Final Project; Phase 4 - Evaluation

Having developed our product prototypes, it's time we have the users evaluate it. What we did was to ask users to navigate around our website prototype, and have them fill up a survey questionnaire that consisted of questions in Likert Scale measuring their emotions.

Using the Circumplex of Emotions, we realized that the general feeling about our website prototype is that it is pleasant but calm/ boring. It lacks the feeling of excitement that we wanted to create in our users.

However, we also noted that the Circumplex of Emotions does not tell us why the users feel so; it will be over inferring from the data to do so. Hence, we carried out laddering to further ascertain the 'why' behind their feelings.

And here's our presentation for Phase 4:

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Class feedbacks
The result is kind of expected as our website prototype is rather bare. Besides expecting the results, Mr Reddy also commented that it appears to be just another website selling mobile phone. And this is a crucial point that we have to work on in order to sell our product, which is a customizable mobile phone. He also suggested that we need to carry out user evaluation of our product concept i.e. customizable mobile phone. This is the part we missed because we only evaluated the users’ emotions about the website i.e. the look and feel of the website.

My reflection
I agree with the class and Mr Reddy on their feedbacks. The fact that the result is kind of expected also pointed to Fahey's point that some design problems are easily identified without having to go through research. I am glad that we went though the process though, as we managed to gain experience from carrying out the researching planning, measurement, and analysis. I believe that the experience of planning and executing researches will also enable a designer to hone his/ her research skills. This will ensure that the research carried out will allow the designer to know what he/ she wants to know.

I also learned that one research method can be employed in diverse settings to find out different things. As in the case of the circumplex of emotions, we can use it not only to measure the look and feel of our website, we can also use it to measure our product concept. One group also experimented with flashing their website along with competitors' websites, and then have the users evaluate his/ her emotions for all websites. I feel that this will allow designers to learn about their website as compared to the competitors. The next step to this, I guess, is to ascertain why users feel a certain way about the various websites, and incorporate the findings in the updated design.