Final Report

Here is our final report for the course of human computer interaction. Team AnarCHI over and out!
Anarchi report

View more documents from Bart Gerard.

Presentations

On 24/05 every group gave presentations about their apps.
You can find our presentation on http://www.slideshare.net/BartGerard/dataminer-presentation-2011-0524-v03 The movie that shows how our application works can be found on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ftsxCp-Mq0

What did we think about other groups?
Chi-Leaders
+ The new interface is much better
- Is there a way to only find articles your friends edited? If it is there, it is well hidden.


Team Geek
+ The application looks good
+ The application works smoothly
+ Finding news of a certain place is very easy this way.
- What is the value of old news? Is the timeline being used often, or are people mostly using the map?


Chimera
- There is no information anywhere in the application, or it can't be found easily if it's already there.
- Aren't users being encouraged to write junk if they receive points per posted question and not based on how good the question is?
- Why is there no highscore? This would probably make users come back more often.


Schi is the limit
+ The application looks good, which is good to attract users
+ Finding news of a certain place is very easy this way.


Team SuCHI
+ The game is fun to play
- Too bad we have to battle often against the dummy
+ But a dummy is better than not being able to play the game because there is no opponent.


The CHIli peppers
+ The game is very competitive, which makes users come back
+ Up-to-date questions


Team musiCHI
+ Stand alone app could be used everyone, even those who hate social networks.
- Why make it a downloadable app? We think this scares some users away.
- Not usable by everyone because .NET was used.
+ Achievements will make users come back (we hope you'll get more)


SachiniNews
+ Badges are a good way to make users return
- about the presentation, not the app: the graphs were very unclear
+/- Lots of functionality. This can be good, as users have lots to do and stay longer, but also bad, since it can get complicated.
- Interface doesn't look that good

Report iteration 1

In the document below, we describe our first iteration with the digital prototype.
http://www.mediafire.com/?wvbqh7mfu7xtt8x

Updated planning

Since we have more work with the implementation than we first expected, we adjusted our planning.


24/04 – 09/05
We add the badges at the start of this iteration and let the application run on facebook. We use the time to continue developing the non-core functionality. We will also make the icons clearer, like asked by users.
If there is time for it, we will add google analitics, otherwise it is for the next iteration.

Week of 09/05:
During the course of this week we will gather and interpret the feedback from our first 'real' release on facebook. We will improve our core-functionality based on this feedback and add the extra functionality. We will then release the application a second time on facebook.

Week of 16/05:
We will review the release, improve, and release a final time.

20/05 and further:
We will use this week to work on our final report as well as interpret the feedback from our final release.

First Release

On Friday 8 April, we launched the Data Miner app on facebook.
The app can be found on http://apps.facebook.com/datamineralpha/.

Only the core feature was available at that time.
Users could mine using the mouse or keyboard and could read articles once mined.
Till now these articles were selected from a predefined set of articles.

Also included in the application was a link to a google form.
This form can be found on link.
It is based on the CSUQ test.

With the questionnaire, we hoped to find out how much users like the application and if it is interesting enough.
Of course the app isn't that interesting right now, because we use dummy articles.
Also the reward system isn't there yet, so it is quite difficult to attract people day after day.
After a full week and active pushing friends and family to the app, we got 10 responses on the questionnaire.

We conclude the following after this first iteration:
- The users weren't pleased with the graphics.
- The icons were to small.
- Users with Safari can see through the article making it very difficult to read.
- Users asked for a legend for the different materials.

+ Most users are medium satisfied with the application and hope to see more soon.
+ Most users find it simple to use the app.
- Because there aren't that many different social news games, it was difficult for most users to compare it with something else.
Also they didn't know if it had all the functionalities they expect it to have, cause they didn't expect that much.
- We score neutral on the effectiveness of our app. This because we still use dummy articles. The test users know what we want to do and think this can be effective, but right now they rather watch the monkey out of the tree. (English with hair on it)
+ Except for the Safari 5 tester, all other testers felt comfortable with the app.
+/- The opinions about the concept are divided.

