Evaluations and refelections

It has been a really great experience working together with our participant. He was very willing to meet up with us (physically) and he was also very willing to participate in our experiments and tests. It was a positive aspect that he lives relatively close by and therefore it was quite easy to visit him often.  Even though our participant was quite excited to work together, communication has been difficult sometimes. Our participant is sometimes hard to understand, due to his speech difficulty. Also, our participant could not read or write, so we could only email him via his caretaker. Communication via WhatsApp was possible via voice messages, but we found out that only calling really worked best. When we gave him an assignment to do on his own he would forget to do it most of the time so a good reminding system had to be set up which was calling him or informing his caretakers.

Furthermore, we got the impression that he was quite excited about this project and that he was really hoping to get a real solution for his problem.

However, since we are only building a prototype and not a real product, we hoped that he would not be disappointed. This was something that we had to communicate clearly, in order to avoid miscommunications about the expectations. We also asked him what his experience was during this project and he had a lot of fun but had expected things to move a lot faster than we were able to do.

The final design is quite simple, yet effective. During the midterm presentations, we got quite some positive feedback. We have done quite some ideation and we communicated closely together with our participant in order to achieve the best design possible. We also had help from our tutor in how to test certain things and how to communicate with our participant. We tried to test our prototype with the user, however the user has indicated that he only needs our product when presenting and was too comfortable around us. We tried playing out scenarios but if this project were to continue the effect on his presentation when he's more nervous would have to be tested more. This also because we were unsure whether our final product would distract our participant.

In general, the teamwork went well. Beforehand of a meeting, an agenda was made such that the meetings were effective. During the meetings, the minutes were clearly stated in a separate document. This helped to keep meetings very organised. Also, there were clear task divisions made during the process of the project, such that every groupmember knew what to do and when. However, sometimes there were some miscommunications. In order to avoid miscommunications, we tried to have as many meetings on campus as possible. Sometimes, there were some time-management issues. Especially during the last couple of weeks, the time-pressure increased and there was still quite some work that had to be finished. 

Overall, the project went quite well and the final prototype matched with the wishes of the participant. therefore, the co-design process went quite well. We were lucky that we had a participant that was really excited about working together. For next time, our time-management could have been better, such that the process went a bit smoother near the end. Also, we had some minor issues with testing the prototype, since our participant was quite confortable around us and we could not test the prototype when he was giving a presentation. Overall, it was a succesfull project. We have definetly learned a lot of new information about cerebral palsy, as well as we got an idea of the issues that people with disabilities come across in everyday life. It has been a good experience to put ourselves in someone else's shoes.