CRII: CHS: Remote Paper Prototype Testing for Mobile Applications

该项目的目标是建立一个研究计划，使移动应用程序设计师能够在现实环境中对低保真度或纸上原型进行用户测试。移动应用程序的使用现在占了数字媒体总使用时间的一半以上。目前的做法是，新应用的实际测试往往只有在开发出高保真原型后才会进行，这可能需要数周或数月的时间来实现。PI将构建和评估工具，并开发用于远程纸原型测试的方法，这将使设计人员能够在实验室中方便地进行测试，而用户则可以通过Wizard-of-Oz机制与只需几个小时即可生成的低保真原型进行远程交互。PI的目标是通过让设计师能够在设计过程的早期观察并收集来自用户的有价值的反馈，从而加速手机应用的开发；因此，设计师将能够测试多个想法并快速进行迭代，从而以较低的资金和人力成本提高创新速度。PI将通过在开放源码和creative commons许可下向公众发布所有软件工件，并提供仅依赖于现有的、现成的技术的实现，使他的工具可供广泛的研究人员和设计实践者使用。PI将设计、实施和评估远程纸原型测试工具，这些工具将保留并扩展纸原型到移动设置的功能，同时支持在现实位置和使用情况下测试移动应用程序的设计目标，促进测试会话和远程指导纸原型，并提供基于位置和情境的上下文。例如，用户将在实验室外测试纸上原型，而设计师则在远处指导。放置在实验室摄像机下的纸上原型将视听馈送到测试人员的移动设备上，而用户身上的设备将视听数据馈送到推动者和向导上，包括用户的第一人称视角，他们的声音，以及其他相关数据，比如他们的位置。为了远程操作原型，向导根据来自用户的实时流响应用户的动作和情景上下文。对原型的任何警报或更新都将流式传输到测试用户的移动设备。在这项研究中，PI将与西北大学的西格尔设计研究所、设计、技术和研究项目、为美国设计以及新发明项目合作。开发的方法和工具的有效性将通过控制实验和实地部署进行评估。项目结果将有助于我们理解用于远程测试的低保真原型和基于向导的技术。

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.