Midterm Report: Colour Pot

Anders Vinnogg, Jarl F. Isaksen, Jørgen Taxt Walnum, Florian Büther

24/10/2008

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 First Development Cycle 22.1 Description of the Prototype . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22.2 Requirements Analysis: Usability and Experience Goals . . . . 32.3 Conceptual Framework . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

3 Analysis and Establishing of Requirements 5

4 Design and implementation 84.1 About the design and implementation process . . . . . . . . . 84.2 Description and images of first prototype . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

5 Testing and Evaluation 105.1 Setup of the Testing Session . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115.2 Differences from the Plan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125.3 Our Observations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

6 Evaluation 14

1 Introduction

The Colour Pot is a concept for an interactive, computer-based exhibition atthe Oslo Barnemuseum[2]. A children’s museum is a place that is especiallydesigned for children: It offers a wide range of activities that are designed toprovide an active and educational playing experience. The exhibitions aretailored for children not only by size, but also try to meet the explorativeand playing needs of the children. The Oslo Barnemuseum is currently in aconceptual phase, so there is still much room for new and innovative ideas.

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The Colour Pot is developed as project work of the Human-ComputerInteraction lecture, so the project focuses on the conception, the design andthe evaluation of the exhibition. Specifically, the development process iter-atively follows an user-centred design model[3], consisting of three steps:

1. Identifying needs of users and establishing requirements2. Design and build a prototype3. Evaluation of the design and prototype

The project work described in this paper is therefore based on these threesteps.

2 First Development Cycle

As the first iteration of the design process also included the brainstormingto evolve the actual idea, it focuses on the design of the prototype. Thegoal of this cycle is therefore to obtain a rough and theoretical prototype,which serves as a starting point for the next iteration. This cycle thereforedescribes the users and their needs and performs a rough evaluation of thedesign with regard to the user experience and usability goals. The finalresult of this development cycle is the Wonder Document.

2.1 Description of the Prototype

The Colour Pot is a room where children can make and mix colours. Tocreate colours, several mats or pads will be arranged on the floor of theroom, painted with different colours. Stepping on one of the pads will makethe room light up in the same colour as the one the child is stepping on.Illuminating the room can be done by having big lights on the ceiling thatlight up the complete room. When multiple children step onto pads, therooms colour will become a mixture of the individual colours, in the sameway as natural colours blend together.

No fixed goal exists, that the children can reach with stepping on thepads. While the children can just run around and try the different pads orwatch the changing colours, they would ideally try to figure out how thepads work: Different colours can blend and create new, inspiring colours.Maybe the room would reward more sophisticated colours with stars or dif-ferent animations across the ceiling.

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The kids give input through the pads on the rooms floor. They will becoloured in red, green, blue and yellow, giving an easy starting point formixing colours. The arrangement of the pads is not yet clear; they can bearranged in a matrix-like setting, attached to another or with spacing in-between. Also, the design of the pads themselves is still unclear. Feedbackis given by the change of colour in the room. This can be augmented withsounds for each press of a button, or with music, that may in some way re-late to the current colour. Feedback may as well be produced by animationson the wall or ceiling, showing the change of colour. Field research willshow, which options are the most fun, or work at all.

An interesting way to place the installation in the Children’s Museumputs it in a room or space which is commonly used as a corridor or area toget around. The children just stumble upon the pads, causing a spontaneousreaction. This will get them interested in the way the pads work, and willget them to experiment with them. Furthermore, in this way the installationfacilitates cooperative working, as other children might also stumble uponit at the same time.

2.2 Requirements Analysis: Usability and Experience Goals

The intended user group is at first equal to the user group of the Children’sMuseum, so children starting at the age of zero up to twelve. As the ex-hibition encourages running and jumping around, it naturally requires theparticipating children to be at least four years old, although it might providea fun experience to younger children too. To ease up the initial design, theuser group will be restricted to children in the age of four to nine years.

The goal of this project is to let the children have a good experienceby running around, interacting and learning about colours. Supporting thismain idea come the different aspects of usability and user experience goalsfor the project. The Children’s Museum might as well introduce several spe-cific usability and experience goals from their own set of standards, whichhowever will not be considered in this project.

In the series of usability goals effectiveness is very general, but refers tohow good the system is at performing what it is supposed to do. Observationwill probably be a good way to measure how the children rate the successof the system. As children’s behaviour and preferences are difficult to pre-dict, revisions of prototypes may seem inevitable! On the other hand, thesimplicity of the system should counter for the attention of the user group.

