Bake-off 1
Overview: Group project for Designing Human Centered Software, designed program to make it faster and easier for users to click target squares in a 4x4 grid
Role: Designer & Project Manager
Tools: Java & Processing
Team members: Jason Pan, Mingkang Li
Duration: 2 weeks
Problem Space
There are many situations where there are several targets a user can click on a screen, such as the home screen of a phone or laptop or a design software.
Goal
Our task was to make it as fast as possible for users to correctly click targets in a 4x4 grid while keeping all target squares equally clickable at all times. We also had to take trackpad input, with the option of also taking keyboard input.
Features
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mapped the grid to keyboard letters usually controlled by the left hand; user presses the corresponding key, then clicks the trackpad to submit
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in this way, we were able to take advantage of users' typing ability, since this is a skill that most people practice every day. Users are already familiar with how to accurately press these keys
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implemented a look-ahead of one key to help the user speed up the process
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showed next key in 2 ways:
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Piano Tiles style where it scrolls vertically to show the next key
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if user is familiar with the game, this might be easier for them
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visually mapped to the grid
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may be more intuitive for users
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used colors to increase visual feedback
Prototyping
First round prototypes
Discarded 2nd round prototype
Final thoughts
This project was really fun since we had a lot of ideas we wanted to implement, so we did a lot of user testing to pick our final design. One of the designs we had to discard was to divide the trackpad into 16 regions and have the user press the corresponding regions of the trackpad. My teammate Jason was super fast with this design, but unfortunately everyone else's error rate was too high and we didn't end up using it for the bake-off.