Home page

Student profile page

Employer profile page

Prototype of subscription page

Cancellation page

Cancellation feedback page

Introduction

The present day visual inspection of the aircraft is purely skill based, is time consuming, raises safety issues to the inspector, and there is also lack of the record of the inspection. The accuracy can be affected by inspector's boredom level, weather conditions and weariness. Images captured from the aircraft surface and presented to the inspector after enhancing the defects can make the visual inspection easier and accurate which in turn results in saving time, and ensures the safety of aircraft.

Problem Statement

Development and implementation of algorithms for the detection of surface defect (dents) in aircraft surfaces using image processing. It involves image acquisition, noise removal, background removal, phase wrapping, phase unwrapping and height mapping.

Objectives

The project aims to create a semi-automated system to perform dent detection on the surface of aircraft structures. The objectives include identification of dented regions; classification of the dents from surface features such as writings, markings, textures and patterns; and quantification of the detected dent.

Methodology

Use of 2D image processing using edge detection is not good enough for the detection of dents as dents deform the surface into the third dimension. The use of edge detection will also detect the surface features like writing, markings on the surface also as defects. This problem can be solved by trying to re-create the height information of the surface. Variety of ways are described in literature to carry out the profile mapping using optical profilometry. Fringe pattern based optical profilometry method is adopted in this study using 3-step Phase Shift which involves following steps:

1. Digital fringe projection
2. Image acquisition
3. Image processing
4. Fringe analysis
   • Phase detection
   • Phase unwrapping
5. Height mapping

Digital Fringe Projection involves projecting a fringe pattern onto the object surface. A sinusoidal fringe pattern is used as it has features that counter defocussing and is most apt to be processed by linear filtering. The setup consists of a projection unit, an acquisition unit and a processing or analysis unit. The images of the reference plane as well as of the object are captured with the camera, perpendicular to the surface of the plane or object, and the projector at an angle in the Image Acquisition step. The captured images contain the projected patterns on the reference and object surface. 3 phase shifted images are acquired per surface.

The images that are captured include the surface that needs to be tested as well as certain unwanted elements, such as the background, shadows and reflected light. Image Processing involves the pre-processing of the captured images to remove the aforementioned unwanted elements. Background removal is performed to improve computation time and avoid redundant processing. Fringe Analysis is the next operation performed on the pre-processed images. Fringe Analysis consists of 2 steps: (i) phase detection, and (ii) phase unwrapping. In phase detection, the image is analysed to produce a wrapped phase map distribution. An inverse tangent function is used to generate phase map from the intensity values of the captured images. The resultant map contains the localised phase values of the pixels. The recovered/estimated phase is obtained in the interval [- π, + π]. In general, true phase may range over an interval greater than 2π. In such cases, phase values contain artificial discontinuities. The process of determining the unknown integral multiple of 2π to be added at each pixel of the wrapped phase map to make it continuous by removing the artificial 2π discontinuities is referred to as phase unwrapping. Phase unwrapping is an important step with many pre-existing algorithms designed to perform the task. The unwrapped phase map obtained contains the true phase values at each pixel location. The phase values are then converted into depth information using Height Mapping. The dent is detected based on the height map, and then quantified to find the relative dent depth and area of the dented region. Calibration is needed to perform accurate image to real world coordinate transformation.
Unit testing, Integration testing and system testing were done to see if if all the modules are working correctly, individually and when they are integrated with other modules. Testing will also help remove bugs from the software. After testing all the modules, user interface was developed and the final touches to the software were made.

Publication

We also published a paper based on this research:
Augustin M.J, Archana Ramesh, Yaswi Jalan, Priyank Singh, Nitin Joy, Amit Gupta, Nitesh Gupta, “Adaptive Background Removal for Fringe Profilometry based Surface Inspection of Aircraft Structures”, National Seminar on Aerospace Structures XIX, February 23-25th, 2017, VIT University, Vellore India

Sine wave

Objective

The goal was to perform usability tests on the Bergen swamp preservation society website to identify the usability issues that existed in it. The main aim of the study was to make sure that the users could clearly understand and use all the features of the website.