We also noticed that most users reach their articles within an acceptable amount of clicks or keystrokes. Some users also try to dig as much ground as possible without getting to an article. This is not really the point of the application, but as long as they like doing it, it's fine for us. We can't ban them for doing it. We will have to find some way of removing these users from the usage statistics, as they raise the average amount of clicks/buttons pressed by a large amount.

That's it for right now.
During the second iteration we will:
+ Update the graphics for a more pleasant experience.
+ We will add the reward system to lure users back to the app.
+ We will widen our test group.

On hold:
- The Safari problem.
- The legenda.

Till next time!

Team AnarCHI

Planning & first iteration

First iteration/release

We decided to skip the tests we planned for previous weekend and decided to directly test on our digital prototype. The tasks our users have to perform changed, but the questionnaire stays the same.

What will we test?

During our first release we will test our core-functionality: the mining and rating of articles. We would like to know if users:

1. find it easy to navigate.

2. enjoy mining and rating articles. (do they like the idea? Would they prefer it differently?)

3. actually want to rate articles.

How will we test this?

We will test the core-functionality of our application in two ways.

We will first conduct an offline test using a dummy flash application (the weekend of april 9th). The offline test will allow us to present test-users with a questionnaire. (We will use a slightly modified version of the given questionnaires, more on that in a next post). The questionnaire will help us determine whether or not the users actually enjoyed our application and of the general usability of our application.

The second part of the test will come as a first release on facebook (the week of 17/04).

During both parts we will keep track of the number of mouseclicks and keystrokes the user uses. We expect about 25 keystrokes between mining articles and an average of 1.1 mouseclicks between mining articles (since mining an article simply involves clicking it). Rating articles involves an 'interesting', 'meh' and 'boring' button in addition to a close button. We expect each of these buttons to be pressed roughly the same amount of times. Should the close button be used more than we hoped, this could indicate that the user isn't interested in rating articles or he/she doesn't understand it.

Who will we test on?

The offline part of the test will be conducted on 6 people in total. These people will be chosen at random from our own social circles. The second part of our test will be on facebook. We will post the application on our facebook wall.

Planning

09/04:

Working flash application consisting of dummy-sprites. It should be possible to move the miner and to mine/rate articles. Rating an articles will have no actual impact whatsoever.

We will test this bareskin flash application the weekend of april 9th. This will happen offline with people from our own environment (6 in total).

17/04:

First 'real' release on facebook using the bareskin flash application developped earlier. We will review the feedback received during the weekend of april 9th before the release, as well as add some better looking sprites.

24/04

Between april 17th and april 24th we will let the application run its course on facebook. We will gather feedback (using the method described above) and will use this time to develop the non-core-functionality (invite a friend, statistics, etc.).

Week of 25/04:

During the course of this week we will gather and interpret the feedback from our first 'real' release on facebook. We will improve our core-functionality based on this feedback and add the extra functionality developped between april 17th and april 24th. We will then release the application a second time on facebook.

Week of 02/05:

We will let our second release run its course on facebook and gather feedback.

Week van 09/05:

We will review the second release, improve, and release a third and final time.

Week of 16/05:

We will use this week to work on our final report as well as interpret the feedback from our third and final release.

Further testing

For the next evaluation of our application, we will use the paper prototype for the last time. We will now describe how this testing will happen.


What will we test?
We have 3 core functionalities in our application: mining and rating articles, adding friends and getting statistics of a user compared to his friends. This is why we made 3 special tasks to test the usability of these features.
We also wonder if the detailed statistics can be found by the users. The screen is not accessible in a single click, so we added a fourth task to test if our users can find it.
In addition to these detailed information, we also want to know the overall feeling our users have of the application.

How will we test it?
The users will perform these tasks in the order below. They get the next task as soon as the previous one is finished.
We will measure both the time it takes to perform a task, as the amount of clicks needed to perform it.

1. add a friend
2. compare your statistics to those of your friend "Drill Bill"
3. mine and rate an article
4. find the detailed statistics of the category "sport".

