By Wei Gong
With some general concepts like guiding the visitors with some questions so that they can explore the exhibit on their own, and attracting the visitors with zoomable images on the screen, we did our first round user test in the living room of Frick Environmental Center. Actually, this is a combination of discovery research, generative research and user test, since we aimed to discover design opportunities, gain insights on design solutions, and test our concept at the same time. Before the test, we wrote a proposal for the test plan.  

User Test Proposal

Goal

1. Understand the general profile of the audiences 
   1. Age range? Mostly kids or adults? 
   2. What are the audiences doing in the living room?
   3. Why they come here? What do they expect to see in the living room?
2. What kind of experience do the stakeholders want people to have in the living room?
3. How audiences interact with the kit in the living room? What engages them？Which of the artifacts they feel more attractive?
   1. blocks? Images? Video stories?
   2. What will the audience do after seeing images/videos on the computer?
   3. What other audiences do when one is interacting with the computer
4. What do the audiences want to know about the insects when playing with the kit?
5. Video/images on the big screen?

Materials 

• Macroinvertebrate observation kit

1. specimen blocks
2. flashlight
3. magnifying glass.
4. other 

• Signages

1. Instruction for viewing Gigapan pictures and vidoes
   1. Do you want to see a big picture of the specimens? Check them on the computer
   2. Do you want to learn life stories of these unique organisms? See their stories on the iPad
   3. See whether you can match the blocks with the cards?
2. Prompts/questions
   1. Do you know which of these insects can survive in Frick Park?
   2. Do you want to learn more about dragonfly’s life story?

• Computer iPad: 
  • To show the Imagescorresponding with the blocks
• iPad: 
  • To show Videos corresponding to the blocks telling stories. 

Observation Note Template

1. Alone or in group
   1. If alone: age (child, teenager, young adult, parentage, senior)
   2. If in group: 
      1. with family: how many family members, profile
      2. with peers: how many, profile
2. Behavior: What he is doing/looking/talking about in the living room before he comes to our exhibit
3. Attention: What attracts the audience to our exhibit
   1. Facilitators
   2. Signages,
   3. images on the big screen
   4. blocks
   5. computer/iPad
   6. other
4. Guidance: What guides him to interact with the blocks/computer/iPad
   1.  Facilitators
   2. Signages
   3. images on the big screen
   4. other
5. Engagement: At what moment he is engaged and says words like “wow” 
6. Questions: Which question attracts them most
7. Preference: which of the resources attract them more
   1. blocks
   2. Images
   3. Videos
   4. cards
8. Interaction:
   1. Does the audience talk to each other when they are interacting with the exhibit?
   2. What they talk about?
9. Length of interaction: How long he/she spends with the exhibit kit
   1. Less than 1 minute
   2. 1 to 5 minutes
   3. 5 to 10 minutes
   4. 10-20 minutes
   5. more

Interview Question to Audiences:

1. Why do you come to Frick Park today? 
2. Why do you come to the living room? What do you want to do or see here?
3. Among all of theses resources here, which one do you prefer and feel most attracting? 
4. What do you want to know about these insects?

Interview Question to staff in the living room:

1. What do you expect audiences to do here in the living room?
2. What do you want the audience to take away interacting with the macroinvertebrate kit in the living room? 

​

Audience: 

1. During weekend, most of the visitors come to the living room of Frick Environmental Center with their family, usually a parent with 1-3 children under 6 years old.
2. Children are more attracted to the exhibit than adults. Usually, parents will just sit on the seat or read books.
3. One of the parents came to facilitate the children when he found they were very interested in the exhibit.

Attention: 

1. Among all the materials (signages, computer, cards, blocks, flashlight, magnifying lenses), blocks caught children’s attention most and attracted them to the exhibit.
2. The next attractive elements are magnifying lenses and flashlights. Children will play the blocks with these two things. 

Interaction with the kit: 

• Children will start to play with the blocks on their own without reading the questions on the signages. Some younger children just treated the blocks as toys.

          Quotes

                “I want to make a tower with these blocks”
                “They are so pretty”
                “How does it feel to taste bugs”

• Children will explore the blocks by putting them under the magnifying glass or checking them with the flashlight.