Purpose

We were a team of 6 for this project, and we collaborated with the developer of the new Bergen Swamp Preservation Society website to go about with our usability studies. The main goal was to see if the user experience in the website mapped to the users conceptual model on how to use the website. The purpose was to detect all the usability issues related to the website and also get feedback from all the participants on the website and suggestions on how to improve the website.

Process

The Bergen swamp preservation society website had many functionalities in it like getting directions, calendar, events, photos and so on.
The first step in our usability testing study was to perform the heuristic evaluations on the website. Initially, all of the members in the group, individually used the different heuristics and all the gestalt principles to detect the usability flaws in the website; and we then merged all of our findings.
We created flyers to recruit 5 students from Rochester Institute of Technology for the study. All potential participants had to take the screener questions, using which we filtered the participants to select the 5 eligible students who visited websites related to nature and nature reserves. A 20$ Amazon gift card was given as a reward after the study to all the participants. Pilot tests were performed initially with 2 participants, using which test design was made and a test plan was formulated.
5 tasks were created and all of them were based on problem scenarios. These tasks were shuffled between all participants so that there is no transfer of knowledge between tasks and the tasks were counterbalanced.
The success criteria for each task was predetermined and decided upon by all the team members in advance. Qualitative analysis was performed using the data collected by asking the participants questions after each task, and Quantitative analysis was performed using the data collected by counting the number of clicks and the time taken for every task.
SUS scale was used to measure the usability of the system.

Setup

The usability tests were performed in the usability lab at B. Thomas Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences. There were two rooms, a testing room and an observation room. There was a one way mirror between them, where only the observers in the observation room could see the people in the testing room. The morae software (Morae-observer and Morae-observer) was used to record all the observations of the observers. There was a web camera and microphone used to record and listen to the participants. Based on the input, feedback and suggestions made by the participants; a report was written. We presented the whole usability study to the client and submitted the report with the recommendations and usability issues present in the website.

Results

Based on the intensive usability studies conducted on the Bergen Swamp Preservation Society website and the results gathered, the following suggestions were made:

• To replace the property icons with pictures or linking those icons to Maps/Photos.
• Segregating the photos in the photo gallery as to which properties was featured in the photograph.
• Making the “Become a Member”, “Visitor Request” more prominent in the main tab.
• Including the ‘Visitor Policy’ data in the ‘Visitor Request’ form or having the link to ‘Visitor Request’ form in the ‘Visitor Policy’ page.
• Adding more information about becoming a Member and what each membership type entails.
• Adding more information about the Swamp itself.
• Renaming the Favorite Links section as “Resources” or “Links” or moving it higher up on the homepage where it is easily visible.
• Moving the membership details to the ‘About us’ or to the ‘Contact Us’ section.

Introduction

Accoutre is a mobile application for dressing, that is aimed at providing suggestions and allowing its users to pick out clothes, either

based on the current weather outside, or the weather throughout the day, or/and

based on an occasion or an event that they are to attend, such as a party, wedding, interview, sports activity, and so on, scheduled on their calendar or in their emails.

All the major designing of the app was done using Adobe Photoshop.

Stakeholders

Primary stakeholders of our application would be the end users who own and use a smartphone, and ones who need help in picking out clothes based on the current weather outside, or an event they are to attend.

Contextual Inquiry

We conducted contextual inquiries for 12 participants in total. The interviews were conducted via video calls, or in person. We interviewed both male and female participants, between the ages of 20 to 60+ years, and who owned a smartphone. To ensure that the data we collected from our contextual inquiries came from a relatively diverse set of end users, each of our group members interviewed participants who were located at different geographical regions, with varying climates and weather conditions. The interviews also provided us with different scenarios for the type of occasions or events that the participants were most likely to attend or dress for.
We gathered important information about the factors influencing the daily routine of picking out clothes for our participants. Most users used a weather application on their smartphones to check the weather, and then proceeded with selecting their clothes. While a few users, mostly college students, picked out their clothes randomly. We also came across a user who took suggestions from their friends and family, to select their outfit for a special occasion or event. The interviews also provided us with different scenarios for the type of occasions or events that the participants were most likely to attend or dress for.

