The weight scale: An exersice in restraint
Imagine you are going to make a new lifestyle product that will be tested on a wide array of possible users. Think of all the products that are already out there, and how far we have come with personalisation of technology. Now, imagine being handed the task of creating and testing a new type of weight scale, it doesn’t matter what it’s for, but it can not be connected to any other devices or the internet. Could you do it?
Where do we start?
Starting this usability project, four students from NTNU Gjøvik were baffled at the concept of creating something inovative and have it be completely offline. These days anything cutting edge has an app or a seperate gadget that somehow connects everything to you and who you are in some way or another. Your TV is connected to your Google which records your search history, your latest Youtube videoes, your email and so on. Your smart watch is connected to its app that records all kinds of things going on in your body. Maybe that app is connected to another one, the one you use to compete with buddies riding your bike to work, the results of which are posted on Facebook. You get the idea, everything is connected. So, how can the four of us make something that is off the grid as it were, and still make it exciting?
First of all, our assignment was rather open, so we needed to decide on what we wanted to weigh. This sounds easy enough, but while brainstorming there was surprisingly a lot of good ideas that came up, and ultimately it became a case of killing your darlings. To make things easier we did not have to land on a spesific idea, after all this assignment was about user testing — we could simply let our users tell us. Our weight would not weigh people, it should be a scale for weighing food, in one way or another. That’s were we start.
Asking an expert
Wanting to focus on nutrition, we decided to have an expert tell us a bit about what they would typically do when helping a client. We had a personal trainer come in for an interview to tell us what he might use a weight scale for. Before starting the interview we had him sign a concent form, this is very important if you are taping the conversation, even if it’s just for personal use. In the interview, he told us that he doesn’t really use a scale in his work, but he had some great ideas about how his cleints might use one for messuring nutritional values in food. A lot of his clients are trying to better their health with diet and exercise, and he said having a tool to help them do that might be benefitial. He also said focusing on a health aspect is what he would do, because there is a lot of detail that goes into building a spesific diet with the purpose of preventing og bettering an illness or intolerance. This information was really interesting, so we took all his feedback and went on tonterviewing potential users.
Interviewing more people
Having a good idea what our scale should be used for, we wanted to get some feedback from potential users. Interviewing health personel seemed like the best option to get constructive feedback and ideas for our scale. This group of individuals might want to use a weight scale for nutrition purposes in the treatment of patients. Eventually, we managed to get 4 interviews in. However, we quickly figured out that we needed to conduct more interviews on regular people without a health background, as we found out that they would be our target audience.
Workshop
Next up was to conduct a workshop and we did it in a small room at Deichman Tøyen. Even though with fewer participants than advised, our participants were able to conduct a fruitful discussion with many ideas. Before the group entered the workshop, we had generated an idea in our head that we had pictured we would continue to build on after the workshop. This was to create a personal weight that followed you through the day, that you could tell it what you ate, and it would calculate your intake throughout the day and give you feedback when you had reached your goals. However, we never revealed this idea to our participants. We learned that it was great to bring props, such as the physical kitchen scales we had brought just to start conversation and for the participants to brainstorm around. Because of the feedback from our workshop, we put aside the personal aspect of the kitchen scale and continued building on the idea of a recipe database in addition to the nutritional database and weight.
The physical prototype came together after several suggestions were brought up by our test user at the workshop. This included that it was waterproof, had a separate screen for the display, and was wireless. They also wanted the opportunity to bring the scale on the go, which required a long battery life. If we had been closer to campus in Gjøvik, we would probably consider 3D-printing our prototype, but as all the group members are based in Oslo, this was no option, and we therefore were only able to make a low-fidelity prototype for the looks of the scale. However, this gave us more time focusing on the interface of the scale. We created the interface in Adobe XD, but as we were pushing the time limits, we were only able to create parts of the interface. The design was kept simple, and followed out visual profile. Since the color green is associated with being healthy, we figured this would be a great color for us to use.
User testing
For the usability testing, two of our group members decided to jump on the boat back and forth to Nesodden to recruit people for our user test. In order to get the people to join the testing, we bribed them which Twist chocolate. We asked them questions about their interest in nutrition, food, and how often they used a kitchen scale. We then wanted them to test out our product, and had set up 3–5 tasks they needed to complete while resonating out loud. We did this, because we wanted to see how they interacted with the interface we had made, and the prototype consisted of a piece of paper and a high fidelity prototype on an iPhone 4S.
The design
The design for the prototype were held neutral, but after the user testing we understood that it needed a colour to make the interaction points popp. Green is a color associated with health, so we used this as our accent color, two shades gives the design more depth. Having the rest of the scale in neutral high contrast colors gives it a clean look. The fonts we used are a modern and easy to read fonts San Francisco. We used SF Pro Text on all main text, SF Compact Display where the font were bigger than 20 pt and SF Compact Text where there was little space for text as in Select. We checked that the colors selected had enough contrast for visually impaired by using a program called Colour Contrast Analyser.
Final thoughts
This project was a real challenge all the way. First off, trying to come up with an idea for a product such as this was both very random, but also limited by what we could actually test in the end — especially since the product could not be connected to other devices or services. Many ideas came and went, great ones at that, but our testing and prototyping made them all redundant or irrelevant as work went on.
It was a shame we were not able to make a medium fidelity physical prototype, this would have been really fun to test out. The assignment did ask us to make product, and we did so in the beginning of the project, asking our testers to give us their ideas and possible needs, but when it came down to producing the prototype in physical form, we came short. This had to do with both the lack of facilities with equipment and time. However, we did the best we could with what we had, and given the initial scepticism of the task at hand, this product actually ended up being something we might ourselves consider buying.
