Tuesday, January 15, 2013

User Studies

During the first weeks of January, 2013, we employed several methods of data gathering to try and understand what our potential users might feel when they use the StreetBeat. These are the main results:
First, following a FaceBook survey we conducted (52 participants of which 25 were female; conducted during the first week of January, 2013), we learned that close to half of participants rated their concern about the invasion of privacy by the StreetBeat as 1 (minimum) and the as the rating goes up, the frequency goes down:


But we also found that only 22 of our participants reported actually listening to music while walking outside (no correlation between gender and this tendency: ).

To better capture the StreetBeat experience, we conducted an experiment at the IDC Psychology labs campus, between January 9th and 14th. Participants were 9 first and third year psychology students (6 female). First year students received academic credit for participation.
The experiment was conducted with small (2-4 people) groups. Each participant arrived at the labs campus and with his or her respective group, selected a favorite song and was asked to listen to this song on a device provided by the experimenter. All participants were told that these devices were loaded with a software that "senses" the song being played and sends it to a server to display this data.
Following a 1-minute listening session, participants were asked to follow an experimenter to another room, where all the songs listened-to by the group were displayed on a wall-mounted 19" screen.
Following this, participants filled in a questionnaire.
Here we found that 7 of the 9 participants rated issues of privacy (how they felt about seeing their own music on the wall and how they felt about other's seeing their music on the wall) as 1 (minimum). The highest rated measure was "how interested were you in the music played by others?". 5 participants rated this as 4 or 5.

With each of the groups we also conducted a focus group where we explained the idea thoroughly. Here 9 out of 9 participants said the idea of adding headphone jacks was "excellent". 7 out of 9 said they think it's a good idea and 2 said they thought it is not relevant for joggers.

3 participants agreed to be provide video feedback (interviews conducted in Hebrew):
Participant No. 1
Participant No. 2:


Participant No. 3

2 participants (3rd year students) reported that they did not believe us at any point of the experiment.
2 participants stressed out that they enjoyed our experiment :-)

This is a good base to design a more detailed experiment at the IDC campus, which is currently in the works.

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