PMC Top Seminar 17.11.2011 at ADF – Usability and Testing in Product Development

PMC Top Seminar was held in Design Factory on 17^th of November. The theme for this year’s seminar was usability and testing in product development.  In addition to three interesting key notes and a panel discussion, the PDP students had prepared tests for the participants, related to on-going projects. The visiting lecturers were Raimo Sepponen, professor of Aalto ELEC, Marko Nieminen, professor of Aalto SCI and Liisa-Maija Keinänen, Adage Oy.

This year seven PDP teams took part to this seminar and according to Päivi, never before have the teams had so many prototypes already at this point of the course.  What did the participants and users earn and learn from this experience and what was the event’s best offering?

“Although projects run smoothly and well – like this year- it seems like it is a big challenge and threshold for the teams to test early stage ideas with people outside the team. The theme of the PMC Seminar definitely helped to make the threshold of the experiment and testing lower, which usually brings a very useful additional nuance to the project. Not only are the planning and realization of the testing very instructive and useful, but also the possibility to see other teams’ testing arrangements. This way the learning was multiple.

I enjoyed listening the visiting lecturers and their speeches which were to the point. The test demos of the PDP-teams were really inspiring, funny and it was difficult to choose one’s favorite from them, as all of the demos were good in different ways. The complex worked well. Perhaps still the best offering for me was to meet former PDP students from years back and get direct feedback from them that does the spirit in Aalto University still resonate warm and lovable feelings.”

Ericsson team was rewarded in the seminar for best testing.

“The best thing about the whole event was that we got to see how people got enthusiastic about the testing and prototyping and we also got some great feedback from them. Also the users gave us good points about the prototype and insight to some of our problems. It was good that we didn’t think ourselves since the team had lots of assumptions which the users didn’t have.

For us this seminar came in a good time, since at the moment we are doing market and user research and interviews related to our concepts, and the PMC was a kick start for this as we got to talk with users face to face and collect the feedback. We photographed and filmed the users as they tested our concept and we are going to analyze the results afterwards. This experience made us also think about some user experience aspects which we hadn’t thought before. One thing that surprised us was that some of the people liked the peeping sound that our product made and some people got annoyed by it.”

“In my opinion the visiting lecturers were very interesting and I learned a lot about testing from the speeches. It was inspiring to be able to test the prototypes that the teams had built in a funny and concrete way and also directly reflect the things that the lecturers told in practice.

This kind of event creates positive pressure to the teams and forces them to create a prototype for testing. The teams get useful feedback from the users, they get something concrete ready and they get to see how their ideas work in practice. This was an unique year, since never before have the teams had so many prototypes ready for testing.”

“Our team tested only a small part of the whole project but it was still very useful to get something concrete and a physical prototype out of the team. For us testing and building the tap was a lot of fun, even though this first prototype was quite incomplete. In our case we saw how a thing like washing hands can be very much bound to the culture and what kind of challenges might we face when trying to teach a new way of handwash. This was also a great opportunity to see how the mechanism works.”