Week 13
This week was our final week of playtesting at the MuseumLab! It’s been incredibly helpful to our design to be able to iterate over the course of the week. We returned to the Museum a few times this week to observe and make adjustments, and then also playtested during the STEAM Carnival on Friday and Saturday with about 45 children.
On Friday night, we also attended the Glow Party at the MuseumLab, a 10 and up party with glow themed activities, which our installation was perfect for! Two girls that had playtested at Avonworth, came up to us and were really excited to see the full installation! They loved it and remarked that it was much better than the cardboard one that we had brought.
Fab
Marissa worked on fabricating the final blocks for the experience. As we mentioned last week, we made the executive decision to go with the hollow wooden blocks with RFID stickers and symbols on all 6 sides.
As a review, this design choice was the cumulation of playtesting:
- The block material was determined by robustness, cost, and replicability. We went with a smaller size, 3 inches, because we noticed that younger children (3 years old) had a hard time removing the 3.5 inch blocks, as they would try to rotate them out of the cubby and they would get stuck.
- We decided on RFID stickers on each of the sides that were all programmed with the same information (a red block, a blue block, and a green block), because we noticed that guests didn’t realize that the bottom of the cubby was what was important for reading the information. Even with putting a symbol on the bottom of the cubby (and being told), younger children would not put the block in correctly when there was only one tag. To counteract that, we put tags on all sides and made them have the same information.
- We decided to use symbols to notate the difference between the blocks. Although we have received feedback multiple times that we may want to consider just coloring the blocks the color that they represent or by putting letters on each of the blocks, we received information repeatedly during playtesting from 10-14 year olds that they did not want it to be obvious. They preferred the symbols because they looked cool and “techy,” and they wanted to be challenged to figure them out. We ultimately decided to cater to our demographic and their wants.
Interactions
From playtesting, we realized that we needed to fine tune our interactions more.
- We got rid of the hidden interaction when a column is synced.
- We noticed that no one was trying to do that.
- We plan on adding 1 hidden interaction: when the whole wall is turned to one color → rainbow interaction that randomizes → ends with randomized wall.
- We noticed that the feedback mechanism of the wall recognizing the blocks was not eye catching enough.
- We changed it to a “paint splatter” effect, where the adjacent cubbies turn to the color of the block to exaggerate effect.
- We noticed that guests were not drawn to the installation. We had added in a flickering idle state in the cubbies with the blocks in them that occurs after 2 minutes.
- Nidhi worked on wiring the entire wall together.
- Wei added in an effect that the whole wall flickers when not interacted with for 30 seconds.
Hints
We noticed that guests didn’t know what to do with the installation because it did not have any affordances. We needed to add a call to action to guide the guest. We updated our hints to do so.
We also worked on figuring out where to put the hints. Using magnets, we added in a hook to the side of the installation to test where to place the hints.
Other
We also added in lights to the inside of the installation to better highlight the wiring. Nidhi will continue to work on wire management before softs (we had to delay this as we could not do this in the museum).
We brought our installation back home to the ETC after the STEAM Carnival and reinforced the base.
We also worked on the trailer! Coming soon…
Next Steps
- Soft opening on Monday! We’ll demo to our faculty and get feedback
- Finalize the hints
- Technical documentation
- Trailer
- Prepare for ETC Fall Festival!
