Testing Methodologies

Through research it has been discovered that when conducting emotional engagement testing towards brands, PR companies first test the participants on their brand engagement and then assign them to a group based on their emotional response level. Some people have high emotional engagement towards brands, others much less. By grouping participants in this way, it is possible to see Usability testing with respect to  people's differing emotional engagement levels.

It is proposed that this can feed into the groups research, by pre testing people and working out their prior engagement levels, this will add more quality to the data gained from the usability study.

FaceReader

FaceReader 6 by Track Sys is a piece of software that uses a webcam to capture emotions a person is expressing. A demonstration of the software has been arranged so that the group can evaluate its suitability for the project. It's thought that if it works, it can help with establishing the kinds of emotions that users feel when both interacting with the websites and viewing the adverts.

http://www.tracksys.co.uk/product-details.php?id=20

Guys, we need to talk! Using google hangouts!

http://www.google.com/intl/en/hangouts/

We have used google hangouts for our group meeting since our mentor Raida recommended 

us to use it, very handy and high recommended for you to check where you are ( I mean project)
Even the biggest group in our class (yes, the huge astronautic group) can fit it the "chat room", google hangout allows up to 9 people to meet simultaneously, simply log in and try it out!

[eye tracker] Test on Tobii X120 eye tracker

The weather is okay outside so I decide to reach Tobii the eye tracker located somewhere on campus.

Don't know why the door shutting me down from time to time, after some waiting and talking I finally get the access to the system.

Since I am the only one in the lab so I have to be the subject for the testing of the system, and it works well! The image above is the screenshot I made from the section that I tryout the website of Kingston University. It's a heatmap for an intuitive, easy way for the researcher to understand where the participant is looking or not.

I also learned we have to mount the special mounting board to hold the device and and extra arm for the camera to capture the eye motion on other mobile devices I metioned yesterday, we will see if we need to do the extra part of research or not.

Glad to know Tobii works well and I have some fun play with it!
You can do it, simple and easy, just don't forget to bring a flash drive with you, the exported video size is quite big!

[eye tracker] interesting clip of previous study by Dr Jo Van Herwegen at Kingston University's Department of Psychology

Oh, cute baby! (Watch the clip and you will know why I say so.)
Dr Jo Van Herwegen mentioned she will consider integrate monitoring brain activity and eye tracker together to get better research data, I think we are on the right track because we have that idea in mind as well and about to put into practice! 

I will be going to play with the Tobii eye tracker a bit tomorrow while our UX strategy, Shaleen going to find out the functions of Neurosky and UX architect, Dave on his way to reach the facial recognition software. Looking forward to it and I will bring my tablet and phone to see if the Tobii system can work well while I operating the website on those devices. We haven't included multi-platform tasks on our branded UX evaluation at the moment, however, know the function and equipment better will definitely benefit our up coming testing task.

http://www.tobii.com/en/eye-tracking-research/global/products/hardware/tobii-x60x120-eye-tracker/

UX Content Role Redefined

The specific task for UX content role in this teamwork context would be listed as follow:

Investigate brands and industries to better fit our aim: evaluation of branded UX

Produce Usability Testing related documents such as target audience profiling, personas, metrics etc.

Produce and develop the material for the testing method UX architect comes with 

Work closely with UX architect producing content for better wire-frames/ prototype delivery

Shift from Cars to Smartphones

After the 1st presentation and discussion with Vesna and other classmates we concluded that cars won't match our user group and the personas so we changed to mobile phones/smart phones and the brands we selected were likewise:

1. Apple
2. Samsung
3. HTC