I have been able to do a fair amount of user testing and research, as I had a prototype for the Winter Show last semester.
Some of the major takeaways from watching people interact with my project were working to have a more simple interaction — there were a few times where kids wanted to interact with it, and that made me realize I need something easy enough to understand for everyone so that in a way it could be self explanatory. Over the course of the two days of the Winter Show, I was constantly explaining how it worked and what a user had to do, and that is something I want to avoid in the future. I think the need for the explanation can take away from the experience of the user, so it should be an interaction the user can simply discover for themselves.
Some new interaction I’ve been working on is body / motion tracking using a Kinect V2 and OpenFrameworks. This is a simple interaction as the user can easily notice that the drawing machine is mimicking / mirroring them every time they move around a given space. I have yet to fully test this interaction (aside from the occasional friend that has been around as I test the interaction), but I need to work on adjusting the code and taking into account the larger frame before I can have a proper user testing — which is something I will be working over the break once I get that last bits and pieces for the new frame.
Here’s a link to my site where I post a lot of ADM updates and things.