          Quotes
                 “So Cool” ---- After putting them down the magnifying glass.

• Some children start to match the blocks with the images on the cards under the facilitation of their parents.

Interaction with each other: 

• Sometimes children talk to each other when interacting with the kit

          Quotes
                 “I’ll show you how to play with the blocks, put your magnifying lenses above the blocks.”

• Parents facilitate children when they notice they are interested in the kit

          Quotes
                 “You want to zoom in and out?”
                 “Let’s try another one”
                 “Can you match them(the block and the card)
                 “Do you want to see the legs?”
                 “I just noticed they are interested in it. I want to know whether they really understand it.” 

• Parents don’t allow children to touch the computer

          Quotes
                  “Don’t touch the computer”
Length: 
Most children who are attracted to the exhibit can play with the kit as long as they can until their parents require them to leave, usually more than 20 minutes. 
​

Reflection
After the test, I think we need to design some activities that the audience can really interact with, either by themselves or facilitated. In the user test, although the kids had fun with the materials, they didn't really interact with it and got information from it.  Most of them simply played treated them as toys. 
Several ideas I have in mind: 

1. Matching activity: Paste the cards on the table and guide the audience to match the cubes with the cards.
2. Sifting Activity: Guide the audience to sift the cubes with certain features.

Next step: Observing how the audience behaves doing the activities, whether they are interested in doing the activity, whether they need facilitation, etc.

By Wei Gong

During this summer, our team aims to design an educator kit for the educators to engage kids in macroinvertebrate education.  Our first step was to do research to understand the problem and identify design opportunities. Before doing field research, we generated driving questions that we wanted to answer by the end of the research phase. 

Driving questions:

1. What are the learning goals for the students in the water quality and macroinvertebrate education?
2. What elements form a successful and engaging macroinvertebrate educating activity?
3. What pain points do educators have for water quality and macroinvertebrate education?
4. What resources do educators use right now for the water quality biomonitoring activities and macroinvertebrate education? Among the resources, what works well and what doesn’t?
5. How can technology play a role in macroinvertebrate education and what are the technological constraints in the context?

With the driving questions in mind, we conducted semi-structured interviews for the following interviewees: 

• PatMcShea, naturalist educator in Carnegie Museum of Natural History
• Lauren Horner, Senior Environmental Educator & Naturalist at Powdermill Nature Reserve
• Taiji Nelsen, naturalist educator in  Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy
• Jessica Robert, a learning scientist working on developing training tools for water quality biomonitoring activities.

After the interviews, we consolidated the data into several categories and answered the driving questions as follow: 

Question1: What are the learning goals for the students in the water quality and macroinvertebrate education? 
Based on  data we got from all the interviews, we concluded three major learning goals for the students in macroinvertebrate education as follow: 
​​1. Learners will explore the connection between the insects and the ecosystem and have a basic awareness of

1. The existence of insects in the stream
2. How the insects in the stream can indicate the health of the stream
3. How the health of the stream is affecting the insects

Quotes: 

• Some people see stream just as water, get them to recognize stream more than just waterfall, it’s an entire ecosystem -- Taiji
• What we want the kids to learn from the activities are: the connection between the stream’s health and the insects; ways to analyze the health of the stream; why insects are important to steam health; -- Lauren
• Tell the kids the insects in the stream is a good thing -- Pat

2. Learners will have a basic understanding of the structure of the insects 
Quotes: 

• We also teach kids to identify the organisms  -- Lauren
• A supplement is to help the students notice that organisms have structures -- Taiji

3. Learners will be able to notice and explore the intrinsic value of the insects
Quotes: 

• We want the kids to notice the intrinsic value of them, how unique each organism is -- Taiji

Question2: What elements form a successful and engaging macroinvertebrate education?
Probing into the engaging elements in the macroinvertebarete education, we got 3 insights in how to create a successful exhibit kit as follow: 
1.  Create a live experience for the learners in which they can touch, feel, and observe.
Quotes: 

• Every kid wants to be in the water and feel it -- Taiji
• The tactile ability is one of the key factors to engage the kid. They like being able to touch the stuff -- Lauren
• Catching the bugs and identifying what they caught itself is exciting for the kids -- Lauren
• We need tools with which kids will really be able to observe the insects, and really see them well -- Taiji