Once the users are finished with the prototype, we will ask them to fill in an additional questionnaire. This should help us measuring the overall usability of the application and the feeling users have of the application. We want to keep the amount of questions lower than 20. Otherwise our users would get bored with the questions and might give the application a worse rating, just because they are getting bored.
We have chosen to use the CSUQ test. This seems the best one to represent what we want to know. Other tests are more focussed on the job of a person or the errors the application gives. We also don't want a too short question list, as that doesn't provide enough information. The 19 questions of CSUQ seemed like the best way to go.

Who will we test on?
As our application is designed for adolescents, we will try to test this on adolescents. This means people between 14 and 22 years old, both boys and girls. It is best if these people don't know too much of informatics. Everyone in our group will test 2 people, so we have 8 testpersons in total. For the ease of finding people, we will ask people in our direct surroudings during the weekend. In Leuven we don't have access to many people in our testing range.

Report 1

The following link contains our first report for the course of human-computer interaction. In this report we explain what we did during the first step of our project. We go into detail about our concept with the aid of a storyboard and a screen-transition diagram. Then we continue with explaining our paper prototype and what conclusions we took from these first tests of our application. Finally we also make some conclusions about this iteration and plan on what we will do in the next iteration.

We wrote the report in English, so our non-dutch-speaking readers can also read the report.

http://www.mediafire.com/?cb3824a2ffh1bww/

Paper prototype - 3rd version

We tested this third prototype with housemates who are not computer scientists. This way we could get some feedback from people who have a different view on computer programs.
The feedback we got from this was generally positive. Although some testers still had their doubts about the concept, the interface seemed to be doing its job very nicely. These are the relevant remarks:

• The text in the indroduction screen is not clear enough.


• The button to indicate which friends are taken into account for the value of articles - a green/red “stoplight” - is confusing. People don’t know what it’s for until it has been explained explicitely.


• The button to rate an article neutral was unclear.


• Using the terms Like/Dislike for rating an article causes wrong usage: interesting articles about bad events were rated negative although for our system they should be rated positive.


• When looking at the statistics, some people wanted more specific information, such as a further refinement of the categories.


• One of the test persons thought the button to close a window would close the entire application, and didn’t manage to return to the mining game.


• We had a facebook like-button to the starting screen of the application. However, this was only reachable when starting up the application while it should be accessible anywhere.

Because there were still quite a number of (small) remarks, we are planning to do one more paper prototype iteration. We will make the following changes:

• The “stoplights” in the friends list will be replaced with a checkbox. The color of the box of the friend will also help indicate whether or not they are included in the calculations.


• The rating buttons will have a visible name in addition to the icons, clarifying the purpose.


• The introduction message will be slightly more elaborate to clearly specify the goal of the game.


• It will be possible to view the statistics of categories in general, as well as more specific stats within a category.


• The facebook like-button will be visible everywhere, although we haven’t figured out exactly where on the screen it will be.

We decided not to change the close button, since we believe that when the application appears in the context of a webbrowser it will be clear that it doesn’t close the entire application.

Paper prototype

Since we had to re-do a lot of the work of the previous sessions, we are running a little behind on schedule. We started with paper-prototype tests of our application on Wednesday. We started with a prototype to test on our own. Not all popups and mouse-over effects were there, as it was just to see if we didn't forget some major functions. In the picture below, you can see how the prototype looked like. We already kept in mind some of the things we learned from the paper prototype tests of our previous concept. Users want a close-button for the menu items, and don't want to click the menu on the left. They are lost if we just give them a menu, they want close buttons. We decided having both the menus and close buttons available would be best.

Once we had a good feeling about it, we made a second prototype. This time we tested it on people sitting in the hall of the computer-science department. We noticed people didn't know where the mining button was for. They kept clicking on it, while they were already on that screen. This button remained there from the time we didn't have the close buttons. In the next prototype we will remove this button.

The users also wanted to be able to select which friends are being used to determine what articles they are mining. To achieve this, we will add an extra button in the friends list. By clicking this, a friend can be enabled or disabled.

We are now testing our new version of the paper prototype with new users and hope the interface will be better with our new improvements.

Working out our new concept

We decided to work out the idea for mining and rating news. We will first explain how this new concept will work, and then explain what we think the benefits are compared to our old concept. However, if users prefer the old concept we will go back to the previous one.

