Week 10/Week 11 - Iterative Reflection | CPT208_B4_Porfolio by CPT208_2223_B4

In this section, we perform a thorough review of what we have done till this stage. 

1. Design Goal: we have discovered the main issue we would like to solve which can be summarized as helping people understand ancient characters in depth (the Oracle Bone Inscriptions for a typical example)

Specifically, the aims can also be listed in the following bullet points:

• Wide range: design and develop a learning platform that supports learning multiple pictographic genres that are used in different countries
• Decryption: Apply light-and-shadow technology that allows users to manipulate virtual light sources to reveal hidden messages and finish the decryption.
• Immersion: Create an immersive virtual reality environment that replicates ancient sites where pictographic scripts were used for user to explore.
• Attraction: Attract at least 1,000 active users within one year and receive positive user reviews and word-of-mouth reputation.

2. Intended Target Users: The intended groups of users have been described in the following personas:

Erick Purwanto: A middle-aged, foreign professor teaching in China, interested in ancient languages, Oracle Bone Inscriptions especially. But have no or less knowledge of Chinese culture. 

Yue Li: A Chinese youngster who certainly has a partial understanding of Chinese culture and an interest in learning and exploring ancient characters. 

Based on the persona, we drew the Empathy map and User journey map of our solution

Empathy map

User journey map

3. Existing work and issues

The detailed content of this section can be referred to in week 4's reflection on the journal.

Here is our basic structure of iteration in this group project:

Requirements:  At an early stage of this project, we have gradually made a concrete idea of the project, which is that we want to design a pictographic scripts popularization application using a special way that combines the elements of both education and entertainment. 

4. Iterations

Here is a list of the iterations we have gone through the process until now:

Discovering requirements: 

Previously, we have found the pain points that appear in the current market; and a further investigation of the potential clients has also revealed that they are longing for an innovative way of interaction that motivates them in the process of studying ancient characters.

Design:

Reason: Now that we have confirmed our basic ideas for this project, we need to implement an appropriate means of designing such that more users can appeal to our project. 

Iteration1: We have first investigated several real applications available in the market for now, focusing on those that implement similar elements that are used in our design, for example, light-and-shadow decryption, education with a visual aid, etc., and found out to what extent they followed Schniderman's 8 golden rules for UI design.

Iteration 2: Based on the designing principles we have considered in the first iteration, we have tried our best to make our project satisfy the above requirements as much as possible. Additionally, we have also made some new processes including the implementation of several personas, and user studies to gain a deeper insight into our intended users.

iteration 3:  We have further improved the interactivity of our product, by making insights into our currently intended means of interacting and making improvements and applying appropriate incorporations of different interaction methods.

Conclusion: We need to try to combine both elements of education and entertainment organically, integrate them with suitable design techniques and thus provide the users with a fully immersive and interactive experience.

Prototype:

Reason: Prototyping acts as a means to concretize our ideas into tangible models using which we could obtain feedback from the clients, and thus make continuous improvements on our product.

Iteration 1: During the period when we were figuring out what to achieve in our project, we carried out a simple demonstration of our ideas using a fairly low-fidelity medium, which is just a piece of stretch paper.

Iteration 2: We have created a gif using the software Tinkercad for a basic illustration of how our prototype works

iteration 3: In this step, we have implemented a high-fidelity version of the illustration using a more sophisticated software called Unity and simulated our expected scene to a greater extent.

Achievements: Through this iterative process we have gradually concretized our thoughts about what to show in our design and progressed gradually with the users' feedback we obtained in each iteration stage.

Evaluation:

Reason: The vital reason for evaluating is that we aim to develop a usable product that can be widely accepted by a large range of clients, thus we need to conduct an iterative and user-involved evaluation process to help us track the current process and make continuous improvements.

Iteration 1: For this step, we have utilized the relevant tools for heuristic evaluation we have seen in the lecture, with measures like distributing a questionnaire and conducting an interview with the public being taken to evaluate our design better. Then the data we collected was analyzed.

Iteration 2: Following the theoretical evaluation based on the principles we have learned in the first iteration, we have conducted a real experiment on a number of volunteers to figure out the best way to represent our product.

iteration 3: For this part, we have conducted a so-called 'field study' to investigate the users and figure out roughly their preferences and their reactions in a natural setting.  Then the data has been collected and analyzed thereafter.

5. Discussion and Conclusion

Discussion: We have incrementally built up a portfolio and a prototype during the semester, with constant evaluations applied at the same time to help us develop and improve our design. However, there are also some drawbacks in terms of our techniques used, such as a lack of integration of multiple methods for implementation. In our future work, we plan to collaborate the developed products with national archaeological institutions and antiquities bureaus. The NeRF [1] technology is used to scan archaeological remains or artifacts physically into scenes and objects in virtual scenes in order to give users a more realistic experience environment.

Conclusion: Throughout this iterative process, we have realized the significance of applying a continuous manner of evaluation in terms of our development of the project, since we obtain feedback and make reflections on our work in order to improve our future performance.

[1]Mildenhall B, Srinivasan P P, Tancik M, et al. Nerf: Representing scenes as neural radiance fields for view synthesis[C]//European Conference on Computer Vision. Springer, Cham, 2020: 405-421.