CPSC 444 L2B FacilityFinder - Blog Update #5

This blog post will be about the medium-fidelity prototyping for our project. It will include the rationale of our prototyping approach and a demonstration of our prototype.

5a. Rationale of Medium-Fidelity Prototyping Approach

How much horizontal and vertical?

The scope of our prototype should be a 70/30 split between vertical and horizontal. We plan to focus more on providing vertical functionality to allow our prototype to fulfill our experimental tasks, though with enough horizontal functionality to provide an accurate overview of our app. As we plan on having 3 conditions and thus 3 versions of our prototype, areas unrelated to the main functions (such as the “Settings” page) will not be fully implemented to allow us to focus our efforts on the most relevant areas.

What (simulated) functionality must it contain?

The main functionality should include allowing participants to search for washrooms, navigate to the selected washroom, and add or update the information about specific washrooms. Since participants will not be physically walking to their selected washrooms, the navigation feature will be Wizard-of-Oz'd through displaying a sequence of screens with their location on the on-screen map changing. In addition, our ideal app will display specific information and instructions for each available washroom. As this would require a great deal of redundant effort, this will be constrained by giving participants the illusion of choice while having all washrooms lead to the same directions screen.

How important is appearance (i.e., the visual look)?

As our app is based around maps and navigation, a clear and appealing visual appearance is needed to provide information to our participants. A colorful appearance would also itself well to the gamification conditions of our experiment. Lastly, an appealing visual look is important as it provides a more polished appearance to our prototype.

If your interface includes physical (non-graphical) elements, is it useful and/or feasible to augment your functional prototype with form mockups?

Our interface is entirely app-based, and thus does not include physical or non-graphical elements.

Finally, decide which prototyping tools to use. Most likely you will want to use one of the tools that you learned in CPSC 344

The prototype will be created using Figma.

5b. Prototype Demonstration

Please see below for a demonstration and discussion of our medium-fidelity prototype.

Direct video link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5TRbvpVg8U