey results we can see that the users generally were more relaxed after using our application. Studying the results from surveys, the overall improvement of feeling relaxed showed that our users felt more relaxed after using our application. This proves our relaxation hypothesis and shows us that our users are able to play with our application and navigate through it without taking away from the main goal of relaxation.

4. Gestural Interactions:

   We initially assumed that the gesture for playing/stopping a video should be simple and intuitive enough for the users to learn because it was different from the rest of the gestures. In Stage 1 tests, the users had to do “zoom-in” to play videos and join their hands to stop playing. We found that the “zoom-in” gesture required very specific angle setting of the kinect and the seating style of the users. All users from Stage 1 reported issues with this gesture and we decided to change the gesture to join hands to play in Stage 2.

   We found that users learned better with interactive gesture tutorial in Stage 2 tests and were able to use the app in a coherent way sooner than those in Stage 1. Also, the users had to somehow learn the gestures by experiencing after the app started even though they went through the tutorial. There was a learning curve in gesture control but in general users took about less than 5 minutes to be able to master the gestures.

   Some users demonstrated to us some swiping left or right, and up gestures that we did not expect at all before. It was useful to observe what they did naturally such that we could design our gestural control more suitable to a wide range of users.

Implications

Lighting:

• During the tests, we found that the effect of changing light color was not apparent mainly because there was too many other source of lighting in the open area. Therefore, we plan to build an special enclosure to block out distractions from other sources.
• We plan to implement automatic change of the color scheme of the lights when different categories are selected and automatic change of light brightness when the videos play/stop.
• Users were amused by the color effect. We plan to set the theme of the environment by using three bulbs of different soothing colors but within similar theme.

Video Viewing:

• As informed by the results of Stage 1 testing, we added descriptions and duration for each of the videos. This caught the attention of the users and they seemed to have more interested in playing the videos given the brief description. We plan to keep the texts in the second prototype.
• We are going to replace some of the videos so that they are better suited for certain categories.
• We are going to set up sound system when testing with users for prototype 2, however, we will not prioritize implementing volume control because other features, such as video playing and lighting are more effective to provide the feeling of relaxation to the users.

Feeling of Relaxation:

• We realized that in order to allow user to get into the mood of using bathtub, we need to create a special environment for the users to have similar feelings as in a bathroom. we plan to build an enclosure of about 5ft by 10ft and users have to enter the area to use the application. We will also limit one user at a time so they have the sense of privacy and enclosure. We continue to discuss with the teaching staff for getting the consent for the space on the demo day.
• We will keep calibrating the gestures such that users can navigate the application with ease and intuitively.
• We also plan to find comfortable arm chair to mimic the bathtub setting.
• We also thought of having users wearing a bathrobe when they use the application.

Gestural Interactions:

• Since our app involves several specific gestural controls, we provide a short tutorial to teach the users the different gestures in the beginning. We found that interactive tutorial is a better way for users to learn about the gestural control than the static instruction page. We will keep the interactive component of the tutorial.
• Moreover, we discovered that presenting real-life demonstration was actually the best way for the users to learn by seeing. Therefore, we plan to play video of team member demonstrating the gestures in the interactive tutorial.
• It is also possible to design the instruction panel such that users and refer to later in the application.