2.  Provide cool facts and stories about the bugs
Quotes: 

• Kids like to learn life histories, and cool facts about the bugs -- Taiji
• The key is to hook the students with a story -- Taiji

3.  Bring up leading questions when students are interacting with the kit ( In a facilitated exhibit)
​Quotes: 

• Asking  leading questions when students are interacting with the kit like “what do you think about ...etc” can help the kids engage in the activity -- Lauren

Question 3: What pain points do educators have for water quality and macroinvertebrate education?
Although under different contexts, the educators similar challenges and painpoints in the macroinvertebrate education, which we concluded as follow: 
1.  Difficulty in creating a real experience where students can touch, feel and observe clearly.
Quotes: 

• Real things are always more captivating than images on the screens, but we don't have all the stuff in the stream. —— Taiji 
• The images on the resources are so small and it's difficult for the students to observe. —— Taiji

2.  Difficulty in motivate students who are not interested.
Quotes: 

• Sometimes it's difficult to engage the kids who are not interested in the bugs —— Taiji 
• Some kids just try to identify the bugs, and when they encounter difficulties, they'll just give up. —— Lauren

Question 4: What resources do educators use right now for the water quality biomonitoring activities and macroinvertebrate education? Among the resources, what works well and what doesn’t?
Currently, educators use the resources below in macroinvertebrate education:

• Resin & live specimen
• Hand lens
• Video microscope
• Printout sheet
• key to the orders
• Tubs, plastics, etc for activity in a field trip

Question 5: How can technology play a role in macroinvertebrate education and what are the technological constraints in the context?
We investigated how technology is applied in macroinvertebrate education now and the potential opportunities in the future. Key findings are as follow: 
1.  Educators have concerns on students using their individual phones in camps, field trips or other similar activities.
Quotes: 

• Cellphone is a distraction for the kids in camps. Plus, we don't always have cell serve. —— Lauren
• Sometimes kids take pictures with their phones on field trip, but I will remind them to not break their phone. —— Lauren
• Kids are not allowed to bring phones to the field trip. —— Taiji

2.  Usually, the camps have iPads, but several students need to share one with each other.
Quotes: 

• Sometimes the kids work together in group to identify the insects. They usually share one ipad in in small groups —— Lauren

3.  Educators see the potential opportunities of the application of innovative technology including NFC and AR, but they are concerned about the contextual constraints like wifi and devices..

​Among our 6 ideas, Jigsaw and Balance the stream are the most popular and received some helpful feedback

Jigsaw:

• Can see the potential of collaboration among kids, they can do a group activity, which is fun.
• Suggestion 1: Simulated Pokemon Go
  • Every time they complete find an insect, they can get one point
  • Collect all the insects for more points
  • End: show a video
• Suggestion 2: jigsaw for parts of the insect — wing, foot, tails, etc.
• Puzzle game: pollutant and healthy streams, locate insects in different places

Balance the Stream:

• Compare two streams: one is healthy and one is unhealthy, show different insects distributed in these two streams
• Compare different parts of the stream: fast vs. slow, deep vs. shallow, and show different insects distributed in these parts
• Add a factory or pollution: remove or add some insects (see how the pollution is affecting the insects)
• Stay away from the right answer and the wrong answer, make kids explore the difference

​Design Challenges

With the concepts and feedbacks from the educators, we consulted Jessica and Marti for feedbacks and suggestions on next steps. We consolidated their feedbacks into several design challenges:

1. How to make the experience design cater to the learning objects?
2. How to break the general learning objective into small pieces and break down what builds the story?
3. How to provide a breakthrough conversation between the audience and the exhibit?
4. How to hook the audience through interaction?

These questions helped us flesh out the current ideas we have, generate new elements, clarify the design direction, and narrow down the scope.

​

On going...

By Emily Chan, Harvard University, Summer 2019 REU

​Hi there! I'm Emily, a rising junior at Harvard studying computer science with a minor in statistics. I'm a week and a half into the HCII REU, and I'm working on two projects with Marti Louw, one of which is Macroinvertebrates.org. I came to the HCII REU because as a computer science major and an artist, I'm interested in learning more about design, and I also want to experience what doing research is like.

