February 11, 2017

Local High School Pilot Test Review

This quarter, our team successfully conducted our first pilot test with EMAR at a local Seattle high school. We gathered qualitative data from a small group of five students, the results were important because they provided feedback that can help us improve our current prototype. Generally, the students felt that EMAR was “cute” and approachable. They were constantly engaged and interacted with EMAR’s simple questions about stress levels. The engagement was a good sign that EMAR can be interesting to teens and potentially collect data about stress.

While the overall experience was a positive one, some of our participants offered some constructive criticism that can motivate us to redesign EMAR’s interactions. One student admitted that he expected to answer more questions opposed to the two questions about stress.

To create a more engaging experience for teens we determined that EMAR should be able to ask more than two questions in order for them to feel “heard.” This way the interaction can flow more like a real conversation and can enhance our goal of making EMAR’s interactions more conversational. Another student pointed out that he was confused as to what EMAR was supposed to do. They asked if EMAR will only collect stress data or also offer some sort of therapy for stressed out students. These questions prompted us to think about what design decisions we should make for teens to feel “heard.” Whether or not a therapeutic experience correlated with better communication of stress is still subject to more comprehensive human to robot interaction research.

The feedback we received from the five students was extremely crucial in informing our design decisions. However, we did realize the participant group members were all fairly homogeneous. They were experienced with an algorithmic and technical thinking process. They were also more concerned about testing the boundaries of EMAR’s abilities rather than on the overall user experience. We heard very encouraging comments from them. One student said, “let’s try this… in the name of science.” In order to gather more generalizable feedback, our team looks forward to conducting another pilot test with a more diverse group of students.