A user will have the possibility to mine freely in the underground. In this underground, he will find different minerals that represent articles. When his friends haven't rated the category of the article or the total ratings aren't positive or negative, it will be a rock. A more valuable mineral will represent an article category his friends liked. The more they liked it, the more valuable mineral will represent it. A diamond will represent the most valuable article categories. A non-valuable icon, like talc will represent an article category that was rated negatively by his friends.

The user can earn badges with the actions he does in the game. There will be badges for reading articles attached to a specific mineral. For example "diamond lover" if the user read 100 diamond articles or "persevering" if he read a lot of articles rated as talc. The user is still allowed to choose like or dislike after reading the article without consequences for the badges. The rating system is to help his friends, so the reward for pressing the right button is that the user will get more relevant news later on, depending on his actions. We will only attach badges to how often the user uses the application, not how he uses it.

Since we have a clear view of what categories of articles a group of friends like, we can create graphs to indicate the common interests of the friend group. This way a new user can find out what his friends like, just by adding them. Without even reading a single article. The graph could also show the difference between what the user likes and what his friends like, allowing him to remove friends that have totally different interests. If you just want the articles you like, just don't invite other friends.

For finding friends easily and making it easy for our application to spread, we would make this as a facebook application. This way users don't have to register and they can just select their friends in a list to play together. It is also possible to give users the option to post badges on their wall when they earned them, allowing to attract more new players in our application.

So what are the advantages of this new concept?

• The users have a clear motivation for playing the game. If they rate articles, they will get news focussed on what they like. If his friends rate a specific category, this will also give the current user more news from that category.
• The application still has badges, but now the badges also make it possible to attract new players. In the old application badges only made the current users attached to the application.
• We think the application should be simpler and the concept more clear. We dropped the highscores and the selling system, keeping the application focussed on 1 thing.
• Users can now indicate if they didn't like a specific article. This will make sure the current category will be shown less often. They won't feel we are bullying them with articles they don't like, we are just trying to learn what they like.

We will create a storyboard for this new concept in the following week and start to test it with a paper version once that is finished.

Back to the drawing board?

After the reviews we got from the paper version, we now have a better look at our concept. It seems the concept isn't very clear for the users. Not all the reviewers seem to understand the point of the game.
This leaves us with a tough choice. Do we have to keep to our current concept of mining with a tree-structure or do we have to change to yet another idea?

What are the pros and the cons of our current idea?

• We saw the tree-structure as a way to unlock better news and more refined categories later in the game. This can however also be seen as annoying the user with stuff they don't want to read in the beginning. Only later on in the game they will be able to get the refined news they are looking for. The user will never get there, as we scare them away in the beginning of the game. For us it was clear that the user can work towards the news he likes, but apparently not all users see it this way.
• We had money in the game, but the money had no use except the highscores. This was very confusing for the users, because they expect to be able to buy something with the money.
• It seems that the rollovers were not clear enough in our paper version. Users got lost in the UI and didn't know what to do, because the information was in the rollovers. Some users also didn't know how to get out of certain menus, as there was no cross to close it. Both these things can be related to the fact that it is only a paper version, where a rollover is hard to simulate and that a paper isn't always the same as a window. We don't know this for sure, the only way to find out is by testing it in a real version. 

If we want to continue with our current idea, we should find solutions for these problems.
Now, why would we stick to our current concept?

• Some of the test-users liked the concept, even though it can use some refinement.
• We already worked out this concept. Although this should not make our decision, unwillingly it will play a role.
• The idea of badges and highscores will make the players come back to our application.

What next?

One of our test subjects (E.D.) suggested to give the articles a value based on the opinions of friends on that article. In this vision, you will rate articles which will increase their value. This could be globally or for your friends. We should decide what the meaning of the depth is. This could be refinement of categories, value of the articles found or even nothing. We had the feeling we did this, but apparently it wasn't clear enough.

We thought we could give more articles of a specific category based on what the user and his friends liked. So every category starts with the same likelihood to be digged at the surface, but the deeper you mine, the more you get articles that match the interests of your friend group. You are also able to go back up to get some more varied news. If you want to read something totally unrelated to what your friends like, you won't find it if you mine too deep. However, articles that match the interests of your friends will be worth more. To keep this system working, a user would be obligated to press like or dislike. That way no news stays unrated.

