Presentation and feedback

We continued the rest of the project including the final touches and decisions, the slides and what to say in the presentation remotely. We chose to start by explaining briefly the process of how we did the project and how we came up with the idea followed by the characteristics and design choices of the project. Some of the classmates, in the Q&A part, were not sure about the type of the interaction the user should have with a smartwatch when they are cooking, i.e. the hands would be dirty and greasy, therefore, swiping and touching the screen would not be a good idea and instead, we have to use sound or other ways to interact with the device. It is interesting how this makes a paradox with how one of the points we discussed in the beginning and made us choose this concept was dirty hands and using them on your laptop. Despite this somewhat fair critique, our teacher pointed out that this should not be a problem, the best and most preferable way to cook is when you either do not use your hands directly on ingredients as much as possible, or you clean your hands each time if you do. So according to him, this was not a problem at all. He mentioned one thing about the presentation itself and how it is unnecessary to go into detail of the process and that we should use the 5 minutes to talk about the actual “final” product/prototype. Other groups’ works were also interesting, the different ways they had made the wireframes and the prototype itself. The more specific the design concepts and scenarios, the more they made sense. Almost all of them were inspired by our everyday-life situations/problems, which makes the exercise we did on the first day (user journey) more valuable to me.

Although glanceable screens and devices are not very interactive, and one might say we, as future interaction designers, are not required to know about them, however, I think this was a good exercise to make us be more aware of what kind and how much information we should provide to a user depending on the situation, whether the interaction in a situation has to be an active one or glanceable and peripheral, to get familiar with the relationships between two or more screens and how that would work, and last but not least, ‘high interaction levels’ is not always a good thing or the best solution.