This also touches the efficiency of the system at hand. An important as-

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pect is for the children to have a fun time in an easy way. The system shouldinvite the users by its uncomplicated appearance, yet still appear exiting andtempting by the implementation in a large, full-room scale. Learnability andmemorability will also take advantage of such a presentation. Children areprone to loose interest if it is too hard or time-demanding to grasp the con-cept at hand. Here the children can get started right away and catch theintention of the system by exploration.

Limitations to the number of children participating at one time is essen-tial to avoid destroying the efficiency and the user experience the system isdesigned for. This is a critical point that needs to be highlighted in the designof the system. It might also be a key argument for the museum as a whole, tolet time limits secure the efficiency of the different attractions. With a usergroup this young, this may be crucial to establish a certain amount of orderin a busy environment! Also, since the system is not overly complicated, itmay get repetitive after a period. A time limit will help the children avoidgetting bored. Finally, it may even be impossible for impatient children touse the installation in a meaningful way, if they for example do not want towait for other children to collaborate.

Safety is a key usability goal in this setting, considering the age of theintended user group. Careful considerations have to be made to ensure asafe experience for the children. Adult supervision may be necessary, per-haps also separating the children into smaller age ranges, to ensure that theolder ones do not harm the younger unintentionally. The system must bedesigned with special care when it comes to safety precautions. This alsodeals with the importance to design for errors, what can go wrong? Whilethe system’s design tries to accommodate as many children as possible, itcan obviously be hard for colour-blind children to have a meaningful expe-rience. It is a difficult task to design for all eventualities that may occur.

With this kind of system, utility is not a core usability goal. Hopefully,the children still may have a certain degree of learning experience mixingcolours! More important, though, is the user experience in this system. Thekey user experience goal for this system is to provide a satisfying, enjoyable,fun, entertaining, aesthetically pleasing, creativity-supportive and emotion-ally fulfilling experience.

2.3 Conceptual Framework

Mental models are used to achieve an understanding of the functionality ofreal-life objects and phenomena. When we see a device of some sort, wementally develop a conceptual model of how it works. The physical prop-

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erties and implications of the device combined with our prior knowledgeof different objects signal what to expect. A well designed system shouldgive the user the right conceptual model, that is give the user the possibilityto predict the behaviour of the system and the effects of our actions. Thevisibility of the system will also contribute to this, hidden parts or elementsmay cause confusion. In a design process, three different aspects of concep-tual models must be distinguished: the design model, the user model andthe system image[1]. The designer must strive to develop a conceptual de-sign model that is understandable by the user. The user model is the mentalmodel that the user develops to explain the system. The designer “commu-nicates” the intention of the system to the user through the system image,and the user acquires his knowledge of the system from the system image.Therefore, the system image must reflect consistency between intention andperception, and this is the responsibility of the designer.

As this installation is designed to be used for a comparatively short time,the conceptual model emphasises this fact. This conceptual model is easy:The room or area of the installation provides a big pot of light-colour to jumparound in. Via the controls on the floor, the children can pour in differentcolours that change the mixture in the pot. This concept can be picked upquite easily: As it is unusual to have non-white lit rooms, the importanceof colour is easy noticeable. With the attention already drawn to it, thechange that occurs when the kids step onto the pads is even more obvious.Seeing the ability to influence the lighting, they will hopefully be drawn totry out different colours. The conceptual model does not contain more thanthis, making it very simple and easy to understand. Thereby it supports theprocessing of the installations way of working.

External cognition does not play a big role in this exhibition. As it doesnot aim to ease a part of the children’s work, it does not support externalis-ing or offloading of computational tasks. These can therefore be discardedduring analysis. The major type of external cognition in the project is cog-nitive tracing. The pads allow the kids to manipulate the state of the colourpot they are standing in, they are directly manipulating its properties. Thisdirect manipulation renders the interaction thereby more natural, as it iseasier for the children to understand a direct response to their actions.

3 Analysis and Establishing of Requirements

Identifying needs and establishing requirements bring us to the more formaldescription of the system. A requirement is a statement about an intendedproduct that specifies what it should do or how it should perform[4]. In

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order to make a successful design it is important to understand as much aspossible about the users involved and the context they are in. There maybe some initial requirements present or the project may have to establishrequirements from scratch. In this case, there seem to be some indirectrequirements that can be transferred from other typical game/explorationsettings involving children of young age. The age of the users involved willtypically establish some set requirements regarding e.g. levels of difficulty.The aim of getting accurately defined requirements is to avoid the failure ofthe design of the system. Getting these requirements is often a difficult task,e.g. the clients don’t always know exactly what they want. In this case,we assume that we are given a high degree of liberty from the Children’sMuseum in forming the experience.

