UI Design for P.K.E. Meter

ABOUT THIS ON-GOING PROJECT

Academic Project: Screen UI Design for P.K.E Meter

Course: User Interface Prototyping and Development

Semester: Spring 2016

Prompt: Design a UI-based screen for P.K.E Meter (a fictional ghost searching tool).

Team Members: 1

My Roles: user and environment research, Ideation and brainstorming, interaction design, iteratively working on developing low, medium, and high-fidelity prototypes, and video presentation.

DESIGN PROCESS

Step 1: Data Gathering

(1) User analysis. In order to have in-depth understanding of the meter user, the more detailed facts can be collected, the better. Questions such as Q1 - What do you know about your user?, Q2 - What do you not know about your user? (things you wish you knew) should be considered. Ideas for things such as age, gender, culture, language, ability, education (reading level) are all valuable. 22 facts were collected.

(2) Task analysis. Identified several tasks that the meter user performs using the device and listed steps that are needed to complete each task. This is to plan the task analysis drawing. I've identified two major tasks : 1) find ghost. 2) examine subject.

(3) Environmental analysis. Wrote down the environment where the user-device interaction occurred such as lighting conditions, sound conditions, temperature, or moisture. This rule can be applied to other devices to be prototyped. In the case of the P.K.E meter, it can be used in a variety of envrionments.

Step 2: Brainstorming

After analyzing the collected data from user and envrionment of the meter, I needed to figure out where to put the screen and the size of the screen via brainstorming. The purpose of brainstorming is to create something new, solve problems, find new users for existing thing, and break out of tranditional thoughts. Since the original P.K.E meter already has a small screen on the front of the device, I tried out individual and group ideation techniques to generate ideas on the things I could consider to re-design the screen interface. Ideas generated include : 1) enlarge the screen to a mobile phone size; 2) it will be a front screen; 3) the material of the screen should be waterproof; 4) the screen displays the information such as the GPS ordinates, color-coded paranomral types, the heat degree of the ghosts, entity filter, sound mute, voice recording, camear, falshlight, siren warning light, and the screen should be bluetooth enabled; 5) the device should have nice feedback such as buzzes, vibrating, or voice commands when the target is close or found, etc.

Step 3: Prototyping

Before moving on to the low-fidelity prototyping, it's important to decomposite each task into steps and create a detailed task analysis for how user uses the screen to complete each task.

Task Analysis - Task 1 : Find ghost

Task Analysis - Task 2 : Examine subject

(1) Low-fidelity prototyping: sketching with pencil and paper prototypes.
Pros: rapid, easily iterate, cheap, programming skills not needed; Cons: not interactive, organization needed.

(2) Medium-fidelity prototyping: create interactive prototypes in PowerPoint.

Pros: familiar to many people, more interactive than paper prototypes, flexible (ubiquitous - supports animation text, images, and video), inexpensive, easy to share, stable (isn't going away anytime soon); Cons: gets complex when many slides are involved.

(3) Medium-fidelity prototyping - desktop UI: https://invis.io/A36VNOEJ4

(4) Medium-fidelity prototyping - mobile UI: https://invis.io/UG6RKE38T

THE CHALLENGE

P.K.E Meter is a fictional tool appeared in move "Ghostbusters" and there is limited information regarding the screen. Therefore, good user research and idea generation via brainstorming builds a firm foundation for the following prototype design.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Design is an interative and fun process!

Group ideation is powerful but needs a good facilitator.

Creating a clean and functioning task analysis is iterative and thus documentation and annotation is important.

Technologies and prototyping tools are evolving fast, making it essential to adapt to ever-changing design trends.