More Investigation

SO I have been thinking about the one user situation - for this project, they would prefer that one person can use your experiment at a time. The problem this leaves me with is that the whole point to my experiment is that it is surprising for the user how they perceive objects sounds.

A possible way to combat this is to have have pre-recorded sounds and make them all myself and then have the user put on headphones and guess that way. But it wouldn't work as well because I would have to time how long between the noise and the answer - and some people wouldn't have decided which pictures they wanted to choose. Also if I do it this way, I would have to include a lot of technology in my experiment and the materiality would be advance, instead of using simple materials which is something we should be doing.

The element of surprise would be lost if I had one user where a mask and pick up two objects and beat them together - they would use touch to help them decide on the objects - and the experiment would be changed dramatically. It wouldn't be testing how user's perceive sound from sight and what they think the objects will sound like, because the touch aspect would give them too many clues.

I also like the element of human interaction in my experiment - for instance - how each user reacts to the situation. Does the person creating the sounds want the other user to guess correctly, or do they make it harder on purpose? Does the person looking at images entirely guess, or do they guess one and always get one object they recognise? Are they completely surprised and think they are definitely correct when they have both objects wrong? These are all interesting interactions to observe.

I also like the element of curiousity that my experiment has - once you hear the sound you automatically want to know which objects were used - because sometimes from sound alone we think we know what we are hearing, but we are completely wrong. As humans we wouldn't be able to interact with the experiment I have created, and not want to know the answer. If I took away the element of finding out whether you are right or wrong, the user wouldn't be as intrigued because they wouldn't be testing how efficient their eyes and hears interact. The care factor would go down if that makes sense!

So in terms of  Useability I think the object side of my experiment needs enough room to smack objects together ( but not enough so they can go to town and try and make the loudest noise possible, as the object might break!) without the image side catching a glimpse. Also I need to make sure that the barrier between the two is at neck level or below as the experiment works best when the two can communicate efficiently (eg. "ok I'm starting now").

Already I am surprised how many people guess correctly - but I am going to create my own objects for another user test to see if people's perception of what the noise should sound like changes when objects they are not familiar with are used.

Still trucking along....:)