Using our paper prototypes, we set out to conduct some user testing in order to explore if participants found the interaction of our interface easy and if they could grasp the concept of our installation and the message we are trying to communicate to our users about data and privacy protection.
During the first user test, our participant was quick to spot a few elements of our interface that needed further attention and development.
Privacy Policy
The first comment we received from our participant is that we need to change the Terms and Conditions on our starting page to Privacy Policy. This way no explicit consent would need to be given from participants before their interaction with the artefact.
Question Phrasing
Throughout our first user test it was obvious that our participant was not very willing to answer the questions as they were obviously asking for quite personal information which they were unwilling to give.
This helped us re- design our questions in a way that they would be seen as less intrusive. Gamification would also be used so that questions are more enjoyable to interact with than just constantly typing answers or choosing numbers from a dropdown button.
Prompting Users to Answer More Questions
Along with changing the structure of our questions we also needed another way to prompt users to answer questions and create an overall more fun experience for our users. For that reason we came up with the concept of a robot companion who would make funny comments throughout the experience and would encourage participants with phrases such as “Halfway there!”
This first user testing also brought forth the idea of having more pieces of puzzle fall when users answer a sensitive question. This will be a sort of reward for them and encourage them to answer more difficult questions during their experience.
Skip Warning
Our first user testing also made us realise that skipping all questions could be done very easily. For that reason we added a warning page which would come up when participants tried to skip questions. This would warn them that they are missing out and will not be having as much of a fun experience if they decided to skip all the tricky questions.
End Slate Wording
For the end of our experience, we were to add the participants’ name with the percentage of the questions they answered and the word “Compromised” would appear above their name with the intension of making a point about them not protecting their privacy. However through our testing we discovered that the word Compromised could be perceived differently than we intend, so the word was changed into “ Exposed” instead.
Following these findings from our first user test, we set out to alter our paper prototype a little bit so that the changes mentioned above could be incorporated into our user testing. After we made more assets for our paper prototype we went back to testing with another 2 participants.
The second participant seemed quite interested in our prototype and actually answered all of the questions apart from the most sensitive question, which was the password question.
Our third participant was a little bit more reluctant with providing personal information, however the warning slate that popped up when she attempted to skip a question did seem to make her consider skipping, and she actually did go back twice and answered 2 questions which she originally wanted to skip as a result of the warning stating that she will be missing out if she were to skip those questions.
Both participants also positively responded to the robot companion and expressed that it enhanced their experience.
Overall, our paper prototype testing was a fantastic way of helping us recognize any weakness in our design and prompting us to find solutions. We will be taking all of the new decisions further and integrating them into our design, as well as spending more time formulating our questions so that we can ensure they are easy to answer and that their severity is not visible straight away, but they feel more like playing a game.
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