Testing User Interaction

While also being a fund raising and publicity opportunity for Dundee Science Centre, my couple of days out at The Overgate Shopping Centre was also a great opportunity for some in depth user testing. This has allowed me to highlight some alterations that will be required for the final model as well as provide a chance for me to scope out how I might film my final video – which is one of our required hand ins for the final deadline on 2nd May. I am thinking for this video that I am going to go for a similar approach to this, a montage of people interacting with DON-8r in a manner which I have not prompted, instructed or influenced. I really like the variety of honest interactions which come through in the video above!

Back to user testing though, DON-8r was misbehaving a bit on early Saturday – not really coping too well with the outdoor terrain. I thought that this may be due to the motors wearing out which was a bit concerning. A quick change of the batteries though and DON-8r was speedy again! I had altered some coding to compensate for the slow movement but with it working at a good pace again I will probably change that back. I think that this highlighted the battery duration is around 5ish hours before they become too weak.

I also noticed that, when outdoors, DON-8r needs to stand out more. The flashing head is not really noticable at all in the sunlight and the audio, though amplified as loud as I can get it, is still drowned out by traffic and the general hustle and bustle of the town (unless you approach DON-8r). I was thinking it would be nice if DON-8r wobbled or moved enough to make the flag wobble as a means to grab peoples attention. I’ll get this coded and see if it helps.

I added a bit of red electrical tape around the coin slot as I noticed many people were not finding the coin slot as immediately as I would have hoped. Also, many people were taking photos of DON-8r from the front although there is not branding for Dundee Science Centre here so I may look to see if I can get a couple more vinyl’s as I’m sure it would be good publicity for DSC to get their branding on some Facebook photos.

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Credit to Dundee’s chiptune maestro Edwards Shallow for the soundtrack to this video – I love his stuff and you should too!
Listen to his tracks (and download them) here: http://edwardshallow.bandcamp.com/
check out his youtube here: http://www.youtube.com/user/edwardshallow
Follow his Tumblr here: http://edwardshallow.tumblr.com/

UPDATE::
Forgot to mention, there’s no hard feelings towards the girl who breaks DON-8r at the end of the video. It was user testing after all and clearly the head was not secure enough! DON-8r has since been repaired and recapitated

UPDATE 2::
This video has been receiving a whole heap of online attention. I uploaded it to b3ta.com (a cacophonous online community of meme makers that I frequent) and received largely positive reviews. It was then later unexpectedly picked up by geekologie (a tech/humour blog I was only vaguely familiar with) and was apparently lambasted by both the author and within the comments. In the case that all publicity is good publicity I decided not to get directly involved with a retort and thank goodness for that as it turns out that their harsh tone is a recurrent joke for their opinion towards robots. Could have resorted in a flamewar there! Still a bit miffed that the top google result for “DON-8r” directs you towards their article (which, for the unaware masses, doesn’t give DON-8r the most shining review) but I have received around 4000 hits and counting on the video so I guess thanks to geekologie for the traffic there!