Problem Scenario

Each morning, Jenny wakes up and checks the calendar application and e-mail notifications on her phone. She then takes a shower, and randomly picks out clothes to wear to work. Since her office is 10 minutes away from her home, she usually walks to work. One day, on her way to work, it started to pour suddenly. Because Jenny was not prepared for the rain, and did not have a raincoat or an umbrella with her, her clothes and bag got completely drenched.

Design Scenario

Ever since Jenny started using the Accoutre app, she wakes up each morning and checks the app, along with other notifications on her phone. She then takes a shower, and wears the clothes suggested by the Accoutre app, based on the current weather outside, and/or an occasion or event she must attend, like a boarding meeting or a party. The app helps her pick out the appropriate outfit each time.

Introduction

In this study, users using Google maps were observed and problems faced by them related to its user interface were analyzed based on Normans and Gestalt principles (Principles of HCI). The major tasks involved field observations, contextual inquiry, conducting interviews, creating personas, story boarding and heuristic evaluations.

Process

In the first phase we performed field observations and interviews. Each one of us first observed people using Google maps on phones and laptops individually and noted down our observations. We discussed each one of our observations and then came up with a set of interview questions based on our observations.
In the later stage, each of us interviewed participants individually using the interview questions that we had decided. This interviews were to determine how users interact with the environment in real time and what are the problems they face.

The final step consisted of the creation of Problem and Design Storyboards. The design Storyboard/ Scenario would help us determine how the design improvement we have suggested would affect the problem scenario. Both text and graphical representation of storyboards were created.

Introduction

The Aim of the project was to perform heuristic evaluation of the Virginia’s EZ Pass website.

Process

The initial step was to perform heuristic evaluation on the website, and all the members of the team performed heuristic evaluation individually to identify the usability and accessibility issues in the website. We then discussed our findings and compiled them into a document which in total had 27 usability and accessibility issues found in the website.

Results

After evaluating the Virginia E-ZPass website, we concluded that it had various usability and accessibility issues that need to be fixed. Although none of the issues we found were considered catastrophic, there were many website issues regarding consistency of terminology and formatting, especially involving menu options, which could lead to confusion for users. Content and information are often displayed in a haphazard way with lengthy text sections and require simplification so that users can comprehend the content easily. The organization and hierarchy of the website is unclear, and further efforts to organize content in a more user-friendly way, perhaps by detailed task analysis or card sorting, would be beneficial. Although some effort has been made to make this website accessible, including the use of 'alt' tags, a 'skip to main content' link and closed captioning for videos; there is more work that needs to be done to make this site fully accessible, especially to those using screen readers. This website provides a valuable service to the drivers and passengers in Virginia, and should be improved to make E-ZPass tasks easier to accomplish for all users.

Introduction

Designed and developed a web application for the course outcome mapping system for R. V. College of Enginering, Bangalore. The scores obtained by the students for each cource were mapped to its outcomes, which helped in comparing the success rate of a student in fullfiling the course outcomes to the success rates of all other students for each course.

Details

Using web technologies like HTML, CSS, Javascript, HTML5, JQuery, Ajax and Bootstrap; we developed an application that would map the scores of each student to the outcomes of the courses he/she has taken. The student portfolio includes marks, attendance, certificates, tuition, grade point averages and other relevant information. The Course Outcome Mapping System performs batch segregation and assists the counsellors in tracking the performance of students with respect to marks, attendance and extracurricular activities. For instance it helps the faculty/student counsellors calculate the aggregate percentage scored by a student in an exam/group of exams in a semester individually and also helps in calculating the class average. This will help faculty see how their students are faring in exams and also assess a class overall. This will also help them make improvements or changes if necessary to their teaching style and also their way of setting question papers. The Course Outcome Mapping System also enables the parents to keep track of the performance of their wards and interact with counselors personally using the appointment scheduler included in the portal.

