Theme 5

The paper Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration by Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008) is a good example of design research because it describes not only an idea of using vibration for live streaming on mobile device but also the authors made some design guidelines, showed coding schemes, conducted user studies and then evaluated results. They made conclusions  how vibration could be used as means of rendering live dynamic information for mobile phones and add some main remarks.

The technology of real-time streaming using vibration was evaluated based on experimental platform, usability analysis and trainability[1]. In my opinion, the most important part is usability in this case and it’s usually defined as the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which users can achieve particular goals in specific environments. One should always try to show a new developed prototype to the user in order to test it and then probably avoid some defects.

Moreover, I am curious how companies apply design research in their work. I found out that the design process is characterized by four core strategies such as need finding through user research methods to establish constraints, ideation to generate many possible ideas and then select promising ones, prototyping to create specific models and approximations based on those ideas, and iterative refinement to test generated prototypes.

A few words about prototyping. 

Houde and Hill [2] defined three types of questions a prototype can address: the role of a product in the larger use context, then its look and feel and in the end its technical implementation.  It is possible to use prototype testing to reduce the risk and it’s not so expensive and time-consuming as a development of the full design.

I selected a paper The effects of touch screen technology on the usability of e-reading devices by Eva Siegenthaler, Yves Bochud, Pascal Wurtz, Laura Schmid, and Per Bergamin (Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 7, Issue 3, May 2012, pp. 94 – 104). This study investigated the effect of touch screen technology on the usability of electronic reading devices. Three different types of devices (two Sony e-readers and one iPad) were compared and participants completed different use case scenarios for each device. They also filled in a questionnaire and tried to rate the usability of the navigation, handiness, design, as well as  handling of each device. There were only 12 participants taking part in the experiment from 20 to 26 years old. I guess, that it would be better to compare different age range in this study and not only take into account young people.

The authors defined several research questions if touch screens increase the reading experience and  if the sensitivity of the touch screen seems to become important. The researches wanted to know if  the interaction with a multi-touch display were more usable for the user and it actually provided a more direct interaction with the e-reader.

They hypothesized that touch screens contribute to the improvement of the usability of an e-reading device and the sensitivity of a touch screen has a positive influence on the usability.

I have learnt from this paper that while conducting a design research one can use both qualitative and quantitative methods to support concepts and/or confirm a hypothesis. In such kind of research one should make end user analysis and evaluate results of experiments.

[1] Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration by (2008)

[2] Houde, S. and Hill, C. What do Prototypes Prototype? In M. Helander, T.K. Landauer and P. Prabhu, eds., Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction. Elsevier Science BV, 1997.

[3] Eva Siegenthaler, Yves Bochud, Pascal Wurtz, Laura Schmid, and Per Bergamin The effects of touch screen technology on the usability of e-reading devices (Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 7, Issue 3, May 2012, pp. 94 – 104)