Using narrative techniques for lo-fi prototype testing.


“We need to figure out which common gestures could work across a variety of devices and environments. It’s time to step up and start making, to define and document a common set of movements and motions that could be used for initiating actions across a variety of platforms. We need to help create this shift, not just follow along behind the technology. And, if we wait, well, we’ll simply find individual companies creating their own standards. And although there will always be custom solutions for particular problems and environments, standards would help.”Dan Saffer (Designing Gestural Interfaces, 2008)

Masters of Gesture is an open source project proposal of a series of five natural and intuitive gestural hand movements for interactive interfaces designed in collaboration with sleight of hand magicians.

Due to their very nature, prescriptive theories such as this project, have a fairly general scope. While the theories of Masters of Gesture give guidelines for gestural design, the specifics on how to actually follow the guidelines is left up to the designer. The goal being to provide as complete as possible theories, by proposing clear guidelines and providing test results.

The design and tests were conducted using scenarios and personas developed as part of the Narrative Ecology methodology.

For more information see the Masters of Gesture website.


Behind Masters of Gesture : the design and testing process

Narrative Ecology: How do you create Actor Stories for scenarios and personas for in a (unknown) future?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): “In order to forecast future scenarios I needed to have vision into the prescriptives being set by the experts. Although translating this was only a case of a creative challenge rather than having to face technology challenges, as I was merely projecting these desires using various narrative techniques. From amongst the multitude of guidelines for gestural interfaces, the common themes of visibility, consistency, user control, feedback, error handling and reversibility of actions were considered, and also themes that begin to address the need for a more human-centered vision.”

Narrative Ecology: How did you research your Actor Stories?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): “Research was a combination of on-site and desk research for my gestural scenarios. Namely this called for “immersion in the setting”, allowing me “to hear, see, and begin to experience reality”(Marshall & Rossman, 2006) as the characters would; going to the physical sites of the scenarios I was going to re-create; the Whitechapel emergency entrance, following old people around Tesco, observing families navigate the Natural History Museum; taking photographs, writing notes, collecting mementos of emotional spaces in time; conversations, moods, smells; providing me with “new vantage points and (with) opportunities to make the strange familiar and the familiar strange.” (Glesne, 1999) The insights from this physical immersion allowed me to communicate with, and develop the characters and their environments more subjectively, using the hints from their environments to finely shape their needs, desires and interactions.”

Narrative Ecology: How was the Narrative Ecology methodology used in Masters of Gesture?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): “The scenario planning and forecasting process involves much more insight than foresight, and this is achieved by observing, monitoring and understanding the changes and complexities within the environment, by utilising various expert opinions in the relevant fields. This process made possible by observing the relevant actors within my ecosystem in Sense of Belonging. The scenario forecasting was explored using the Narrative Ecology methodology, Facing the Challenge which helped to accelerate the strategic decisions needed when creating the narratives, or Actor Stories that exist within high changing environments such as the ones I was observing. Narrative Ecology allowed the project to have a clear understanding of where power lies, enabling agency to take advantage of the strengths, improve the weaknesses, and avoid taking the wrong steps.

Narrative Ecology: How does traditional forecasting techniques, traditional narrative theory and Narrative Ecology’s Actor Stories find an equal balance?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): The sum of the individual elements together create a narrative environment where a story is told and experienced, within a context of real time and narrated time, and where an environment is both narrated and experienced. So, if you consider ‘Cambridge Introduction to Narrative’ (Abbott 2008) on whether the scenario illustrations could be considered to be a narrative environment, Abbott states: “Narrative is so much a part of the way we apprehend the world in time that it is virtually built into the way we see. Even when we look at something as static and completely spatial as a picture, narrative consciousness comes into play. Is it possible, when “reading” a picture, to resist some kind of narrative structure?” –and so, while illustrations are most definitely narrative in nature, scenario illustrations (Actor Stories) require the context of elements contained within them to indicate space and passage of time, in order to fullfil the requirements of being a true narrative environment.

Narrative Ecology: How did you use narrative scenarios and lo-fi prototyping to work together?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): “The lo-fi test participants were presented with one scenario package (that is, a photograph, a corresponding journal and any accompanying ticket or tag) and at times also verbally read an excerpt of a journal, then asked to imagine themselves as that persona in that scenario. They were not given a background to the project or the project aims in order to obtain objective results. The process used the scenarios as diegesis; where the test participants, were the audience, and were required to be completely passive –to adopt the role they were assigned with and act within those constraints.”

Narrative Ecology: Can you explain how your developed Actor Stories worked with your lo-fi prototype?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): “The lo-fi prototype was purposely designed to be generic, so that it could represent a gestural interface in any one of my proposed scenarios, and then ran a series of three tests with a random mix of participants. The evaluation results were based on a group of thirty participants, divided into three age groups, ranging between nine and sixty-three years old. All participants were asked to explore the five developed scenarios and asked to imagine themselves using a gestural interface (specific to that scenario) to complete an activity. The tests were, a) participant is invited to interact with the lo-fi gestural prototype, and asked a series of guided questions, b) using the prototype, the participant is asked what gesture they might create to do complete an activity, and c) participant is shown the proposed hand gesture, asked to repeat perform it, and comment on what emotion it evokes. All comments were both recorded by myself on paper and filmed, in order to have a subjective backup.

Narrative Ecology: Why did you decide to use a lo-fi prototype opposed to the digital prototype that a project subject like yours expects?
Crystal Campbell (Masters of Gesture): “The generic lo-fi prototype was designed using cardboard and theatrics in order to remove the test participant from focusing on design and usability issues. I did consider building a digital prototype, and went through several interface designs before realising that my focus, as would be the test participants, was in the wrong place.

I chose two specific methods for my tests, a) to use a lo-fi prototype developed with the simple tools of paper and theatrics. This was to keep the test participant away from focusing on the design and flow of an interface and rather on the nature of a gestural interaction. The lo-fi prototype allowed me to test the benefits and drawbacks of my proposed gestures and also provided a platform for other unforeseen issues. And b), to use my developed scenario images, and character journals to build up a narrative of the environment that I wanted the volunteers to imagine themselves in, and only then commenced the tests with questions that were adjusted to suit the different scenarios. This provided not only insight into my main aim, the strengths and weaknesses of the gestures my project is proposing, but also insight into the feasibility of using scenario’s to bridge, enable and empower test participants’ input in a project.

I would have liked to have taken the testing further than the lo-fi prototypes, to explore environments with a primary prototype designed for computer-human interaction, and also to expand my test groups beyond the limited range of UK based Caucasians, as I am sure that a mix of cultural contexts will have interesting results.”

ACTOR STORIES: Script example.

Magnus.

Further Actor Stories can be seen here.