Introduction

The most common problem that big amusement parks face today is the huge crowd which lead to long wait times for the rides in the park. The wait times can be so long that people end up getting frustrated and they wish to never return to such amusement parks. Coaster Crunch app solves this problem by introducing a digital fast pass system as well as other additional features.

Problem

We all want to spend our leisure time with family and friends especially when we're loaded with work. A theme park is often one of the most favourite places for people to relax, have fun on the rides and forget their troubles for a brief period of time. But isn’t it exhausting to wait in a seemingly never ending queue to get on every single ride? During peak seasons there are queues which could go on up to an hour or even more for every ride. This could be a frustrating problem to a lot of people who have spent a lot of money on the tickets and don’t get to go on all or most of the rides in the park. The whole experience of waiting in a queue for an hour or more for a ride that lasts a few minutes can be stressful, exhausting and demoralizing at times.

Solution

A solution for this would be to introduce flash passes or in other words to introduce points for every ride. For instance, let’s say we have one point per ride, and the people have to scan they phone with the barcode for every ride. After two rides, the person can get a fastpass for the next ride, that he has queued up, for which there would be there would be a separate queue where only the people who have accumulated the points and who have that ride queued up for themselves will be able to enter. In this way people would be able to complete most of the rides in an amusement park. The concept of a flash pass has already been initiated by Disney for their amusement parks, however an application does not exist which makes it very exhausting for the people to walk up to each ride, get a pass for that ride and come back at the time that is mentioned on the pass. However, our objective is to digitize the entire concept so we can develop an app. The application will keep track of all the points accumulated by the park visitors which can be used at any time during the year. The app will also give notification of options on which rides can be accessed without facing the queues. This solution falls under ‘Market or population characterization for new system concepts’ which will require us to understand the needs of our target users and develop a new in-house system for existing theme parks.

Customer

More businesses in this day and age are reverting to using user data as part of their process strategy. In this particular case, the target user is quite clear – people who visit theme parks multiple times a year. Gaining user data is core towards the successful implementation of our solution.

Stakeholders

There are two key stakeholders that we need to focus on to ensure practical application of the proposed solution – the people who frequent theme parks annually and the businesses who own them. The goal of this process is to ensure that customers who visit theme parks multiple times in a year are given the opportunity to enjoy future visits without the added pressure of waiting in long lines which would encourage them to increase their visits. The businesses will be able to reward their most loyal customers and attract new ones who would then turn into loyal customers which would drastically increase the brand value of company which owns the theme park.

Design Process

The design process included conducting contextual inquiries for all the groups of stakeholders to get diverse views. We designed a list of questions and a screener questionnaire, and recruited participants from all groups of stakeholders viz. children, mothers, people managing the park, and teenagers. After conducting the interviews, we analyzed and consolidated our data by brainstorming and making an affinity diagram as shown below.

Personas

The next stage was to make user profile personas for all the user profiles considered for our project. We made both the primary and the secondary personas as well as an anti-persona. All the personas are shown below.

Lo-Fi prototype

After making the personas, the next step was to build the low-fi prototype. Using the affinity diagram we built and the personas, we designed the content for all the screen initially, and then built the low-fi prototypes. The app includes functionalities such as buying daily and seasonal passes, list of rides with barcodes to scan, keeping track of the rides, issuing of fast passes and also designing virtual reality games for people to play while waiting for rides. The low-fi prototypes are as shown below.

Hi-Fi Prototype

Introduction

This project aims at studying how productive are voice assistant applications for academic purposes. Qualitative analysis, Quantitative analysis, and experimental research were performed on the data collected by interviewing students at Rochester Instittue of Technology.

