Hello again! This weeks brings us to actual user studies that we managed to conduct through a bunch of interviews and some questionairies. But first, let us talk about segmentation and why is it important.
Segmentation
In short, we have to look up to our potential user base and define the segments of the related area that we target withour robotics project. Thus, we decided focus on educational environment with 3 different user groups/segments: students, teacher and researchers of the field. Each segment recieved own persona that stablished the initial imagery and description of the segment overall for future reference.
Common characteristics:
- Part of the university environment
- Deeply involved into learning and teaching process and methods
Each persona (on pictures below) also contains background to an issue or situation that is targeted by our product to solve.
Students (responsible member - Pavel):
Students (responsible member - Pavel):
Interested in the learning process and eager to use effective means to progress effectively through the studies.
Teacher (responsible member - Aparajita):
Guiding the student thorugh the whole learning process and utilizes teaching methods in order to achieve it.
Researcher (responsible member - Ilaria):
Interested in the R&D of the robotics and its application to the various areas and environments, including educational instututions.
It is also essential to present what kind of other stakeholders could be involved. For this purpose we used Power/Interest grid that demonstrates the spread of such stakeholders based on their potential power/influence and interest in the subject.
Now speaking about actual field work, we decided to stick to the methods listed in the beginning of the post. This activities were involving students, teaching and researching staff with some outsiders related to IT. There were conducted several rapid interviews and couple of structured ones alongside with an anonymous 5-point Likert online questionarie for a quick feedback and overall mood on the topic.
Questions in the interviews were based on emotional response on robotics as a whole, actual implementation (e.g. what kind of features participant would like to see and what problems to solve), is the idea of the robotics itself worth to explore in the context of the education and what kind of appearance would likely be suitable for such assistant.
Result of the interviews were hard to generalize on some degree due to the spread of types of users got involved into the interviews (master students, teachers, researchers). Most of the issues that may be resolved are basically related to following directions: campus navigation, engagement into learning in classroom and team management (for students), paper work (grading and feedback gathering - for teachers).
Desirables on other hand were following: aside from solving problems above (which can be generalized as a multitasking), potential robotic assistant should also be emotionally empathizing towards human and appearance should not generate or represent threat or fear (small sized and non-human-ish appearance is the key to resolve this).
Questionaire was proven useful time management-wise and results are much easier to interpret, though amount of participants were quite low (only 3). Results:
- All participants agrees on the usefulness of robotics in the future
- 2 out of 3 agrees on utilization of the robots outside university (home, work, ...), 1 remained neutral
- Pretty even spread (1 for each) was noticed across the answers (disagree, neutral, agree) to the statement that considers the importance of human-like appearance for the perception of users.
- Voice-based controls as a primary were prefered by 2 participants, while 1 was not fond of such idea.
- 2 out of 3 participants agrees on the fact that physical interaction with the robot could be proven useful alongside with the voice commands.
Materials and links:
- Questionnaire - https://goo.gl/forms/1dzNkGtgUMEmTcru1
- Interview questions - compiled from pre-tasks #3 of each team member
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