Low Fidelity Prototyping
In designing this experience, we hope to show some features of reading such as saccades, fixation pauses, and regressions, as well as emphasizing the embodiment we experience when we read. I drew a sketch to combine these existing ideas and tried to add fun into the experience.
Initially my idea was to drop a ball on the top of a box, the ball would roll down automatically, and encounter some obstacles along the way, the speed of ball is like the speed of one's eye movement. Based on my sketch, my teammates and I explored further, the following pictures are some low fidelity prototyping of our group.
Among them, I was very interested in Max's "Balance Ball Game", because of my terrible English explanation, he misunderstood my sketch hahaha:) he thought int my design, the participants should control the ball trajectory by themselves, I liked his misunderstanding! We can control the speed of ball, just like we control the movement of eyes.
Please switch!
From the literature review, we found there are main 6 elements affecting the eye movement are language, word complexity, word accuracy, unknown words , fonts and word predictability.
I tried to eveluate by observing people the activities of eyes when people meet those words during reading in a physical way. For example, when we meet a very complicated word, we tend to read then again, and read it several times until we understood. in the game, I designed it as a ball felling into a trap, takes participants' several attempts to keep the ball going.
The following pictures exhibit the evolution of the model from 2d to 3d:
Based on this reaesrch, I started to make our physical model, we needed a paragraph that contains those 6 different elements.
Here is the text rewrote by Moxue based on a introduction of a skincare brand:
I added this paragraph into the 3D modelling as a background, created the following diagram to explain the 6 factors that affect eye movement.
Figure1: 6 factors that affect eye movement
And created the final prototyping
Presentation & Thoughts
We invited participants to experience the "eye movement" game.
The last presentation went not very successful, the classmates still felt confused about our idea after our explanation. I summarize the following reasons for our failure:
Lack of prioritizing: Kolko(2010) suggest that a designer must decide that what piece of data is more important than another during the process of synthesis. Last week, our group did lots of literature review, and we exhibit everything in this week, even some of them didn't relevant to the final work, It took us more than half the time. I think we should determine what is most significant in this reading project, focus on our conclusions.
Out of order: One stand out point from the feedback was that if we could explain the diagram(figure1) before the game, participants would be more immersed in the experience.
Rough model making: John reminded us that the model was not a high fidelity prototyping at all, it was not accurate. It can be seen from the video that Alex was very difficult to recognize the text at the bottom of the model even as a native speaker. This is because firstly, the text is very tough to understand. Secondly, I wrote it by hand.
Anyway, although the last presentation wasn't perfect, it's still a good experience for me in the first term at lcc. I can sum up more shortcomings from the failure, how to find research and apply them; how to collabrate with other designers; and how to use diagrams or videos to express ideas clearly... All these will be what I will continue to improve in the next term!
Reference
Kolko, J. (2010) Abductive thinking and sensemaking: The drivers of design synthesis. Design issues, 26(1), pp.15-28.