Problem

Voice assistants are widely used these days, and has made some of our tasks very easy by providing us the ability to interact with devices over voice. This study was to analyze how productive is the use of voice assistants for academic purposes. In addition, we also analyzed the interaction of non-native English speakers such as lot of the international students with the voice assistants, to determine the problems faced by them.

Results

The qualitative analysis states that the study cannot definitively confirm whether Voice Assistants improve Rochester Institute of Technology student’s academic productivity. Due to the technological limitations of mobile artificial intelligence, as well as the limited available functionality for academic applications, Voice Assistants cannot yet eclipse the traditional modes that students use to stay productive at school. Although the initial impetus for this research bared insubstantial results, this work has provided a general view of the factors that affect the usage of voice assistants with regards to academic productivity.
In the quantitative study which sought to see impact of Voice Assistants on the academic productivity of international students, research was going to be done to see whether Voice Assistants limit the everyday production of non-Native English speaking students at Rochester Institute of Technology. Our research concluded that the areas which ultimately impact the productivity of international students at Rochester Institute of Technology is the language they choose to communicate with their Voice Assistants, and not their international status. However, we have found that the majority of Voice Assistant users view accents and general language recognition as the biggest issues of Voice Assistant, regardless of their international status and preferred Voice Assistant language. Although we expected that different selections of preferred languages would lead to different user experiences, there are no substantial associations between language choices and dissatisfied response times and accuracy, specifically amongst international students at Rochester Institute of Technology.

Introduction

The individual project for the Web Development course needed us to develop a website about a place we have lived in or have visited. As I have lived in Bangalore, India for 22 years, I developed a website about Bangalore with information like places to see, places to eat, climate, and places to shop.

Color Swatches

Introduction

Pullano and Company is a benefits outsourcing service organization. The company service individuals and groups who are looking for health benefits for themselves, and for their employees. With a growing team and a client base which is getting larger and larger, Pullano and Company would like to redesign their website in order to better suit the company, now that it has expanded. They would like the website to be accessible and easy to navigate for all clients, as well as convey information about the company to new or potential clients.

Site Goals

Pullano and Co's overall goal for their website redesign is to refresh the way they categorize their products. They will aim to achieve this by focusing on a) creating user paths, and b) making the website responsive.

a) User paths
Pullano and Co has traditionally been a company that focused on small and medium sized business insurance plans. The current iteration of the website focuses on the customer being a business. Recently they have started taking more customers, not businesses, looking to receive Medicaid coverage for themselves or their family. This has caused a significant split in their user base: businesses and single person customers. The redesign will focus on leading the consumer into the camp which best represents them. This will help guide the user to the right destination.

b) Responsive Design
While Pullano and Co’s current website has responsive elements in the overall presentation, there are certain aspects and features that are not developed with responsive design in mind, such as images, menu options, and font choices. Pullano and Co wish to revisit these design choices and refine them to fit the user path goal discussed above. Building an effective responsive design will help consumers searching for personal healthcare and business options on their personal devices, especially cellphones and other mobile devices that non-business consumers are more likely to use for their own personal business.

Audience

Pullano and Company’s audience generally consists of three types of clients. The first type would be someone over 65 who is looking to transition to Medicare. The second type of client might be a younger person who works part-time or is unemployed and looking for help obtaining individual healthcare which is affordable. The third type of client is a business owner who is searching for a way to offer his employees health benefits. Pullano and Company partners with clients and businesses to provide an easy transition to healthcare that is affordable and fits the needs of each client. The personas below outline some attributes and factors that are important to consider when building this website.

Future Work

We are currently working on the style guides and the design prototypes. Once this is done, we will start the development the website.

Role Responsibilities

Led the UX efforts for the Business Intelligence team and performed UX research & design for various products like email campaigns, portals, landing pages, and web applications for large tier-1 IT vendors. My role involved collaborating with a team spread across the globe and was geared towards being the point of entry in for projects, where I would determine the next steps, and allocate the project to the right associate or lead the design effort on the project myself.

