Week 9 Progress

These were our goals for this week:

• Continue Fabrication

  • Add more circuit and paper-based interactions to current pages

• Find more users to test with

  • Visit the library, contact friends

  • Look into getting quotes about project from parents

Fabrication

This week we made another pop-up page with a playground scene. From previous user tests, this 2D-illustration-to-3D-popup style is appealing to children of our age group, so we'll be keeping it for our final design with its simplicity.

We remade one of the pages to include a scrolling paper interaction. For our final book, we'll probably add a smooth film over it as a signifier that it is different from the rest of the illustration and may be interacted with, since right now it's not easy to tell that it has the ability to scroll:

We also experimented with conductive ink, where we can simply draw a circuit with a pen and have it power an LED. It seemed to work, but it was tricky to get a secure connection as it involved having to draw a thick, firm line without any scratchiness or gaps. Although nylon tape seems to be more reliable, this is a circuit-building method we may incorporate in our final book for more tricky connections.

User Testing

We tried to visit the library to find more children to test on, however we were told by a librarian that we needed to schedule a session to come in and conduct user tests. Here is the email request that we sent them (as of writing this post we haven't heard back yet):

From the one child we were able to hear from, they seemed to confirm that the circuit incorporated with the popup made the page cooler than just a regular popup or even just a paper-based interaction such as pull tabs.

Another option we're considering is making copies of our current pages and sending them to be handled by children out of state. This is a possibility if we can schedule a time with our contacts before the next rounds of user testing data is due.