Modification after Usertest

After the user tests we have had on Friday, our team were really engaged with fixing and changing stuff, that was criticized by the test subjects.

The following changes were made:

• slower down game action and ball speed; user has more time to react
• adding delete-button to the keyboard (in respect to the definition of usability phase "errors")
• replacing red-dot on user's hand with user ID
• new color scheme. more brightness 
• position of scores during the game are set father from the borders
• "misplaced text"- bugs are fixed
• paddles are bigger now
• change depth image to real background

We have set a real Background, so the users can see themselves playing the game and the control becomes more intuitive

Brighter color and better contrasts where set. Additionally, instead of the yellow progress circle on the right corner, we have put a progress bar directly into the action buttons .

The progress bar was also implemented for the keyboard. Additionally some animitions were added ( Pointing and Clicking Finger). Users can undo their inputs now, by clicking on "Delete" button

After applying users input by clicking on "Enter" , their name and play time where add to the score board

The new structure of our project

As mentioned we had rebuilt the whole structure of our project. The old "One-Class-Structure" was not designed for collaborative working. In a group which consist of 4 computer science students and 1 human factor student, its really hard to work on only one class. Besides this we only had 1 Kinect to test our application. To solve this problem we additionally add mouse control to our application. The following pictures show the packages as UML diagrams:

The package structure looks like:

pong
   - pong.feature
     |     pong.feature.Key
     |     pong.feature.Keyboard
     |     pong.feature.ProgressCircle
     |     pong.feature.Score
     |     pong.feature.ScoreBoard
     |     pong.feature.Soni
   - pong.gui
     |   - pong.gui.button
     |     |     pong.gui.button.ActionButton
     |     |     pong.gui.button.SelectionButton
     |     |     pong.gui.button.Button
     |   - pong.gui.pages
     |     |     pong.gui.pages.GamePage
     |     |     pong.gui.pages.MenuPage
     |     |     pong.gui.pages.Page
     |     |     pong.gui.pages.ScorePage
     |     |     pong.gui.pages.StartPage
   - pong.logic
     |     pong.logic.ArtificialIntelligence  
     |     pong.logic.Ball
     |     pong.logic.MovementProvider
     |     pong.logic.Paddle

Package Feature:

Package Gui:

Package Logic

Whole Project

User Tests

The tests were executed on Friday around 5 p.m. in a well-lit room in the TEL building. Our application was displayed on a 30" large display. Since our application is designed for large public displays, we preferred using a large display over notebook monitors for more accurate results.

We tested our application on two users. We asked the subjects to say their thoughts out aloud and took notes.

The subjects were asked to try and interact with the application, without prior knowledge of its contents. This task included understanding the purpose of each page of the application, understanding the icons, the buttons and the actions required to trigger these buttons, since one of our main goals is that our application is self-explanatory. We were also very interested in knowing how challenging the game is to the average user.

Our Subjects:
Carla, 23 years old, studies biology, has experience with gaming using the EyeToy on the Playstion 2, no experience with the Kinect.
Paul, 28 years old, studies chemistry, has gaming experience with both the Kinect and the EyeToy.

The subjects criticized the following features of our application:

• During the game, things happen too fast, so that the user has not enough time to decide for a proper action and react in time.
• The game concept is not identifiable
• The red paddle moves too slow
• On the border of the game, the behavior of the red paddle and dot are irritating
• The ball moves too fast
• The scoring system is not comprehensible
• There is no delete button on the keyboard in the high score page
• Having the red paddle and dot painted simultaneously on the user's hand is irritating
• The color scheme used throughout the game is not appealing
• The natural colored image is preferred over the depth image

Aside from the user feedback, the user test gave us also the benefit of reviewing our program once more. We noticed the following bugs in our application:
• when having more than 3 digits for scores, some of the digits are not properly displayed in the page and are misplaced
• after changing from the score page to the menu page, all of the displayed text is misplaced and shifted to the left.

For eliminating the detected bugs and a higher user satisfaction, we have planned the following modifications to our application:
• Using the normal color image instead of the depth image from the Kinect.
• Remove the dots that are drawn on the hands completely, or to replace them with the user ID
• Make the paddles bigger
• Make the ball slower
• Add delete button to the keyboard