Identifying stakeholders in the context of the exhibition may be impor-tant in identifying requirements. They may also affect each other in waysthat can influence the establishment of the requirements. There seem to bethe following stakeholders involved in this particular system:

• Children• Parents• Employees of the Children’s Museum• Administration of the Children’s Museum• System designers• Other visitors

There are different kinds of requirements that suit different types of sys-tems. Functional and non-functional requirements are the traditional kinds.Functional requirements tell what the system should do, and in this case:

• Stepping on coloured pads result in colours appearing on a screen.• Stepping on several pads of the same colour result in a brighter colour.• Stepping on several pads of different colours mix the colours.• Not stepping on a new pad results in the colour fading to grey.• Stepping on a pad invokes a sound.

Non-functional requirements will specify what constraints there shall beon the system. These requirements are often refined into further categories.Among them are the so-called environmental requirements or context ofuse. This is the expected environment or circumstance in which the systemis supposed to operate. They consist of four aspects:

• Physical:

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– The room must be dark.– There will be a choice of 4 colours.– The floor will consist of 20 coloured pads.– Noise will be present and may affect the collaboration of the chil-

dren. Noise may affect other exhibitions in the museum and haveto be kept at a tolerable level?

• Social:

– The children can communicate in order to collaborate to mix aspecial colour.

• Organisational:

– User support and training will in effect be self-explanatory. Thechildren will learn from watching each other.

– Supervision from adults/staff may be necessary to avoid chaos.– Limit of three children at one time on the pads(also from a tech-

nical point of view).

• Technical:

– The control of the system will be run on a Java platform.– A projector will show the colours on the wall.– The lack of means for the construction of prototypes may limit

the overall success of the project.

In addition we have the user requirements consisting of the user’s abili-ties and skills, but these do not seem to be relevant regarding the low com-plexity of this project. For the same reason, it is not necessary to discern be-tween a novice, expert, casual or frequent user. Usability requirements arecovered by the descriptions of usability- and experience goals in part 2.2.

To determine the requirements listed, we need to collect information totest the requirements. The goal is to establish stable requirements to sup-port the realisation of a successful system. A task description in the formof the scenario from part 2.1, where we take into consideration the typicalbehaviour of children in similar game/exploration settings, may get us anidea of what to expect. But to gather relevant data for this system we de-cided to build an early prototype where we will observe the children in theright context and also ask them a few questions afterwards. A pilot sessionwas arranged to prepare for the data-gathering and make sure everythingwould go as planned. This first session involves the most important stake-holders: The children(several), the designers(several), and parents(several,aka kindergarten-employees). Data-gathering from the other stakeholdersmay come in the form of an interview. This involvement of the users can beseen as a user-centred approach to the design-process. The data-gathering

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is typically an iterative process as the design-process itself. The first de-scriptions of the requirements result in a first low-fidelity sketch prototypeillustrating the exhibition, seen in figure 1.

Figure 1: A sketch of the installation’s layout

4 Design and implementation

4.1 About the design and implementation process

We decided to make a lo-fidelity prototype of the system, making us ableto do testing early in the process and explore ideas that way. We wantedrapid feedback and several iterations for improvement. Lo-fidelity proto-types have the advantage of being quick to produce and easy to modify, andwe did not want the prototype to constrain the exploration of new ideas.

Some decisions for the prototype design were made as we implementedit for the first time.

4.2 Description and images of first prototype

This is what our first prototype consists of:

• 20 sheets of coloured paper (4 each of the colours red, green, blue and

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yellow) sized A3 attached to the floor with celotape• java program that shows colours on the screen as different keys are

pressed on the keyboard following this pattern:

– Red: keys ‘2’ to ‘0’– Green: keys ‘w’ to ‘p’– Blue: keys ‘s’ to ‘l’– Yellow: keys ‘x’ to ‘.’

• a projector and a computer• a dark room with at least one large white wall surface.