Similar to this idea, and merged with an idea of E.D., we can make a user walk around underground, indicating where articles are. These articles would be represented by mud, rocks, diamonds,... The value of the mineral indicates how much the article was rated by the friends of the user. If it receives a negative rating, its mud, a neutral or no rating makes it a stone and a positive rating makes it gold or diamonds. If a user mines a rock, and finds it iteresting he gives it a good rating and the article raises in value. If afterwards the value rises, the user gets extra points. If however others dislike it and the value decreases, the user that gave it a good rating gets penalized. In this solution the mining depth would have no use or value. The value will depend on the icon representing the article.

The problem with these new ideas is that we don't know if they will solve the problems we have with our current design. It could be that our users think they are even worse than our original idea.

We are leaning towards the last idea we described here. We will work this out in more detail and try if users prefer the paper version of that idea. Depending on the comments we get from the users, we will decide with what idea we should continue. We won't make a final decision at this moment.

Any thoughts on the new concept we chose to work out, the other concepts we described or new concepts are welcome.

Related applications

HearSay

http://www.newsgaming.de/2010/10/a-social-news-game/

This game is still being developped. The main features of it are a lot like one of the first ideas that we posted: you get a list of articles liked by your frieds, and you can read/rate articles of your own. The game aspect of it, is that it uses badges and such to keep people entertained and interested in using the app. This also overlaps with what we plan to do to attract users.

What we learn from this is that people are definitely interested in what their friends read. Although in our concept the actual concept is hidden until it is mined, the principle remains the same. We also learn from this, as well as from a ton of other applications, that badges, achievements and similar things give users a big incentive to keep using the application.

Dig Dug

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dig_Dug

Dig Dug is a very old game using essentially the way we would use mining. Here the goal is to move around in the ground and kill all the monsters to move to the next level. This game was quite popular in the eighties. Although the concept of the game is completely different, the controls/interaction of the game are similar to what we intend to use.

From this game, we can learn that moving around underground can be exciting. Although fighting is probably more exciting than moving around to find gems, we think that the additional functionality of the game should compensate for this.

Dig It

http://www.appchatter.com/2009/07/app-review-i-dig-it-by-inmotion-software-llc/

http://appadvice.com/appnn/2009/08/review-i-dig-it/
In this game, the goal is to mine as much as possible as fast a s possible, before running out of fuel. With the money from what you mined, you can buy upgrades, reload fuel, and also reach the final goal of the game: pay off your mortgage.
Once again the mining interface of this game is very similar to what we intend to use. The goal is different again: earn money, mine faster and so on. However, in contrary to Dig Dug, this game is actually about mining.

The lessons learnt are similar to those mentioned for Dig Dug. In addition, it shows that associating a value to what is being mined creates a stimulation to dig towards targets.
These two applications focus more on mining as a goal, while we intend to use mining as an entertaining way of discovering new things.

Refining our idea

Because of the negative comments on the auction system, we decided to get rid of the auction system.

We don't want to offer the application as just a click game where the news is used as in-game currency. This is why we thought of a new feature for the application.

When a user mines an article, he will get the choice of 3 possible buyers. One of them will be related to the article and the other two will just be random people. Only the person related to the article will offer a lot of money for the article, while others will offer almost nothing. There would then be a highscore of the players with the most amount of money. Those who sell the articles to the correct persons will get money faster. This way there is a reason for actually reading the articles. To implement this, we can use opencalais or something similar to get names out of the articles.

Now that we have a final concept, we will explain everything in more detail with the help of a storyboard.

Storyboard

Again the application starts with some kind of start screen.

The user start with no depth and no money in the dig tab.

All bullets in the picture are clickable.

When going over a certain bullet, a roll over menu is shown.

This menu indicates which type of article will be mined and from which newspaper.

Also an indication of progress is given.

Every time the user clicks on the "Random Story" bullet, a random new story article will be shown. More about this in just a few moments.

When a certain node is fully dug out, the user will be able to go to that point.

Also new categories will be available. New categories are refinements of the earlier category or random articles from a total new newspaper.

