BLACKSBURG, Va., March 6, 2015 – This week was a productive week for the three developers, Laura Avakian, Seth Canon, and Ryan Kiel. The three of them conducted an important part of the human-computer interaction (HCI) development process — the contextual inquiry.
Each developer interviewed two individuals to understand the thought process behind the user. In doing so, they each downloaded an already-existing iPhone driving tour app (Ryan downloaded Historic Colorado Driving Tour Pikes Peak Area, Laura downloaded Annapolis Driving Tours, and Seth downloaded Dunwoody Driving Tour app).
The three of them had their interviewees play around with these apps and answer questions to give insight into what the user is thinking when using this kind of app, and further allow them to understand the user experience for a driving tour from a perspective other than the developer’s.
The team then created an affinity diagram by pulling out particular quotes, notions, frustrations, successes, positives and negatives, etc from the interviews and writing them on sticky notes. These sticky notes were arranged to highlight common themes and place them into categories that were seen in these interviews. These themes will be kept in mind while developing the app itself.
For example, Kara Trimpin, one of Laura’s interviewee’s, noted that her favorite part of the Annapolis Driving Tours app is “…that it involves so many historical sites and yet it is so easy to keep them straight and navigate back to look at a different site you were interested in.”
Lastly, the team did a “requirements extraction,” where they decided what was most important to keep in mind for the next step in terms of problems and solutions. A written report detailing all of this will be provided to the team’s boss, Professor Kurt Luther.
Next week, the team will be out of the office, but will be in touch about approaching the next milestone, which is an integral piece to the development of this Civil War driving tour app — prototyping. Stay tuned!
Contact Laura Avakian for any further inquiries.