UX Research & Design on Email Campaigns

• Worked on campaigns (email and landing page offerings to resellers) based on persona segmentation and user research which entailed contextual inquiry / interviews, A/B testing, market research, competitive analysis, studying heat maps and other metrics.
• I talked to users in the different segments (based on my personas), worked closely with the different associated teams, and came up with a few designs using UX Pin for which I performed A/B testing.
• The idea was to strategically create more revenue by reinventing campaigns continuously.

UX Research & Design on Pricing Portals

• Worked on pricing portals, lead & opportunity generation portals, and reseller hubs by performing field research, designing usability studies, conducting surveys across products, analyzing results through qualitative & quantitative analysis, visualizing the data by creating user journey maps & data flow models, ideating, strategizing and prototyping a new product offering that aligns with the other Ingram Micro applications.

UX Research on Dashboards

• Performed heuristic evaluations, usability testing, card sorting and suggested design changes on various data analytics dashboards which provided our team with valuable insights and improved the product offerings.

Email & Landing page Performance Analytics

• Defined key performance metrics to measure the success of the UX projects (by studying the various types of heat maps like click, scroll and move maps; and different metrics like open rate, click through rate, etc. captured in Oracle Eloqua, Hotjar and Litmus.
• Leveraged these analytics and customer insights to help transform the product offerings.
• After we started collecting data and improvised on the designs, customer engagement improved on the email campaigns considerably within the first month.

Defining the UX workflow / process

• Designed the UX process and JIRA workflows for the team from scratch, consolidated and minimized SLAs, and increased productivity.
• The different kinds of projects included portals, email campaigns and landing pages. Different projects needed different flows:- for instance the portals first needed preliminary research which could include both qualitative and quantitative research techniques, then the ideation and brainstorming phase which included creating affinity diagrams, customer journey maps, personas etc., wire framing and prototyping phase, user testing phase (eg: Usability testing could be done at this point), review, launch and post launch research to understand what the users feel about the application.
• I looked at the different projects and finalized such design flows for each type of project.

Post launch Research

• For post launch research I mainly designed surveys in qualtrics to collect feedback on the email campaigns and portals from the target audience and analyzed the quantitative feedback to provide tangible solutions to incorporate in the designs.
• Surveys sample size varied from 50-800 which contained open ended questions, multiple choice questions, likert scales, SUS scales etc.

Driving Innovation

• Initiated the culture of having design hackathons in the team and encouraged the drive for innovation by starting new design channels on slack and microsoft teams.
• I got really good feedback from the team and leadership for this effort. The team said this really helped them to learn new things in the industry on a day to day basis.
• Led design efforts as a part of the ‘Product Enhancements’ committee and made critical design decisions for products across the Business Intelligence team.

Know more

To know more, please contact me at [email protected]

Role Responsibilities

Performed UX research, UX design, usability testing, and business analysis for Toyota.com projects related to hybrid vehicles, Toyota Mirai, Toyota financial services and Toyota owner’s websites. Created user stories and use cases; conducted market research for various projects.

Highlights

• Led usability study for redesign of Toyota owner’s homepage with newly created dashboards for showcasing, understanding, and grouping telematics data; explored optimal display for dashboard indicators and executed usability testing.
• Completed extensive research into user-centered design concepts, market research, and usability studies to recommend improvements to “Shopping Tools” and “Find a Dealer” features for increased sales.
• Designed wireframes for Toyota.com and Toyota Mirai projects using Sketch.

Project Case Study

Goal

• Led the usability study for redesign of Toyota owner’s homepage with newly created dashboards for showcasing, understanding, and grouping telematics data; and explored optimal display for dashboard indicators using user research techniques like card sorting, qualitative usability testing.

Participant pool size

• It was a qualitative usability study with 15 participants both internal and external who were not acquainted with Toyota owners website.

Pilot Study

• A pilot study was conducted with a designer not acquainted with this application.
• This helped me to ensure that the tasks created covered all the painpoints, and that the study could be finished in time.

