Team:Wellesley TheTech/Outreach/Methodology
METHODOLOGY
Our team applied a user-centered design process (UCD) when developing BacPack for New Frontiers. This procedure focuses on the user's’ needs and ultimately creating the most intuitive and user-friendly product. After researching users’ pre-existing knowledge and intuitive behaviors, we edit product designs accordingly to make our software more intuitive and accessible, rather than requiring users to conform to an unfamiliar format. At the end of each new iteration, our team conducts user studies to ensure we are building the most effective and user-friendly product. Following, we describe prior research we conducted on designing museum exhibits, four major prototypes, the user feedback we received on their design, and the changes we made to better fit users’ goals.
Following, we describe prior research we conducted on designing museum exhibits, four major prototypes, the user feedback we received on its design, and the changes we made to better fit users’ goals.
To ensure that our museum exhibit could be user-friendly and educational, we consulted other researchers exploring the design and use of interactive technology to create innovative learning experiences, such as Mike Horn, director of Northwestern’s TIDAL Lab, and Stephanie Houde, principal designer of Houde Interaction Design. We drew design concepts from TIDAL’s DeepTree exhibit, a multi-touch tabletop interface that allows users to explore an interactive visualization of the Tree of Life, as well as their multiplayer exhibit Fishing with Friends, where visitors play in a simulated fishing environment to learn about overfishing. We were also inspired by the focus of creature creation from The Boston Museum of Science’s Virtual Fishtank exhibit, which allows visitors to create and deploy personally engineered creations into a communal environment to see how different combinations of traits in fish interacted with one another.
In addition to visiting current museum exhibits, We also studied literature including Humphrey’s Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement, papers by Alissa N. Antle, and research paper “Designing Visible Engineering: Supporting Tinkering Performances in Museums”. We received additional advice from our instructors Romie Littrell and Anja Scholze, both museum curators and exhibit developers. Our team also consulted synthetic biologists such as Natalie Kuldell, founder of BioBuilder, and other iGEM team to understand basic synthetic biology concepts how to incorporate accurate scientific procedures into our design.
We began the decision process knowing that we wanted users to have a space to go through an abstracted and simplified synthetic biology procedure, and a separate environment where they could deploy their engineered bacteria. Our first prototype featured single-person stations, the option to “test” your bacteria in the workspace before sending it to the environment, and a “friend” who displayed instructions and feedback (see image). We also had a “Challenge Button” where the friend would ask users to create specific combinations (see image). Users were given a clipboard with information about their particular environment to give users hints about what kind of combinations would be beneficial to the environment, as well as a separate scanner where users could place tangibles and learn more about that particular BioBrick.
On June 18th, we presented this initial prototype to two young boys aged six and nine. Both were engaged and interested in the prototype, but it was clear that the premise was too broad and not intriguing enough. The testers suggested making the “Challenges” more difficult, as well as possibly incorporating video clips into the exhibit. Our team also decided to shift the focus from helping the friend to how the users’ bacteria changed the environment. To highlight the impact the bacteria had, we added status bars which displayed the amount of resources in the environment. We also wanted to optimize the number of users per screen and increase collaboration between multiple users, so we began to brainstorm ideas on designs that would allow multiple users to work at once.
One month later, we met up with the BU and MIT iGEM teams where we presented a newly updated prototype featuring four work stations and a focused goal of seeing how users’ bacteria affected the environment. The users all responded positively, stating that they could definitely imagine the exhibit as an official installment in a museum. This evaluation was extremely helpful, as we observed and received feedback on many possible ways that the exhibit could grow.
Firstly, the team members recommended including some introduction to synthetic biology for potential users coming in with less experience in the field, as well as explicit instructions giving feedback and advice at each step of the process. They also noted that they wanted to differentiate their personally engineered bacteria from those designed by others. In response, our team added a video introducing synthetic biology and the iGEM competition (created by the IONIS team) and instructional text beside the petri dish that would reduce confusion and clearly state the abstracted scientific process. We also added a color-coding feature to individuals’ bacteria and programmed the graphics to appear in a particular location in the environment based the bacteria’s engineered activities. The bacteria images also appear directly after users deploy their bacteria onto the environment so that users can more easily identify which bacteria is theirs.
About a week later, our team conducted a user study with fifty MIT-Wellesley Upward Bound students. At this point, our updated prototype now featured the color-coded bacteria and explicit instructions that the BU and MIT teams had suggested. All students spent a lot of time happily tinkering to make multiple combinations, expressed pride at their creations, and were aware of and tried to make combinations to fulfill the status bars. They stated that they could definitely imagine this prototype as a museum exhibit.
Unfortunately, we noted that even with the clearly presented instructions, many students still largely ignored the instructions and then seemed unsure about how to proceed. Students also echoed the BU/MIT teams’ desire for an informational synthetic biology video. As a result, we decided to add a tabbed “Information” section that would clearly display instructions right next to users’ workstations, play a video about synthetic biology and iGEM, and display information about BioBricks’ source and the team that engineered it. With this final prototype, we were ready to begin formal evaluations.
