Blogpost 3
Hey there! We are only days away from finishing module 1 and are working relentlessly to finish our report.
We finished all of our user tests by tuesday 10. March, which happened to be just in time to be able to do the tests at all. 12. March Norway went into a form of lockdown because of the worldwide outbreak of the corona virus, which led to the schools, universities and also the university museum closing its doors. It has been quite an unsettling time with thoughts and worries, but we have tried to keep going as usual, except not being able to meet each other in person. Thankfully, these days we have several platforms like skype and messenger which enables us to cooperate digitally - working together apart.
Conducting the 2 user tests with eye tracking and wristband was an interesting and a little hectic experience. Hectic, because of time restrictions and having to do it before opening hours at the museum. The results from the two informants were vastly different, because one of them was strongly influenced by the hawthorne effect. We still got interesting data for our evaluation.
So there we were, with tons of data to be processed. We began by going through each of the ten interview transcriptions along with our observation notes and the physiological data.
As shown in the picture above, we gathered all the different types of data on each informant in a Miro board, which is an online whiteboard, we set up for our group. This gave us an overview of all the informants and data. The approach throughout was a thematic analysis.
The main findings in our evaluation is divided into the following categories:
Room itself
There was some confusion regarding the different themes.
We saw that it was not all clear for the informant which element to touch and not.
User interface
The maps on the screen shows how temperature, wind and ocean currents are right now, which none of the informants realized.
Navigation could be tricky, some of the orbits were heavy and would sometimes not let you get to where you wanted.
It was challenging to hear what was being said in the videos when there were other people in the room at the same time.
Content
The informants remembered dramatic pictures and videoclips very well, but less of the information given in those videos.
Most of the informants preferred videos with a narrator, not a person in the frame talking.
Several informants liked to see real examples and consequences of catastrophes and climate change. In a video where there is a lady talking about climate change and consequences, we do get to see the consequences, but they are not remembered.
We also made a survey to measure opinions on the climate and climate change, to establish if there were significant differences in the views of the informants from the different schools. There were some differences, but none vastly enough that we reckon would affect the experiences in the globe room in a specific way.
The design implications are under development as we speak, but the essence of them connects to our main findings and links to several of Don Norman's design principles: discoverability, feedback, affordances, and signifiers. We think it could be a good idea for Scary Weather to take our design implications into consideration when developing other installations in the future.
When it comes to climate communication, we have learned alot about the different ways to communicate about climate, and that there are many factors to consider when developing content related to the subject. Scary weather is using an interactive and visual approach in their communication about the weather and climate change and through this approach they want to tell informative stories that will teach and engage their audience.
Working with Scary Weather and their globe room has been an interesting journey, which has taught us a lot. From the meetings with the company to the user tests and the findings they let us to, we have gotten to familiarize ourselves with what works and what could have worked better when it comes to communicating and informing young people about the climate.
When looking back at module 1, we are pleased with the fact that we got to make a lot of the decisions regarding our evaluation. We have also gotten feedback throughout the process, from all of our teachers, which has been very helpful.