The colour on the screen increases if a “red” key is pressed several times.Transcribed to the user experience, this means that if two kids step on a redpad, the colour will be brighter red than if you had just one kid standingon a red pad. Three kids on one red pad each will make the lighting evenmore red. As the kids are standing/jumping on different coloured pads, thecolours will mix and create new colours and combinations. If no new padis stepped on, the colours will fade to grey after 5 seconds. We also addedaudio-feedback when pads are stepped on with a generic blopping-sound.

The easiest way for us to light up the room was to use a projector lightingup one of the walls, as we needed the light to be in connection with thecomputer program. For the prototype this would suffice.

Figure 2: The setup including coloured pads and displayed colour

Although the software in this first prototype probably is very close to thefinished software-part of the system, the prototype must be categorised aslo-fi, as the response to user action is produced by us observing movementsand pressing keys on a computer. It fits in with the Wizard of Oz type of lo-fiprototyping[5].

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Besides, the coloured sheets of paper taped to the floor could hardly bedescribed as hi-fi.

Also, the software is easily changed, so it won’t constrain the explorativeaspects of the design process. There is a very good chance that this only is athrowaway prototype.

The interface of the prototype is meant to facilitate exploration, so it hasno obvious metaphor. Users can relate it to a dancing mat or some sort ofhopscotch game. It’s not a point that users shall get any help understandingthe product until they play with it. The interaction types for the system istherefore leaning mostly towards exploring and manipulating.

As the software allows for several shades of one colour, one could arguethat the prototype is vertical, as it then provides a lot of detail for only a fewfunctions. But you could also argue that the prototype as a whole probablyis more horizontal in this version, as most aspects of the original ideas areincluded.

Some of the decisions concerning the physical design of the prototypewas done during the first implementation. It wasn’t until we laid the padsout on the floor that we decided to have gaps between them. We realisedthat no space between the pads would make the pad-area too crowded,given the size of our testing pads.

This might be an example of making decisions based on a prototype thatdiffers from the original idea because of limitations in budget and equip-ment, and as a result the final product might be smaller than originallyintended. Therefore it’s important to open up for adjustments and revisionseven after the last prototype has been tested.

5 Testing and Evaluation

We did our first test of our prototype on October 17th in Eilert Sundtskindergarten. We will first describe our plan for the test session, and thenhow we really implemented it, since everything did not go as we had planned.Then we describe our observations and conclude with a outlook on possibleenhancements.

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Figure 3: First test of the prototype

5.1 Setup of the Testing Session

The plan was to lay out our pads in different colours, and set our beamerand laptop before we had the children in the room. The beamer would bepointed at a wall. We were going to have two test groups, consisting ofthree children each. These groups were to consist of the oldest children inthe kindergarten, which are 4 to 5 years old, and both groups should be ofmixed gender. We should then, with both groups start with one child alonefor about one minute. Then one more child should come in, and after awhile the last one. None of the children were to be told what the conceptwhere, or what to do, and our hope was they would figure this out forthemselves.

We had talked about introducing music as well as colour, and one of ourthoughts were that we could do it as a kind of “chair-game”. This wouldmean that the music would be playing, and when it stops, the children hasto stop as well. In difference to the original chair-game where there is notenough chairs for all the children, nobody would here be excluded from thegame since there is usually enough pads for all the children. Our thought

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was just that this might be a supplement to the pads and changing coloursif that didn’t give enough input.

The plan was to have the first group playing with the pads without mu-sic, and then introduce the “chair-game” to the second group, and see whathappened.

5.2 Differences from the Plan

When we asked one of the employees to get the first group, which whereoutside playing, she asked us if it were okay for us that the groups werenot mixed in gender. She told us that these oldest groups were quite smalland that both the boys and the girls were tight groups which usually didn’tplayed with each other. Also none of the employees were able to join inon the test, since they were a bit under staffed that day, and they all hadto be outside with the other children. We thought that it could seem lessforced and experiment-like if the children in the groups could play togetherwith the children they usually played with, and agreed to not have mixedgenders in the groups.

When we were waiting for the second group, a girl, that we supposedwere one of the girls we were waiting for came in to the room. It turned outthat she wasn’t one of the girls we were waiting for, but one who had comelate to the kindergarten, and when she saw that something was happeningin our room, she just went straight in. She was very talkative, and aftertalking with her for a while, we decided to just start our testing with her,with out music. One of the reasons we did this is that we weren’t ready withthe music yet. The other reason is that the start of our testing session withthe last group didn’t work very well, this will be explained later.

5.3 Our Observations

We had two groups, one consisting of three boys, ages 4 to 5, and oneconsisting of four girls, ages 4 to 5 and a half.

