Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Lessons from the castle
Recently we’ve been running some trials of our context-aware guide at Nottingham Castle Museum Gallery, and I’ve just finished reviewing the video footage of people using the device. we learned a lot from actually running these trials in a field setting rather than a lab (eg: never trust peer-to-peer WLAN on an iPAQ) but one of the over-arching lessons was somewhat non-intuitive and unexpected. we worked hard to develop a system that had lots of options and would give users a lot of flexibility, then we trimmed it down to make it on a handheld device. then we trimmed it down some more to make our trials simpler. and we still found that people thought it was too complicated for them. it looks like most people see the potential for technology to give them enhanced experiences, but they want something that does things in a very simple way. the other thing we learned is that simple interfaces don’t mean simple code, and getting an intuitive interface to work involves a lot of head-scratching and non-intuitive code.
Recently we’ve been running some trials of our context-aware guide at Nottingham Castle Museum Gallery, and I’ve just finished reviewing the video footage of people using the device. we learned a lot from actually running these trials in a field setting rather than a lab (eg: never trust peer-to-peer WLAN on an iPAQ) but one of the over-arching lessons was somewhat non-intuitive and unexpected. we worked hard to develop a system that had lots of options and would give users a lot of flexibility, then we trimmed it down to make it on a handheld device. then we trimmed it down some more to make our trials simpler. and we still found that people thought it was too complicated for them. it looks like most people see the potential for technology to give them enhanced experiences, but they want something that does things in a very simple way. the other thing we learned is that simple interfaces don’t mean simple code, and getting an intuitive interface to work involves a lot of head-scratching and non-intuitive code.
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(c) 2003-2005 Russell Beale
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