Week 14 – Softs

Last week was Softs (the last informal update teams give to the ETC faculty with the chance to look at the deliverable) and Code Blue as a team learned two very important lessons.

• One comment the faculty had was that we could have done a much better job at arranging earlier playtesting. They understood the challenge of finding playtesters in our age range and that the groups of senior citizens we had contacted wanted a much more advanced notice before the playtest than what we could have given them (we had contacted them throughout November only to be told that the earliest playtests we could get were right before finals; much too late to implement any changes into our final deliverable). If we had wanted a playtest in November, we should have contacted them at least right before October. Back then, we didn’t have a good idea of what we were going to build.

  That being said, the faculty pointed out that with our target age range, we could have called the senior citizen groups back in September saying we wanted to playtest something that we knew they needed to be able to use. We didn’t need to know what we were building yet.

• The purpose of Softs was to let ETC faculty have a chance to really look into the deliverable. We planned to go over the changes we made and challenges we faced since softs and we walked-through the app with them. The walk-through was due to two things:

• We had not gotten access to the data for the prognosis info until recently so that information was not present in the app

• We had not had time to implement the recent changes we had made to the UI and design

Because of these two things, the app was essentially a skeleton waiting for data to be plugged in. With a walkthrough, we could show the faculty the important parts without having to explain over and over again why the content wasn’t present. This did not work.
Instead of having a good presentation like we thought, the ETC faculty said that we had spent too much time presenting and not enough time showing the deliverable. What we were presenting should have been saved for Finals and the faculty didn’t have enough time to grasp what we were building. Additionally, because we had presented the deliverable and not had them play with it themselves, we have given the impression that something is wrong with the deliverable itself. Code Blue needs to implement the last design changes and update the content fast enough (to the point that people can use it) so that we can invite faculty back to fix their outlook of us.

As for constructive criticism, we got some good pointers on making the UI easier for seniors to handle and where we could set up playtests before finals. These include:

1. Adding the sidebar menu we see in the home, hypertext, search, my info, and prognosis info pages to the video/text page
2. Making sure buttons that do the same action are in the same spot always
3. A reference to a senior community apartment building in Pittsburgh that we could call in and set up a playtest in the lobby

Some of the other suggestions we got like adding subtitles to the video were good ones to have but are not able to be achieved with the time we have left. Those we will be adding to our documentation and suggestions to do in the future that we will be handing off to our client.