Some of my personal goals for the summer are to understand how and why design choices are made, get hands on experience developing tools for users using design principles and user feedback, make something that I can show people/people will actually use, and learn about prototyping with smart devices.

My tasks for Macroinvertebrates.org for the foreseeable future include doing usability testing for the new dichotomous key, glossary, and search functionality; creating an improved popup kit for museums to use to engage kids in macroinvertebrate identification, trying to leverage the high quality media that we have and potentially using smart technologies such as NFC tags, etc.; and possibly working on developing identification quiz practice functionality for the site. 

Identification Task
To gain an understanding of the design challenges at hand, we did an identification task using the current resources available to volunteers--field guides and key printouts. The sheer amount of materials was slightly overwhelming, so as someone with no experience doing macroinvertebrate identification, I just chose two field guides that had pictures and stayed with those. I identified five bugs, four using the field guides and one using the website. What I noticed when using the field guides was that the detailed text descriptions of the bugs was essential for family level identification, but the volume of the text also gets in the way when it comes to order level identification. My process was to first do visual pattern-matching to the order level, and then read the descriptions of ones that looked similar to the specimen to find traits that would help distinguish between families. I was surprised by how identification wasn't as difficult or time-consuming as I anticipated, but I also didn't use most of the materials, and never used a key.
​
When I switched to using the website, I tried a similar approach, but the website's organization was slightly different from a field guide (I couldn't just flip through quickly to scan for pictures and then selectively read descriptions), which took some adjusting to. The home page worked well for facilitating my initial pattern-matching approach, but I can see how if I were trying to identify a ambiguous looking larvae, I would want the home page to be more explorable (to be able to zoom in more), since some of the pictures were quite small. Once I clicked through to the order page, I definitely don't think I would have known how to get rid of the diagnostic characteristic boxes obstructing the actual pictures that I wanted to look at. However, since I was already familiar with how to do that, I was able to match the specimen to the common burrowing mayfly just by appearance, but I wasn't able to find the characteristics that might help distinguish between similar looking families in a convenient place. 

For me, this raised the question of whether the purpose of Macroinvertebrates.org is primarily to be a learning resource or an identification resource. 

​Following our site training workshop at the 2019 Annual National Water Quality Monitoring Conference in Denver with Tara Munez, Stroud Water Research Institute, the site was also featured in the quarterly National Water Quality Monitoring Council quarterly newsletter.  We're thrilled to receive the coverage and hope to reach a broader audience of users. 

 https://acwi.gov/monitoring/newsletter/national-monitoring-news_spring2019.pdf

This video was shared with us, while not deemed appropriate for the site...it is a humorous take on the life"style" of a dragonfly with a self-consciously anthropomorphic, locker room humour. 

​Hi, it’s Chelsea again! This spring I have been working with Jaclyn, our new designer, on a revision of the Order level key. Based on our previous usability test results, this time we decided to focus on the improvement of interactivity and element affordance. We wondered if making the key clickable and having paths highlight would make the key easier to follow. Here’s Jaclyn’s rough prototype:

​Since the new key has more interactive features, it requires more customized HTML and JavaScript components. To implement the design, I first tried to use SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) techniques that I learned from my web development class to draw the key  within HTML manually, but the outcome did not resemble the design well since it is hard to control the exact location of the endpoints of the lines.
 
In order to find a better solution, I did some research and found that Adobe XD, the design tool used by Jaclyn, can export graphic designs to SVG images. By loading the SVG image in a browser, I was able to get the code version of the design and move it to the html file. However, since all components in the image, including lines, dots, and rectangles, are represented as separate vectors in the code and there is no meaningful order, it is necessary to label all the components with meaningful names and group them into different classes before further implementing the JavaScript part.
 
At this point, I have added all the popup windows and labeled most order pictures, but I will not be in CMU during the summer, so this project is on hold. For future developers, I would suggest to follow these steps:
 

1. Inspect the page source.
2. Group components related to each couplet, including the rectangle and texts, into a <g> group and give it an id that can describe the couplet well.
3. Group the line vectors by path name and give them class = “path”.
4. Group the paths related to each couplet and give them a class based on the entities connected.
5. Use JavaScript to track the currently active couplets and paths, and change enable color change if a new option is clicked.