reported. Most common one is intuitiveness of the MMR. The reason behind having only pragmatic expectations at this stage is due to the fact that sce-narios and use cases shown during focus group are not concrete enough for the participants so that they can thing beyond the current level of expectations.
Apart from these, users raised several questions related to the privacy and other risks associated with MMR use, reliability and freshness of the presented information, social awkwardness while using MMR and paying for MMR service as possible restrictions to its adoption. Less common concerns are running out of battery due to MMR use and cracking of MMR during critical situations.
During UX evaluations, majority of the expectations are hedonic in con-trast to the pragmatic expectations. Most of the reported expectations are MMR should be stylish, intuitive, unconventional, tacky appearance and so on. The pragmatic expectations are almost same at they are during the focus interview.
Overall empirical UCD and UX evaluation part of this thesis are surely a success due to following reasons- First, results from the empirical UCD supports the previous research results in this area. Second, almost all proto-types and proofs of concept received high user acceptance and appreciation.
This shows that my prototypes and proofs of concept meet user needs and expectations.
What kind of MMR concepts seem most appealing to the users?
During empirical phase of the UCD, participants gave extensive amount of design ideas, concepts and potential use cases for MMR. Some of them are practically realizable while mostly are futuristic in their appeal. Majority of these concepts and use cases are broadly related to sense of utility, rele-vance and personalization. This results in saying that user appreciates those concepts that make their present life easier, possess utility, relevance and personalization. Based on these expectations, I created altogether nine pro-totypes that are tested by users during UX evaluation. I found that “MR Street view”, “MR Toggle view” and “MMR N900 app” are appreciated by the users because of their completeness, realizability, meeting their needs and expectations and possesses something new in terms of design and functional-ity. “Language barrier” is highly appreciated among all the nine prototypes due to the presence of high utility while “playfulness” is rejected by users because it lacks in the element of utility.
“MR indoor view” and “MR outdoor view” are considered pleasant and nice but having almost similar supported functionalities. Both are appreci-ated because they are simple looking, possess utility and novelty. First and third scenario of “MMR interaction” is appreciated by users but the third
scenario having chatting with stranger did not work well with the partici-pants. Several articipants doubt the practical utility of “MR Panorama”. It was regarded as nice concept but lacks usefulness.
What methods are the most suitable for evaluating UX of the designed MMR prototypes and proofs of concept?
Emocard method can be used for evaluating both functional and non func-tional prototypes but alone Emocard is not be suffice as product designers are also interesting in knowing the reasons for a particular type of emotional response so it must include some kind of post evaluative procedure similar to what I used i.e. structured interviews for accessing their overall reasoning on how users evaluated particular prototypes. Pilot study showed that Emocard faces are difficult for users to recognize and answer but due to the additions that I made it, whole study became easier. During the UX evaluation tests, Emocard is found intuitive and fascinating for the participants; this is par-tially due to the added textual description to its different faces and training given before its testing.
SUXES is efficient way of mining interesting data about any product or service with a reasonable effort. Previously, SUXES has been used only in the subjective evaluation of speech based and other modalities in multimodal applications. In contrast to the original SUXES, my adapted version is both challenging and novel as our application area is MMR which is a futuristic technology. SUXES is special in case of MMR interactive application because it helps in collecting of users’ expectations that in a way provides context for determining UX. These expectations can actually show how important are certain factors for users, thus SUXES providing some insights into how the future users will perceive MMR. SUXES method is competent in evalu-ation the pre use expectevalu-ations and post use experience of any prototype. A qualitative feedback is required to further concretize the resulting claims of SUXES.
AttrakDiff questionnaire is potentially efficient when used for the UX evaluation of the almost ready product or prototype. Many statements in this questionnaire fit only to the evaluation of nearly complete product. I used AttrakDiff at three different stages and it is found during the evaluation study that AttrakDiff is competent in elicitation of user expectations when tested against the concrete prototypes or proofs of concept.
Triangulation research principle greatly increases the authenticity and validity of the study methodology. During this thesis, I realized that due to triangulation of different UCD research and UX evaluation methods, I is able to provide a balancing effect on the overall study. This finally enabled me to practice a richer, reliable and valid study.
All these evaluation methods are only successful if the test users are fully trained for using them. A product designer cannot fully utilize the benefits of these methods if the test participant does not understand different adjec-tives, word pair and scales used in these methods.
What are the challenges of creating concepts based on new tech-nologies?
During the literature review, I found that many authors quoting “it is chal-lenging to perform UCD if the technology is futuristic”. This is my first contact with an open research problem i.e. “designing for novel and futur-istic technology based on user needs and expectation”. During the empirical UCD, I found that it is challenging for the participants to picture the whole concept of MMR when less concrete solutions are provided to them. Ma-jority of the participants find it difficult to answer questions related to the affordability and routine use of MMR in the beginning of the discussion. To solve this challenge, I made two important additions - First, different types of stimuli are introduced during the discussions such as use of scenario, sto-ryboard, video, textual and pictorial representations for the potential ideas.
Second, all the use cases, tasks and scenarios are kept present-day so that participants consider MMR as something realizable and a practical utility in their daily life.
After performing the focus group interviews, I felt the need for having more concrete concepts or prototypes that can act as stimulus during such discussions. I fulfilled this gap during UX evaluation where interviews are also conducted along the UX testing. I found that my UX evaluation study is greatly benefitted with the use of concrete and visual semi-functional and non-functional prototypes.