<div dir="ltr"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 10:29 AM, Mel Chua <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:mel@laptop.org">mel@laptop.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Thanks for the writeup, Frances! Ccing the testing list in case anyone's curious about how things went. (Also, the kid-testing was Joe's idea; I just got it to happen at the Museum this Saturday.)<div class="Ih2E3d">
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There were a number of volunteers at the scene<br>
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Note - the Boston-area OLPC group (MassXO) runs this station at the Museum every Saturday from 1-4, so we were really piggybacking off their event. ;)</blockquote><div><br>As a volunteer with MassXO (and not as an OLPC'er) I've also been attending the Museum for the past few months.<br>
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The questionnaire was much too long and detailed. We never even got anyone using it as we decided early on that this particular day should be our observation day where we see what the foot traffic is like, get a sense of what the students like and see how the testing may work in this given environment...our "baseline" in a sense.<br>
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That's good to know too - I really didn't expect the questionnaire to work as planned; it was to give us a strawman to try out things against, and something to do/observe by default if nothing else was going on (clearly something else did happen). Hopefully now we have a better sense of what kind of questions we can ask experts who do this kind of testing for a living; they can help us design and tune these tests (and others) to get us the kind of data that we want. Speaking of which...<br>
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Frances - since we now know what kind of information we couldn't capture (with the procedures as they stand), what kinds of information do you think we could (or did) capture at this kind of location? Once we know this, we can decide whether it's worth trying this again (if it's info that we want and warrants the effort we're expending).<div class="Ih2E3d">
</div></blockquote><div><br>I'm pretty convinced that this particular setup with museum is not going to give us an useful feedback or testing data. See below:<br><br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Its a great environment for introducing our program to folks who may or may not have heard of us, but may not be the testing ground we were hoping for.<br>
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My hope is that whatever we work out for this kind of setting won't be reliant on one person or another being there, but that we'll have instructions that a group of people (perhaps with a particular background) can set up and run themselves - that way other groups in other places can eventually do this too.<br>
</blockquote><div><br>This is a good idea, providing more strawman structures for testing groups to follow, tear-down, or rebuild is a an excellent one. Especially helping testing groups to try things in new locations and in new ways.<br>
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One arrangement that might work better (thinking off the top of my head here) is to keep the XO demo table as a free and open space with intro volunteers helping people play with the laptops, as they are now - and then have a separate table in the corner set off as a "testing lab," with 1-2 XOs and a volunteer that's been trained beforehand on some basic UI test cases (and ask researchers from a UI test lab to help us figure out some simple cases they can run).<br>
</blockquote><div><br>This might work a bit better, anything we do at the museum is going to have to be very off-to-the-side.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
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Have a sign-up sheet on the "XO fun" table where people can sign up for, say, 15min test slots in "the lab," where they'll be guided through the process; they'll be dedicated to being in "test mode" since that's what they signed up for, and a single researcher that's trained on how to carry out this experiment beforehand can get a lot more focused data that we want in a planned, timed session than people passing by the table will be inclined to write down.<br>
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Thoughts?<br><font color="#888888">
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-Mel<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br><br>This is the layout/arrangement at the MIT Museum. In the main lobby of the museum, there are a number of interactive exhibits, including underwater submarines, live fish, and a city-car simulation. This is a fairly small space that people wonder through and then make their way to the longer-term exhibits upstairs.<br>
<br>Parents, grandparents and children wonder through this space, and see that there is an active table and chairs with people behind it, and cute little laptops. People are moderately interested in the program, grab a tri-fold brochure, look at the laptop a minute, and then move to other exhibits. Some fraction of those people stick around for longer and really want to hear about OLPC and about the XO. They want to know how it's different from a 'real laptop' they want to know how the collaboration works, and they want to know what software it comes with. They stick around to ask a few more questions and then they leave. If their kids are interested in the laptops while their parents talk to the nice volunteers then the kids stick around.<br>
<br>You're able to engage the children for at-most 10 minutes, while answering questions to their parents. It's just not the right environment to ask people to do anything formal or to restrict what they're doing.<br>
<br>Also, for the most part fairly-well-off kids at a nice museum in the US are not our target market. Trying to make any sort of assumption based on what <i>these</i> children do in a short amount of time would be even less informative.<br>
<br>And lastly trying to have these weekly information sessions serve OLPC feels really tacky and likely to hurt our relationship with the MIT Museum. They are in the business of fostering knowledge and information sharing. It just so happens that they like OLPC and want to spread knowledge about what we're doing. If they start trying to get their customers to do formal and (for children) boring testing, they're going to lose customers.<br>
<br>This idea needs some rethinking before we drop it on the Museum staff and volunteers.<br><br>--Seth<br><br><br><br></div>