An update

Long time no journal! it is currently week 41, approximately 2 weeks since my last post. Around the end of week 39, after the “failure” of my first round of interviews.

TL;DR, the brief provided to me was that there’s an increased importance of hand hygiene due to the pandemic and there’s been a demand for touchless screens from clients that manufacture screens for different services. When I interviewed around 17 people however, only 4 people returned about noticing a difference in behavior when interacting with touchscreens, 3 of which only noticed mild changes, and 1 noticing an extreme change.

At this point, I felt kind of stuck. How am I going to make valuable design decisions if it’s not exactly backed up by research? I looked to Thomas for help again, and he proposed discussing this matter with his boss. Temporarily he recommended to not focus so much about the pandemic aspect of influence, but just in general, so for the last few interviews (out of those 17) I rephrased some of the questions, changing the “change in behaviour” questions to a more general one, e.g, not saying “has it changed since the pandemic broke out”, and instead saying “has it changed at all in recent years?”, this motivated richer responses as it was more open to interpretation. For example, one of the interviewees mentioned that she was more familiar with the logic behind touchscreens and even though in the beginning she struggled with these machines a lot, she eventually got used to it. This showed that even though touchscreens have once been a struggle to utilize, the interaction eventually became deeply engrained in its user’s minds. If touchscreens took some learning, what about new interactions we propose?

Thomas came back the next day and proposed a new context that hopefully could inspire me in my process. The context he proposed was the flow of using in-flight infotainment screens. Ever since the pandemic broke out, concerns of being in an enclosed space where air gets circulated and recycled constantly for the span of the flight time arose. One thing that’s common on long-distance flights are infotainment screens— these touch screens you have attached to the seat in front of you where you can interact, either with your fingers or with a remote (both requiring you to “dirty” your hands). In the wake of the pandemic, potentially introducing gesture control into these screens could be an interesting area to explore.

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With a more specific “context” in mind, I felt like I finally had a direction. During the interviews, somebody had actually mentioned these infotainment screens, and how they didn’t dare touching it since the virus broke out. I thought to implement some flight screen focused questions into interviews:

• Have you had a long flight experience? What do you usually do on flights like these?
• Have you encountered infotainment screens onboard these long flights?
• What do you think about them in general?
• How do you think they can be improved in general?
• What other services do you wish to be included in the infotainment screens in addition to “information” and “entertainment”?
• What do you think about the process of “ordering food” on board a long flight?
• Have you ever shopped duty free on board a long flight? How was it carried out? Do you think that interaction can be improved somehow? Do you think it needs to be improved?
• Back to the screens, imagine if you could board an aircraft for a lengthy flight now, do you think your attitude/behavior with them will have changed?
• Imagine not being able to “touch” the screen, what other interactions can you imagine being used instead? (e.g pressing buttons, swipe left swipe right) How would you maneuver these actions?

Since then, I was only able to interview four people where some of these questions were implemented. However, Thomas didn’t want the project to be solely focused on this context, it simply acts as a direction, or an example, for where there’s been a demand for touch-less interactions, to help widen the scope a bit. I therefore decided to move on from asking questions in interviews, and took a different direction, prototyping!