Welcome back and welcome to the final session of this conference, obviously before the keynote. Well, this may be the last session, but it's certainly not the least session. So we'll be presenting four very interesting papers, presenting the latest applications of TEI.
And we'll be starting with Connie Holstein. She's presenting VoxBox, a tangible machine that gathers opinions from the public at events. Welcome, Connie. Great.
Thank you, Saskia. Thank you. So, this research was carried out at University College London within the Intel Collaborative Research Institute on Connected and Sustainable Cities.
And I will indeed be telling you about VoxBox, which is a tangible machine we built. to gather opinions. And we focus here on gathering opinions and feedback on the feel-good factor of recreational events. And by that we mean events like a fair or a festival.
And we basically wanted to find out, do people like this event? What is fun about it? What do they remember most about it?
Because this kind of feedback is very important for organizers of these kind of events to be able to improve future experiences. And the reason we designed VoxBox is because we saw that there were some limitations and issues with current means of gathering feedback. So traditionally this is done by just walking around that event with a clipboard and approaching people or sending emails.
email surveys afterwards. And there are some issues with that. Obviously the email surveys aren't in situ, they aren't at the event, so you might miss out important experiences that people had but have already forgotten about. On the other hand, approaching people with a clipboard, well, I don't know how you respond to that, but I usually just run away from people approaching me. So both of these approaches have typically low response rate because we tend to just just ignore it.
So to illustrate this, you remember that at the conference we had to hold up these pink cards and play a game together? That was fun, wasn't it? But on the back of these cards, there was also a feedback form. And what happened? Lo and behold, these poor abandoned feedback forms.
I have a hundred of them. Oh, that's great, that's great. But I just wanted to make a point. You can have this back as well.
Thank you. So we instead considered designing... something that was a bit more engaging and wouldn't cause people to run away, but instead it would add to the experience at the event or at the activity. So previous studies on opinion.
gathering systems have typically used large displays or social media plug-ins or simple voting devices with a couple of buttons. But we really considered looking at something larger, more playful, that would just invite people to touch, to play, just by the way it was presented. And we saw these examples of such large systems at the Science Museum in London, and as you can see they're quite successful.
and getting people to interact with them. So we decided to design something like this, really. And the result is called VoxBox, which is a one and a half meter or five foot tall device, which on the front side, this is my left, the people use physical controls such as buttons, sliders, dials to input, give people a sense of what they're doing. They give their answers to a number of questions we're asking them.
And so they navigate through these different panels one by one. We further have these colorful balls that provide an incentive for completion, which I will come back to later. On the reverse side, we have three portholes with tablet displays that show real-time visualizations of the collected data.
And by showing this data, We want to give the participants some direct feedback of the data that has been collected and also engage passers-by who may not be directly engaging with the voxbox themselves. So to give an impression of how this worked, I have a short video. about this event.
Please say your answer, then hang up and press the submit button. I hopped with lots of food. Sorry.
So you see that this worked quite well. She was quite happy with her ball at the end. We designed VoxBox using a set of design principles and aims that we derived from looking at more traditional forms of questionnaires.
and I will now take you through these design principles and come back to those at the end and evaluate sort of how successful we implemented each of these. So first we wanted to encourage participation and people just coming up. up to it rather than us having to chase them.
So this is why we create a large physical system that fit in with the event in the sense that it didn't interrupt the experience, but it could be just one of the attractions. But on the other hand, it's also a bit of an attention drawing thing because of its aesthetics. The input mechanisms are further familiar.
People know what to do with slides. with buttons so that lowers the thresholds for participation and it didn't look too technical or too childlike. And again, we provided a physical takeaway.
Second, we grouped similar questions, which is a common approach in questionnaires. So this helped to make the question or our survey less visually intimidating and it also provided a logical flow of questions. So we had each group of questions had a its own input mechanism.
So first we had a panel with demographics questions which used push buttons. So we asked them for example their age, their gender, where they're from. Second we had a panel with sliders which were semantic differential scales about their mood. So we asked them for example to rate their mood between excited and bored or inspired and indifferent.
Third we had some round dials which asked them about the crowd. So we asked them, for example, do you feel you fit in with the crowd, or how positive is the mood of the crowd? And fourth, there were these spinners that asked them about the event itself.
So if they felt, for example, that the event provided a positive experience and there were really physical forms of Likert skills. And the final panel, as you saw in the video, is a phone handset, and it rings by the time you reach that panel, and it asks you an open question. open-ended question. So we try to further encourage completion and show progress, and both do this through the same mechanism of physically manipulating a tangible reward out of the system. So we had this tube at the side of the system that we designed, and each time you complete one of the panels that I showed you in the previous slide.
your ball drops down one level and at the end it falls out and you can take it away. So in this sense, it's both a progress indicator because you can see how far along you are and it's also hopefully, we hope that people would keep going because they thought, oh, I'm almost there, I'm gonna get my ball. Early design ideas about this had us looking at more directly linking the action of answering a question that would. physically push something in and cause the ball to move forward, but we had to simplify this a bit for feasibility reasons.
Then another problem with questionnaires is obviously the lack or shortness of answers to open questions. So we wanted to explore how we could change this. And literature has shown that when you give people a playful, a playful thing or a playful activity, they're often more willing to talk and tell you what they think.
So we decided to give that a try. So we implemented this phone handset to do exactly that. Then finally we found that there's often a disconnect between the researchers or the event organizers gathering opinions at the event, and then on the other hand, the people that give the answer.
they don't often get to see what the results are or they have to really go find them on a website somewhere. So we wanted to bridge this divide a little bit. We did this by showing the results in real time on the device itself and also on our website. And by giving the people the balls, which also had the URL of the website on, we really tried to give them also a physical... link and create a sense of the results are quite literally rolling out of the system.
