Individual Report
The initial idea presented in the group report of robot Chef and intelligent kitchen equipment has been very innovative as they follow the latest trend of a human computer interface (HCI). The origination of design idea has a very humble origin as it focuses on solving the problems of cooking meals for friends thereby allowing the host to have a free time to entertain the guest. The group report presents the final product as the smart pan. According to the group report, the initial ideas led to the final product. The task undertaken for evaluating the final product came by asking a question to potential users on the initial ideas. The question and their response from target audience led to the final product.
Boehm (2006) talks about the HCI capabilities and how it is impacting various fields. The research in HCI has been going on since the 1950s and in recent past, the HCI capabilities have taken a new dimension (Boehm, 2006). The group report could be considered in parallel to findings of research from Boehm’ report or an extension as HCI capabilities are applied to home cooking equipment.
In my view, this is a very pragmatic and smart way of designing a final product. The concerns over robot chef and intelligent kitchen equipment idea raised by target audience were all appropriately removed in the final product. The final idea came as an evolution of the initial ideas.
Research on the ACM library revealed several articles that talk about the benefits of HCI, prototypes. Most of the research and mappings presented in DiSalvo Sengers, and Brynjarsdóttir’s research (2010) have been incorporated into the project report.
The group project presents illustration diagrams, design process, and design vision through storyboard that makes the report much easier to understand and comprehend. The use of storyboard is very innovative and interactive as it catches the fancy of the audience and presents the idea in a very subtle format. The group report presents evidence for consideration of interaction design. The final group report discusses several academic resources to present its case of the final product. It also evaluates a kick starter project that is on the similar lines to that of the final product idea. The group report also considers some relevant literature with regards to intelligent and smart home devices and other research in the area of sensor embedded pans in smart home equipment. The group report creates three personas that highlight the needs of potential users who would use the smart pan. These personas were created of a mother of several children, a student with limited culinary skills and an elderly adult with limited mobility. Each of the three persons has different needs, and the only common thing between them was the willingness to have some support system or an intelligent device in their cooking mechanism. Low fidelity prototype models were set up to evaluate the cooking process. The screen allows a user to modify an update or notification. The low fidelity prototypes are based on five core interaction principles of affordance, consistency, constraint, feedback, and visibility. Evaluation and analysis have been performed over the design idea and the low fidelity prototypes. The group report claims that different prototypes were developed including a physical mock-up of a pan. The technology used for prototyping was a mobile application created over HTML. The cognitive walkthrough and both the prototypes were performed upon the responses of the student user. The group report presents an excellent description of the undertaken evaluations of the prototypes. It captures all the relevant information with regards to temperature, meal, and notifications, and a process for monitoring the progress. The group report claims that the cognitive walkthrough identified new possible changes and provided some learning and new ideas into the usability of the prototypes. The group report provides its evidence and justification upon the methods used like a questionnaire and the user involvement for questionnaires, along with the results of the designs and the relevant conclusions. The group report provides an analysis of questionnaires and corresponding results and an experimental task, and a tabular format that was used for capturing the results. The group report provides a very systematic, intelligent and informative section for test results. These sections provide the relevant numbers and outcome of test results. Finally, an explanation of the development of designs is provided at the end of the report. The group report is concise and presents much useful knowledge that would be used in future iterations of the model.
Iteration, Evaluation, and Analysis
For the final product and the final design, several things went well, like the creation of initial ideas, review of initial ideas by target audience and a collection of responses from each of the audience. The responses upon prototypes by targeted users were another set of valuable information that shaped the future of the final product. However, it is recommended that instead of performing a mock test for the prototypes, a more reality-based test could have been performed. Although, the outcome of the result has been much better than expected and I think it would shape the final product in a very positive manner.
Proposal for future research
Satchell and Dourish (2009), in their study talk about use and non-use of HCI technologies. The group project as well presents a useful use of HCI in home products domain. The future of HCI or human-computer interface is very promising as the information technology industry is evolving at a fast pace. There is a lot of data for analysis upon software projects as proposed in the group report. However, there must be the utilization of better and newer technologies available for the given problem (Satchell, and Dourish, 2009). It is proposed that for future purpose additional users would be taken to the final product.
Integrity of method proposed for future research
Myers et.al (2000), discuss the future capabilities and evolution of HCI. On same patterns the research for the proposed final product would consist of evaluations, testing, and iterations off different prototypes. The advancement of technology and changing prices of hardware has impacted each and every field including HCI. There has been mass scale evolution in the capabilities of computers, the evolution of ubiquitous computing, and enhanced capabilities for input and output of devices and availability of tools for rapidly prototype and test ideas have all contributed to the growth of innovation in HCI. (Myers, B., Hudson, Sand Pausch, 2000). Nakajima et al. (2008), discusses the human behaviour for enhancing HCI capabilities. Similarly what the group project presents is nothing but human will and behaviour to improve lifestyle and save time for better purpose from day to day activities through use of technology (Nakajima, Lehdonvirta, Tokunaga, and Kimura, 2008)
Future research challenges
There are multiple tools for coordinating applications over distributed platforms and devices. The evaluation of HCI tools with better and interactive User Interface tools would enable more robust, better tested and stable variant of the proposed prototype for the final product.
One of the challenges is to utilize effectively various technological capabilities like sensor-based devices, cloud hosted solutions, API management. Cognitive API capabilities opens up new avenues for research and feature addition into the proposed final product and would be another interesting challenge to integrate into the group project.
The biggest challenge is additional prototype testing with a larger dataset for the final product. The product must be ready to use by general and common people without any risk factors involved. It is proposed that testing needs to be performed on a diverse cohort of people based on different demographics like Age, Gender, Occupation, Social class, economic condition and marital status, etc. The final product is currently in a stable state and would require some review to convert it into a valuable product.
References
Boehm, B., 2006, May. A view of 20th and 21st century software engineering. In Proceedings of
the 28th international conference on Software engineering (pp. 12-29). ACM.
DiSalvo, C., Sengers, P. and Brynjarsdóttir, H., 2010, April. Mapping the landscape of sustainable HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1975-1984). ACM.
Myers, B., Hudson, S.E. and Pausch, R., 2000. Past, present, and future of user interface software tools. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), 7(1), pp.3-28.
Nakajima, T., Lehdonvirta, V., Tokunaga, E., and Kimura, H. (2008). Reflecting human behavior to motivate desirable lifestyle. Proc DIS ‘08. ACM, 405- 414.
Satchell, C. and Dourish, P., 2009, November. Beyond the user: use and non-use in HCI. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference of the Australian Computer-Human Interaction Special Interest Group: Design: Open 24/7 (pp. 9-16). ACM.
