Week 7 just over halfway through this semester was our scheduled design critique to look at our immersive prototypes, I had found myself a little short of time coming into this critique so while I had a working prototype there were certain areas I would have liked to have had a little more time to finesse and polish before presenting the prototype. As always I see a critique as a great opportunity to gain valuable feedback to improve my prototype and seeing the rest of the class's work is always enjoyable and can provide great inspiration.
The critique offers me the chance to get feedback from my classmates as well as my lecturer, my classmates provide their critique anonymously using a Miro board and you can see my feedback below.
Making my body copy bigger was the most important piece of feedback I received on this prototype, while it had appeared fine on my screen throughout the design process once it was projected onto the screen in class it was obvious it needed to be bigger, there's not much to say about that I just need to raise the point size.
As for the other piece of feedback regarding the videos not taking up the fullscreen when you click on them this is due to the video aspect ratio not matching the aspect ratio of the frame. I didn’t want to stretch the videos in any direction as this can affect how they look and cause them to be distorted. I think the reason this caught someone's eye was because you could see my dark navy background colour which made it obvious. I think if I change the space not filled by the video to black, which is what happens on a TV if the aspect ratio is wrong I will make it less obvious and it won’t catch people’s attention.
It was nice to receive positive feedback on some of my interactive features, it had taken a lot of work to make them work and have content, so it was nice to see that people liked them and were willing to make a point of saying they liked them. It was also good to not have anything that people felt I should stop doing as this indicates that in general, I am on the right track with my design and with some small changes I should have a solid final product to deliver.
My lecturer gives his feedback orally and I like to make notes of what he says so I can look at each piece of feedback and action it accordingly.
On this occasion as well as increasing the font size he suggested I look at how I am using photography, there is nothing wrong with my image choices I have simply displayed them individually alongside text and I could look at doing something more interesting with them, to interest my user more and increase their immersion in the narrative.
Another idea aimed at making my prototype better was to aid the audio of the blockquotes I was using in my prototype. I could have these autoplay as the content appears and this would add an extra level to my prototype. I will look online to see if I can source the audio for these quotes and add it to my final prototype.
I always find another useful part of the critique is seeing how my lecturer interacts with my design and any roadblocks he encounters or any areas he struggles with even if he doesn’t mention it. In this case, I noticed that it wasn’t obvious to use the up and down arrow keys to navigate the content. I had to tell him this was how it worked. This is not a good scenario as I cannot tell every user how to navigate my content. While I have already mentioned when building the prototype how I wanted to mimic the idea of scrolling as I couldn’t trigger animations on scroll I can now see this wasn’t a good idea as I had not added a signifier to show my users that this is what they needed to do. I feel as if I need to look again at my prototype’s navigation and find a better way that works within what you can do in Figma and is obvious to my users.
On the issue of including signifers while it is fine on my timelines on my Saturn V infographic I need to find a way to signify to users that if they hover over the different parts of the rocket they can access more information.
I left this critique session feeling good about my design so far, I went into the session expecting and in fact, looking for some feedback to improve my prototype as I felt it needed a bit more work and time spent on it. I got the feedback I wanted and was able to go away with some nice positive feedback to power me on to make the alterations I need and to the next stage of the project.