Results

• The study also helped to understand the placement of the different modules on the toyota owners home page based on importance and relevance to the users.
• I analyzed all this data and proposed design changes to the leadership.
• The users and leadership were very happy with the results of the study and the card sort and my proposed designs for the grouping of telematics data and display and categorization of dashboard indicators based on the card sort exercises.

Know more

To know more, please contact me at [email protected]

Highlights

• Executing a strategic vision at the onset of a project and working with the team to deliver on this vision at every step of the design and development process. Working hands-on by creating wireframes using Whimsical, task flow diagrams, customer journey maps, etc.
• Leading the UX design efforts within the Apple media products group. Experience managing a globally dispersed team and being the point of contact between the leadership and the design team, by collaborating closely with Engineers, Designers, Solution Architects and Project Managers.
• Evaluating team design methods, strategies, solutions and tradeoff rationale in order to provide recommendations to team partners, business stakeholders and UX leadership. Additionally, also involved in brainstorming solutions with the designers and reviewing designs.
• Managing design effort across numerous initiatives related to Apple Music, through successful project execution, tracking and resourcing. Being accountable for the quality of our designs, including effectiveness, efficiency, and usability measures.
• Working in an agile environment, holding stand ups with designers; grooming backlog & new incoming projects.
• Developed detailed Usability test plans and conducted qualitative usability studies on various Apple Music applications with a diverse pool of participants. Additionally, also closely involved with UAT to perform walk-throughs, gather findings, and report bugs.
• Analyzed qualitative and quantitative data to distill meaningful findings; and presented recommendations & solutions to clients, that meet both user expectations and business requirements.

Project Case Study

The team was developing an application to edit and manage music tracks, where the initial User Acceptance testing results were not very positive. I was introduced to the Project as a UX Researcher / UX Project Manager, where my responsibility was to perform Usability studies to understand the actual reasons from the users for the poor UAT results and present the issues & solutions to the leadership & other teams to successfully launch the project.

Goal

• Improve the User Acceptance Testing results for the application.
• Identify the issues faced by the users & determine possible solutions to fix them.

Understanding the Application

• I initiated the project by speaking to the Stakeholders like designers, developers, delivery managers, solution architects & the users to understand the Application & its functionalities.

Selecting ‘Qualitative Usability Study’

• Based on preliminary analysis, the size of the available participant pool was 5.
• Since based on the UAT results, the users were facing many issues with the core functionalities of the application; there was a necessity to understand how the users interact with the application, different functionalities and their user journey.
• Based on timelines of the project, sufficient time was available to conduct a Usability Study.

Formulation of Tasks

• Based on preliminary analysis, the tasks were formulated & counter-balanced.

Recruitment of the Participants

• Recruitment emails were sent to the selected diverse pool of 5 participants.
• The sessions were scheduled based on their availability.

Pilot Study

• The Pilot study was conducted with the Delivery Manager.
• Goal of this Pilot study was to ensure there was enough time for all the planned tasks to be performed and that the technical setup was good to go.
• Based on the Pilot Study, few similar tasks were consolidated to save time during the actual study.

Setup

Challenges

• Ensure all the stakeholders present during the study sessions do not lead or give away answers / explanations; and understood the distinction between UAT & Usability study.
• Network issues were faced by the user during a study session, which led to rescheduling of the session.

Data Collected

• Notes were taken down while moderating the study; which consisted the raw feedback, answers to the follow-up questions, and observations of the user behavior during tasks.
• The recorded sessions were analyzed to collect data about user actions like mouse clicks during specific tasks and other interaction with different functionalities.

Analysis of Raw Data

• The raw data was analyzed to extract meaningful insights indicating the major issues & gaps in the user experience.

Suggesting Design Solutions

• Collaborated with the designers to understand the rationale behind certain decisions & determine design solutions for the issues discovered during the study.
• Collaborated with developers to ensure the solutions were technically feasible.