When the first group, three boys, came in to the room, they immediatelystarted to jump around on the pads with the different colours, and seemed tohave fun with that. This was with out any changing of the colours, becausethe operators weren’t ready. When we interrupted them to start our testing,they seemed to be more insecure. We asked the oldest boy to stay in theroom and the others to go in a side room. This made him very attentive to

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us, and seemed uncertain on what to do. We tried to encourage him to try tostep on the pads and see what happened with out telling him to much of theconcept. This worked out fairly well, he walked back and forth, and lookedon the colours changing, but didn’t really seem to grasp the concept. Whenwe let the second boy in to the room, he just walked back and forth in frontof the screen, and seemed to have no idea of what was going on. We triedto encourage them again, and let the last boy in. They became more active,but seemed to have difficulties, seeing the connection between the pads theystepped on, and the colours on the screen. This might have something to dowith that it was very difficult to keep track of the different times the childrenstepped on the pads, so the colours didn’t come instantaneously. But alsothey seemed to focus on either the pads, the screen and making shadows,or just stare in to the beamer.

When we asked them about if it was fun or not they all at first said thatit was very fun, then they said that it was a bit fun. When they left the room,they told the girls that were coming in that it was really boring. When weasked if they understood what happened when they stepped on the pads,they seemed to have understood that the colours were changing, but theyhad to be guided to stand on different pads to understand that the coloursalso mixed. They had also noticed the two people sitting with a computernext to the beamer, and were pretty certain that they were the ones thatwere changing the colours, and not the stepping on pads.

As earlier mentioned, the first girl that came in wasn’t really supposedto be there. We decided that we should start right away, since the boys gotvery uncertain when we interrupted their “game”. This seemed to work outreally well, and she immediately started to explore what happened when shestepped on the different pads, and noticed that the colours were changingand mixing. After a minute or so, two more girls came in and the joined thefirst one. The first girl was the oldest one, and the two younger ones mostlyfollowed in her steps. The fourth girl did the same when she came. Whenall the girls were in the room they mostly just jumped from pad to pad,paying no attention to the screen with colours. After a while, we stoppedthem to asked them if they understood the concept and thought it was fun.They seemed to understand a bit of what was going on, and all thought itwas very fun, they just didn’t want to sit still to answer the questions. Wetried to get them to just step on a few of the colours, to see if they got moreinterested in the mixing when it was clearer with just two colours. Theyseemed to enjoy this very much, but it was still the jumping and dancingthat was interesting, an not the screen in the same amount.

What the girls were missing to make it even more fun was music, sowhen they asked for that after a while, we started the cd player that was in

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the room. The cd was in very poor shape, and the music was full of hick-ups.This didn’t seem to bother the girls, as they were having fun anyway. Aftersome time, the program which displayed the colours stopped working, andthe beamer just showed the coding. We thought that this was a good time topunctuate our test, but we weren’t allowed to do so by the girls, so we hadto start the program again, and let them keep on for a while longer until ourtime ran out and we had to pack up and leave.

6 Evaluation

Based on our observations from the first test, there are a few things that canmake the Colour Pot better.

• The room needs to be darker and the changing of the colours mustbe more visible. The colours mixing was too difficult to detect for thechildren, and as a result the learning aspect of the game disappears.On the other hand, we might downplay this learning aspect and justconcentrate on the fun.

• The different shades of the colours were not noticeable in this test.We might just use the four basic colours and their intermediate mixinglevels in the next prototype.

• The children seemed to have more fun when playing in the ColourPot with music, so we should try and find music that will be suitable.The blopping sound that was used when a pad was stepped on hadtoo much delay in this prototype, as it was dependent on our reactiontime to the children’s actions, so it was just pointless. It might work ina finished product, but we will probably not use it again in these kindsof prototypes.

• For later testing we might investigate further the concept of dancing,as the girls in the test seemed to want this aspect of the game.

References

[1] Donald A. Norman. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books, NewYork, 1988. Pages 189-190.

[2] Friends of Project Oslo Children’s Museum. The oslo barnemuseumwebsite. http://www.oslobarnemuseum.org/, October 2008.

[3] Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, and Helen Sharp. Interaction Design.John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2002. Page 186.

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[4] Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, and Helen Sharp. Interaction Design.John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2002. Page 204.

[5] Jenny Preece, Yvonne Rogers, and Helen Sharp. Interaction Design.John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York, NY, USA, 2002.

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