Production
This week’s production tasks revolved around getting ready for 1/4’s, contacting our resources at Equa, and planning meetings. Constanza created the first drafts of both our half sheets and our poster. Gillian worked with Heather to write and edit the project description.
Art and UX
We decided on using the waterfall environment for our project. We chose this environment through an in-team survey where each team member’s preferences regarding an environment’s “Color Palette”, “Biome Type”, “Design”, and “Meditation Guide” were ranked on a five point Likert scale (1 being most suitable for meditation and 5 being least suitable for meditation) and averaged with the other members’ preferences. We also averaged every members’ general environment preferences. The waterfall environment averaged the highest in every category except for “Meditation Guide”.
As a team we got together to brainstorm potential biofeedback indicators and guides specific to the waterfall environment.
As a potential biofeedback indicator, Faris created a flower that opens and closes as well as changes color.
Lauren began work on our water spirit guide which we are considering using as the “voice” of our meditation session audio.
Playtesting
Constanza and Gillian met with Mike Christel this week to brainstorm ideas for how we should conduct playtesting to get a sense of the efficacy of our project. From this conversation, we currently plan to do some A/B testing with some meditators being given biofeedback while others are not. We contacted Equa about getting ahold of one of their post-surveys to get an idea for how they grade the effectiveness of their own meditations. Lauren later had a great idea about testing the Equa audio on our own then asking our survey at the end of the session as a baseline for our project team to compare efficacy with. We also talked with Mike about creating a survey and picking out interview questions for our interview with one of Equa’s meditation coaches, which we’re hoping will happen in Week 4.
Biometric Integration and Networking
Zibo’s been making progress on getting a server set up for our Apple Watch data. Currently our system architecture for biometric data transfer looks like this:
Zibo also began rebuilding our current biometric app so that it can get heart rate data more frequently. This change could be helpful for better predicting heart rate patterns in the an instance where the Apple Watch disconnects or if there is a significant delay in getting biometrics from the Apple Watch to the Quest 2.
1/4’s Walkarounds
We had our remote 1/4’s Walkarounds this Friday so we spent a lot of time building our slide deck and practicing. We got some good questions prompting us to think more in depth about our use of colors, our onboarding process, and how we might integrate A/B testing into play testing experience. Overall, our brief postmortem was beneficial in generating more design ideas and we are going to be wary about potential feedback loops we could create with the addition of biofeedback. We’ll be discussing 1/4’s more (and how our project is changing as a result) as we continue on into Week 4.
Team Building
This week’s team building was a group shopping trip to Giant Eagle to buy snack items for the room. This seemed like a great idea since several members of the team tend to work late or through lunch. We then got dinner at The Colombian Spot in Southside after the Popeye’s we tried to go to eat at ran out of chicken.