Earlier bullets will still be available to dig by going to that point and clicking on it.

The screen will always be centered on the user.

When the user goes deeper he will discover new layers with more interesting contents.

When a user has dug up an article, he will be able to see the abstract of the article.

When interested, he will be able to read the entire article by clicking on the read more button.

To proceed, the user has to sell the article to a random character.

1 character will reward the user generously. The other two will give consolation credits.

In this way, we do not force the user to read the article, but it is more advantageous if he would.

Highscores!

Achievements, trophies, badges, ...

Some kind of special reward for players that fulfill a certain requirement.

Users can invite friends and watch their progress, badges and trophies.

Why do we want to make this application?
Our goal is to get younger people in touch with news. Most kids and teens aren't interested in the news. By adding a playful element to the news, they might read more of the news and get interested in it. They will learn while playing the game.
How will we achieve our goals?

• We will add a competitive element to make sure users keep playing the game. The competitive element will consist of badges that users can show to others and two kinds of highscores: mining depth and coins gathered.
• We will make sure that users read the news by rewarding them for reading it. When they sell the article to the correct person, they get more money.

Similar existing applications
We found a related idea about social news gaming. http://www.newsgaming.de/2010/10/a-social-news-game/

Their concept is very similar to ours. They also want a rating system with badges and stress the competitive element while retaining the social news aspect.

They do have some variations. They let the users be reporters, while we let them be miners. They are also talking about selling things to their users and companies, while ours will be free.

They say they will be the first app in this genre. Our goal is now to try to beat them by finishing our application before them.

What we learned from the reactions

After reading all the comments on our concept, we learned that the connection between the data miner and its auction house is not clear enough.
Originally we only had the dataminer, but this concept on its own can not make users come back. Once they have mined all corridors, they will just quit playing. This is why we wanted to add some kind of living economy system. The most basic one seemed to be an auction house, as this is used in most multiplayer games and the users will be familiar with the concept.
It is true that the link between the mining and the auction system is rather vague, but we couldn't find any economy system with a better link to the dataminer. This leaves us with three options.

• We could just drop the auction system, but that would cause problems with players leaving the game due to a lack of content. This would also reduce the value of the news to nothing. It would just be a replacement of coins.
• We could replace the auction system with an other type of economy. Unfortunately we don't really have good ideas of what could come instead. The economy has to be related to the value of the news in the articles, to make sure users also read the articles. We don't want to have articles just as a replacement of coins.
• We could further explain the link between the two and keep the concept as it is, while just explaining why it is this way. In this system the users indicate how much some news is worth to them by setting a price for it in the auction house, meaning they have read the articles.

Choosing between these three options is hard, as none of them is an optimal solution. 

Once we have chosen what we will do, we will work out the concept in more detail, adding a storyboard for further explanation.

Auction system for DataMiner

We have finalized the concept of our dataminer game. The software would have two main parts:

• mining for new articles
• an auction house system to buy, sell and speculate on articles.

There will be 3 types of highscores:

1. A highscore based on how much corridors the user has already mined
2. A highscore based on the total cash of the user
3. A highscore based on the value of the users inventory. Each article has a recycling-value and the total value of the inventory is the combined value of all the articles in the inventory.

To make the dataminer more focussed on the articles, we would add a auction system to the program. This will allow users to buy and sell the articles they mined. They can speculate on how much an article will be worth in the future. This creates an economy within the game, partially dependent on the base values of the articles, and partially created by how much an article is worth to the users.

The mining part of the game will generate the articles to keep the economy alive. The user starts by mining at the surface. He will get articles from all categories. When mined deep enough, he can choose in which direction to mine. Depending on the direction, he will get articles from other categories. The articles are in a tree-structure, and the further the user has mined in a certain direction, the more he can refine his search for articles. If there is a world-cup football, a user will probably want to find articles in the category sport-football, since those will be worth more at that time. This makes users follow the news, to know which articles they have to look for, further increasing the purpose of the game.

DataMiner Concept v0.2

Again you can enjoy our beautiful drawing skills.

This is the storyboard of the refined concept.

No trading options, shop or bank.

Less buttons, less complex, more fun!

Also the minigame is dropped.

