Theme 5: Design research

I have read the paper Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration, written by Haibo Li and his colleagues. When reading the text I reflected on the following questions:

What role will prototypes play in research?

Why could it be necessary to develop a proof of concept prototype?

What are characteristics and limitations of prototypes?

I think that prototypes play an important role in research and design processes. To make prototypes in a early stage of the process increases the chances that the process are moving in the right direction, and you can soon change and solve any problem with the product. Because of this you can reduce the costs and improve the product so that the users will be satisfied and the sale of the product might increase.

It is a difficult thing to predict what a user will request, therefore it is important to make thorough and developed prototypes. Since all people are different, have different requirements and also previous experience prototyping is an important part of the design process. To get a sense of how the product will be received by future customers you need to manufacture a product that is as similar as possible to the final product. Participants must be able to see the product in front of them and get a chance to feel and squeeze the product to get a good idea of the final product. Simply analyse the product by using qualitative or quantitative methods are not enough to get enough response from the participants.

To test the prototype on participants is a way to test usability. The authors of the text use the ISO Recommendations for developing a prototype and measuring three different aspects of usability; effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

A good prototype can also measure how easy the final product will be to manage and how easy it will be to learn the product's features. Just as Haibo Li describe in the text one of the main characteristics of new technologies is that the product is easy to assimilate and learn. Is it too difficult, I think you lose many users' interests.

The vibrations development that describes in the text is a new development and is not previously available on the market, that makes it important to measure usability after the participants have been trained and practice the system.

In design projects like this, where it is a pretty advanced technology, the prototypes need to be worked through. I think it's difficult, as a designer to determine what might be misunderstood or what may be deficiencies of the product, therefor its requires thoughts and opinions from outsiders.

As development in the text requires that the test persons can test the product as accurate as possible. A sketch or questionnaire would not be able to provide the feed-backs that you need. This means that it takes more energy and money to create a prototype that can provide the participants experience of the final product.To keep costs down, I think it is good idea to make many prototypes that are continuously tested on the participants, to avoid that the prototype is lacking and the whole design process must start over.

Because of differences in materials, processes and design the prototype can not be designed exactly like the finished product, this can obviously do that the survey will not be accurate.