CRII: CHS: Remote Paper Prototype Testing for Mobile Applications

Northwestern University, Evanston IL

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to establish a research program to enable mobile app designers to conduct user testing on low fidelity or paper prototypes in realistic environments. Mobile app usage now accounts for over half of all time spent on digital media. Current practice is that realistic testing of new apps tends to occur only after the development of high-fidelity prototypes, which can take weeks or months to implement. The PI will build and evaluate tools, and develop methodologies, for remote paper prototype testing that will enable designers to facilitate testing sessions from the lab while users remotely interact (via a Wizard-of-Oz mechanism) with a low-fidelity prototype that can be generated in just a few hours. The PI's goal is to accelerate mobile app development by making it possible for designers to observe and gather valuable feedback from users in realistic scenarios early in the design process; as a consequence, designers will be empowered to test multiple ideas and iterate on them quickly, with the potential for order-of-magnitude increases in the rate of innovation at lower cost in terms of both monetary and human resources. The PI will make his tools available to a wide community of researchers and design practitioners by releasing all software artifacts to the general public under open source and creative commons licenses, and by providing implementations that rely only on existing, off-the-shell technologies. The PI will design, implement, and evaluate remote paper prototype testing tools that preserve and extend the affordances of paper prototyping to the mobile setting while supporting the design goals of testing mobile apps in realistic locations and situations of use, of facilitating a testing session and wizarding a paper prototype remotely, and providing location-based and situational context. For example, users will test a paper prototype out of the lab while a designer wizards from afar. A paper prototype placed under a video camera in the lab streams an audio-visual feed to the tester's mobile device, while a device on the user streams an audio-visual-data feed to the facilitator and wizard, including the user's first-person perspective, their talk-aloud, and other relevant data, such as their location. To operate the prototype from afar, a wizard responds to the user's actions and situational context based on the live stream from the user. Any alerts or updates to the prototype are streamed to the test user's mobile device. The PI will collaborate in this research within Northwestern University with the Segal Institute of Design, the Design, Technology, and Research program, Design for America, and the NUvention program. Effectiveness of the developed methods and tools will be evaluated through controlled experiments and field deployments. Project outcomes will contribute to our understanding of low-fidelity prototyping and wizard-based techniques for remote testing.