As you can see, the type of article is free to chose if you have unlocked this option.

Concept

Take a look at some early concept art for our miner. This is by no means a final draft, but just a way for me to get a sense of direction.

I tried to keep it as simple as possible because this is a course about GUI and not drawing/animations. All drawings are only a few lines so they can be easily reproduced.

For your viewing pleasure

Dataminer

We will probably develop the dataminer application, unless we get enough arguments to go for the article rating system from the other groups.

What users will use this application?

• users that just want to play a game and gain levels
• users that want to read random articles of todays news in a certain genre.

We want to give the users the feeling that they are booking progress in the reading of newspapers. This is why we keep track of their progress.Some options are:

• some kind of monetary value gained while mining
• a level of a player, indicating its strength
• how deep the player can mine, expressed in meters
• the combined length of all shafts a player has mined

For each article a user mines, this indication will rise. This way it is also possible to make users compete against each other with some kind of highscore.

At specific levels, a user will gain bonuses, like being allowed to get articles from other newspapers, refine the genre the articles come from,...

When the user mines an article, he gets the choice to keep it in his backpack for later reading or reading it now and throw it away. The size of the backpack is fixed. If the backpack is full, the user has to delete some articles if he wants to keep the newly archived article.

The concept of this application is to make younger people more interested in the news, in a playful way. This means our testing public will be restricted to mostly children and adolescents. Unfortunately we won't be able to do the mom-test, but will replace it with the baby-brother-test.

The highscores will allow us to gather more people, because current players will invite their friends to beat them and they will keep playing, because people always want to beat others.

Article rating

We are still not sure which of the two ideas we will work on. To have a better idea of which one will become our final project, we decided to do a little more work on both of them before deciding. In this post the news-rating system will be explained, the one about dataminer is already here.

The basic idea is that we want people to be able to comment on the news and share it with their friends. We would add a box on news sites, where you can directly see what your friends thought of the article you are viewing. You can also add your own comments and ratings there, or even click a button to see some related articles on different news-sites. 

Here is a mockup-picture of what it could look like:

A second part of our program would give users the possibility to see all of their friends comments on the news of that day and give comments on the comments, read the articles their friends liked or read similar articles. The comments could be sorted by news-category, rating given to the article,...

Both features would contain the same data, so the user can choose to only use one of the features, or both. 

The good side of choosing this idea is that there is a big public able to use it. Even our moms could use this kind of software, while they won't start playing games. That gives us a varied test public when we make changes and it is easier to evaluate if our changes were good.

The down side is that it isn't very original and that it is only useful if many of your friends also use this. The mining game won't have that problem, as it is also playable when you are alone.

We will discuss which idea seems best for everyone in the coming days.

2 Options to Rule Them All

Option 2 - DataMiner

Choosing what application we will make

In todays course we first had to choose if we wanted to do the project about news or music. We have chosen to do something about the news, because there are already so much applications that do something with music. Also some team members already worked with music and wanted to do something new.

We had a brainstorm session about what we could do with the news. Here are a few items we came up with. Some are more realistic than others.

• Gambling on the sensation value of the news of the next day... will a bomb explode, or is it yet again news about the lack of government in Belgium?
• A game where people can unlock better newspapers: they start with the "story" and end with "de tijd"
• Make a site where people can comment on news articles and rate them. You can then see the articles your friends liked most.
• We could add a possibility to comment on user comments, as most newspapers don't allow this
• Give newsarticles related to the article you are viewing or some words you enter in a search box.
• Gambling on how long a current topic will survive in the news
• Make a game where a miner can mine data and increase his skills while mining the news. Lighter lecture like "Story" will be like mining sand, while "de tijd" will be some very though rock. It is possible to get better skills and equipment to be able to read thougher news.
• Add hidden content to news items

We have 2 favourites within these possibilities: the mining game and the article-rating site. We haven't decided yet which one we will make.

Introduction

Welcome to anarCHI.

You are following Steven Vermeeren, Tanguy Monheim (posting as Tman), Sam Agten en Bart Gerard in their struggle to understand the world of human-computer interaction (CHI).

This blog is part of the evaluation of the course gebruikersinterfaces.