Paper prototyping and what I will be doing at KUL

It turns out the I'm learning good stuff about HCI in my stay at KUL. On the one hand I am following the course at Stanford (not at the rate I'd like); and on the other hand, the people in here really believes in the methodology (I remember the discussion I had with them about the utility of paper prototyping).

OK, so... what am I going to do here? Let's see! Narrowing the possibilities, I came up with two options: create data visualization for students including some gamification concepts anda data portraits, and create more complex visualizations for teachers, using complex techniques and a multitouch table as the backing for the collaboration of several teachers in a course.

Let's start from the second idea (the least mature one). Given the dataset I collected in a Multimedia Applications course, I'd use a to-be-defined visualization (like this d3 plugin or this d3 based library of reusable components) to present the data in a way that a teacher (or group of teachers) were able to take advantage of the data in order to improve the course. And then I have to explore the use of the the tabletop for the teachers to collaborate. More detailed information about the table is in this Bram's post.

Regarding the second idea, about visualization for students and data portraits, I started the to use the HCI methodology from the beginning. Firstly, in order to concretize the ideas I wanted to explore and establish a common artifact for sharing my ideas: I drew a storyboard that tells the story behind my project. I shared it with a couple of colleagues and I think it works well for its purpose.

And then, paper prototype time! At first, I didn't believe much in it but helped me in two ways: firstly to concretize a interface before programming it (I usually start programming and have some hints of what I want in the UI, but not it completely defined!); and secondly, because it helped me to explore several possibilities for the UI, since I had a general idea for the UI but let me explore and validate other possibilities.

I started with a prototype consisting of a list of portraits with the data of the students over them, and ordered according to their activity in the course (a weighted sum of several components, like progress in the sessions, attendance, questions and answers, and work from home). The weight of every component had to determined in the design of the gamification strategy: for example, +10p for finishing a section in the assignment, +1p for connecting to the assignment (maximum once a day, and an extra for connecting from home a day different of the face-to-face session) and +2p for questions and answers. Another good visual info was to blur the faces of the students that were bad in the course, to indicate that they were not completely enrolled to the course (thanks Joris!).

Next prototype, is similar but use a dock-like metaphor (Mac's dock) for positioning the students in a row, that again indicates their activity.

But, lately I have been attracted for the aesthetics (what is important according to the experts) of the circle-like visualizations. Moreover, this kind of visualization could be identified with a darts target, what brings more context for a game. It also can show clearly which students are in the good track and which one are out of it. I showed that to who I think will be my main collaborator in this project, and I think really liked it too.

Finally, I had to design an interface for the detailed info about the participants. I had the idea of using something similar to Big Brain Academy, but I have to think a bit about the variables that I want to represent and what is the relation between them to put them together. I have another couple of ideas to work with (visualization of the students working in distance sessions to provide virtual presence and elaborate more on the gamification of the activities).

Finally, I have developed a simple mockup of the app that will be completed these days using the target and my picture :) After finish, time to evaluate it again. That's what I learnt: continuos feedback is as good for students as it is for researchers/designers. See yap!

I write only in June!

It's a fact: I write in this blog only in June. I spent like a year to go back to the blog and write something "interesting".
Right now I'm in Leuven, doing a research stay with Prof. Erik Duval. Right now, my main concern is to find out very concrete aspects to collaborate with the "ariadne" lab people. Last week, I gave a short presentation about my PhD stuff and raised 3 topics for collaboration:

• visualization of students data: I've collected a great amount of data during a experiment in class using classON; in order to make this data useful, I wanted to come up with nice visualization to make the data useful for teachers and students. I can distinguish two different scenarios: a) visualize in class (synchronous) what has to be very simple and straightforward (teacher and students are carrying out a task and the visual info is just a support); and b) visualize after the class, or even after the course (async), what could be much more elaborated and teachers/students could devote more attention to the artefact.
• gamification: as classON collects different types of data, a useful purpose is making use of it to engage students. I'd have to analyse some gamification strategies and patterns, but I had in mind that the goals/badges/medals/whatever should be granted based on the history of the individual, e.g., if an individual demonstrates improvement on his regular activity.
• use case: the last topic I proposed was to use classON in a course at KUL. The idea was not so well received, since it is designed of a scenario where the resources are scarce (the teacher's time to provide feedback) and that doesn't seem to happen in here. At the end, it could be used in a couple of sessions of different courses maybe...

Next step was to talk to each of the people in here, and propose them more concrete topics, relevant both for them and for me. After a few talks, I found 2 main topics of interest, both related to data visualization.

Firstly, try to exploit the relation between STEP UP! and classON, since both of them have commonalities: both are tools that provide awareness about what's happening in a course, and use visuals to transmit this info to the students/teachers. But they have also different approaches, since classON uses data related to progress, questions and question ratings; and stepup! makes use of more social data, like blog posts, comments on the blogs, tweets, toggle (time on activity report), etc. In this line, we envisage a couple of common interests: a) utility of the data types we collected for students and/or teachers; and b) utility of different visualizations for students/teachers (namely, data portraits, data tables, widget dashboard, etc). Besides, I want to explore another dimension that is the utility of visuals in class (sync) or after it (async). We'll see.

Secondly, we're trying to figure out common interests with a work for visualizing of the data collected in TiNYARM (papers read, toread, skimmed, etc.) in a community of research. Again, the data collected is "more social" and the subsequent SNA could be applied over it, but again there's a common ground on techniques we want to use (concretely, in the classon visualizations after the class for teachers/students to appraise what really happened and hints for improvement the learning activities). In this case, we roughly thought about a visualization like this one in order to represent questions and answers (instead of foo and bar), or papers read and recommended.

To sum up, on the one hand we have two groups of stuff: a set of types of data, and a set of visualization tools/techniques; on the other hand, we have two dimensions: target group (teachers/students), and synchrony of application (sync/async). Objetive: let's match of all these!