At the beginning of this week I had decided to tank the actual recording of sound for this project so most of the week has gone to finishing up the prototype so it's ready for testing. Testing will be somewhat challenging due to the physical nature of the prototype. I am, however, lucky that I have some people that I live with, so I'll be able to have two actual physical tests. In addition to those two testers, I'll send out a video with an interview sheet so that the 2 other participants can give their response in their own time without the need to find a time everyone is free. I would have liked more participants, however, between my Master Thesis and this course I've started to use up my social circles and those that I have not used are much too busy to participate. I could contact strangers on the internet for help, however, I have yet to do that. I think this is partly due to the fact that this is just course work and won't actually help with the development of an actual something, it gives me the feeling that I would slightly waste their time. I feel that this would be very different in a job situation because like I said, it would be for an actual purpose besides finishing a school project. I felt this for my Masters Thesis because it is something that at least is for academic purposes so although it's not for a company it still helps further research in my field so it feels more worthwhile. I think it would be interesting if Uni could pay students small fees to be testers in a variety of courses from time to time. This could make it a lot easier for students to get participants and really streamline the whole experience. Although I think getting participants is a part that we should learn, usually testers get some sort of benefit from being testers and usually that is not something we as students can afford. Streamlining this also could mean better and broader testing conditions ending in better finding and overall better results. I know there are companies that do this already, I just think since Uni already has a good mixing pot of cultures, backgrounds and fields of education it could a good way to improve the learning potential of a selection of courses whilst also giving something back to the students.

One major thing that I accomplished this week was to link up my prototype with Sigurd's. After someone finishes the recording simulation with my prototype I automatically send the audio file (currently empty) and a colour to Sigurd's prototype which he then shows as notification, what has not yet bee included is the choice of the colour or the throwing of the ball to send. However, even without those parts, it still gives a good indication of context when both Sigurd and myself can show a little more context between different balls visually.

My plan for this week is to finish up user-testing, analyse the data that I have collected and then create the video and supporting document. The aims of my user testing is fairly simple, first and foremost I'm testing whether the interaction paradigm functions as intended and makes sense to users. Thereafter I aim to find what kind of messages users would like to be able to send through this artifact so that I can know what the next prototype could include or in what direction we should take the project when it comes the content people would like to send. This could end in me finding that people want something that I can't make, but at the very least I should get an indication of what the optimal solution would be. I think this might be a week where I'll go over the allocated 20 hours of work, but that is natural the week before submission.