Report & Presentation

• Based on the analysis done; the design solutions were prioritized by collaborating with developers, delivery managers, & solution architects; taking into consideration the timelines & level of effort needed for implementing the solutions.
• The results of the usability study were presented to the leadership & all the other teams.
• A detailed report consisting of all the issues (with their stats) & design solutions, was shared with all the teams.

Know more

To know more, please contact me at [email protected]

Introduction

The capstone project focused on evaluating a virtual reality application designed for the purpose of watching movies together virtually, by performing a comparative usability study with the video call / screen share approach using TeamViewer software. A usability study was performed for each of the applications, and its results were analyzed to determine the overall advantages, drawbacks, and required feature improvements.

Method

Test plans and tasks were created and formulated. The tasks were divided based on the two approaches being used in the study: TeamViewer tasks & Virtual reality tasks
Counter-balancing of tasks was performed in order to mitigate the issue of transfer of learning. Once tasks were formulated, a pilot test was conducted to validate the tasks and based on the results of the pilot tests, the tasks were fine tuned.
26 participants, aged between 15 to 80 years, were recruited for the usability studies being performed. These participants remained the same for both TeamViewer and virtual reality study (within-subjects study).
The entire study lasted for around 30 - 45 minutes each, after which the raw data collected from the interviews was tabulated in an excel worksheet.
The environment consisted of two rooms, such that voices from one room couldn’t be heard in the other room. Each room had one laptop, one android phone, and 1 VR headset. Each laptop had TeamViewer installed in it, and each android phone had Firefox browser installed in it. A link to a 3 minutes long video clip on YouTube was bookmarked on the browser of each laptop for the participants to watch on TeamViewer. Another 3 minutes video clip was preset in the virtual reality application. The link to the web based virtual reality application was bookmarked in the Firefox browser on the android phone. The android phone was placed in the VR headset as it served as the headset’s screen.

Conclusion

The study resulted in a list of findings stating the positives and negatives for each approach for watching movies together online via two video applications, TeamViewer and Virtual Reality. Overall, the participants had a much better experience with TeamViewer as compared to their experience with the virtual reality application. Even virtual presence of the other participant was felt more using TeamViewer than the virtual reality application. Prior studies found that the use of virtual reality for watching movies was not a good choice because the social presence was not felt as the users had to make an effort to communicate in order to keep the contact during the movie. This study found that the major reasons why virtual presence was not felt using the virtual reality application were the poor or no communication channel, lot of lag in the application making it difficult to focus and causing dizziness / headache, difficulty pausing / playing the movie, square shaped avatar instead of a human-like avatar, discomfort caused by VR headsets, etc. If these issues are fixed, then the virtual reality application seems to have a great potential and would be a great way to watch movies online together. 19 The results were more or less balanced and there was no clear winner, with TeamViewer getting 54% of the total votes. The positive aspects of TeamViewer were that the virtual presence was felt by many participants, since they could communicate with the other participant using audio and webcam video, it was easy to stop/play the movie, however the experience was not immersive and webcam screen was very small. Though virtual reality application received a lot of feedback containing complaints regarding several existing issues like audio, and video lag and the dizziness caused by the lag, communication channel not being established, hard to focus on the pause/play button, cube-shaped avatars making participants feel no virtual presence, and other avatars blocking the view of the movie screen. On the other hand, participants really liked the immersive experience of the virtual reality application which made them feel like watching the movie in an actual theatre and also it was easy for them to move around in the virtual environment using the viewpoints. Participants enjoyed exploring the virtual reality application and the idea of watching a movie together online using the virtual reality application was welcomed with great enthusiasm by most of the participants. The participants who chose TeamViewer as a preference, did so because of the existing issues in the virtual reality application; and they expressed the desire to revisit an improved version of the application in the future. Participants expressed that the virtual reality application had a great potential to be the best method of watching movies virtually, and with improvements it would surely be preferred more than the TeamViewer method.