So let me just briefly tell you something about the implementation. So we created VoxBox by making these plywood drawers with a laser cutter that fit into a set of Ikea shelving. I can really recommend using things like that.
It's very handy. And such question modules can just be moved around easily and questions are also cut on separate labels so we just screwed them on so they could also be very easily changed. Each module consists of a front panel which had all the the electronics, we used mostly off the shelf components but we also created some ourselves like the spinners. And we had each of the panels had an LED strip around the edge which we lit up to show which panel was active and they just went through them one by one.
We used Arduinos to control the input and output. Each module had its own Arduino and then we had one master Arduino that controlled all the others and activated them one by one. And that one and also collected all the data and sent it to a back end server and database using a Wi-Fi shield. So again, that structure also made it very easy to add boxes or change the sequence without having to change too much code.
We have now deployed VoxBox at four different events. So one was a digital democracy conference, a one-day research conference. Two, Tour de France fan parks, and for those of you who don't know what that is, the Tour de France was in the UK last summer.
and in London this was quite a big deal, so they had some festivals around that where people that loved the Tour de France could come together. And Maker Hacker Festival in the UK as well. We've also done...
We've done a demo at it numerous of times within our own institution and we estimate that over 250 people have used the VoxBox by now. But in this talk and in the paper, we focus on the first deployments of the research conference. At this conference about 30 people from industry, government and academia used the Foxbox, which was out of about 40 to 50 people who were present at the event. Foxbox was set up in a demo area. along with some other interactive demos.
It was used over the coffee breaks and the lunch and over a dedicated demo slot. So there was in total about an hour and a half in which people had the opportunity to use it. We very much took a stand back approach, so we just watched and saw what happened, and we saw that people did indeed really come up to the VoxBox. We saw one person running out of the talks to be the first one to use it.
And we saw queues forming and people just coming up in small groups and discussing their answers with each other while they were interacting. We saw that the visualizations also got plenty of interest. several people stayed to actually watch, because these panels, they scroll through a number of visualizations, so we saw people stay and watch these, scroll through. And the picture, 23% feel bored, that was actually, one of the speakers saw that and said to one of the other speakers, like, oh, that must have been your talk, that you bored the people. Next, yeah.
So now I will get back to my observations to discuss the design principles again and just reflect on those a little bit. So first, we saw that voxel box indeed drew attention and encouraged participation while we stood back and watched, basically. So we saw that people self-selected in coming to give us their opinion. The colorful balls and the sort of intrinsic looking tube on the left side of the box, the color of the on the side turned out to be an unexpected attention drawer, which for us confirmed the importance of designing something that looks different and looks fun to do.
Second, the grouping of questions worked really well in giving the survey a simple appearance and making it look like, oh, I can do this, I want to do this. But people got a bit confused about the order and they were like, oh, I can do this. Which they had to go through, which for us was a bit surprising because in traditional questionnaires, obviously, you also go through it in a fixed order. But clearly there was something there that the tangibility and having it all there in one hit makes it actually a lot less constrained.
in where you interact first, which is something we really took aboard and wanted to explore further. Third, people didn't always immediately see the tube at the side and the bolt. dropping down.
They were always very pleasantly surprised afterwards when they got the ball, but they didn't always see it before. And from that we really saw that while the physical takeaway was a bonus, it wasn't the main incentive for people to keep going, but actually the fun of the interaction was the main thing that brought them in and kept them to complete it. Fourth, we saw that the phone set definitely elicits some interesting responses to open questions. Out of all the people we had at the events, I think about two-thirds actually provided a meaningful response to the open question.
Of the other one-third that didn't, there were also kids and people who don't speak English that well, so I think that's a pretty respectable result. We saw, for example, at the conference, we saw one person... and the person say, what if there was an entry fee for this event, how much would you be willing to pay?
And this person figured they would sell their children and possibly their wives, so that was interesting. Finally, so we try to link the answering of questions and the seeing of the results. Again, as with the ball tube, we saw that not everyone noticed the visualizations at the back, so we're trying to get the best of it.
We think this link can be made stronger, so for example by adjusting the design so that there's less of a change in attention from front to back, or maybe making something that is a more of a tangible link of like, now go see your data. So again, this is something we want to explore further. Then I want to show you a sneak preview of what we've been doing, because our design, our reflection on these design guidelines and the deployments of VoxBox have actually allowed us to progress our work in this area.
And we've done two other projects that are built on this. So the first one is Small Talk, and this is another set of interactive boxes which we developed for an interactive, sorry, for a theater company who had an interactive play and they wanted feedback from kids aged four to seven on one of their plays. So, So we again developed a set of boxes which really simplified the interaction and all the questions are really, really much more about the play itself. All the questions can further be listened to by pressing an audio button, so for kids who can't read yet, they can still participate. And finally we had a video box at the end because we noticed with the VoxBox that kids sometimes got a bit confused about the audio.
the disembodied voice on the other side of the phone and they'd be like, mom? So we wanted to avoid that and just give the kids a bit more context. And we have evaluated this performance with using Smalltalk numerous times now and we've had about 60 kids using this and we're currently analyzing the data. Finally, we've partnered with the British Council and Somerset House in London to do another project to rethink the UK census. So the way census data is collected now is you get a big questionnaire in the post and you have to fill it out and it's...
really not very dynamic and it's really not very engaging either. So we built this system and deployed it to explore what kind of data people are willing to share with others and for what reasons. if you, for example, tell them, you know, if you tell us this, we can really improve the services in your local area, will that make them more likely to share this kind of data? Here we're really pushing the boundaries of what we can do with interactive questionnaires, I think.
We've implemented, for example, we've implemented ID cards now, because obviously now it's important to know whose person is entering what data. And with these cards, people can, again, go to a visualization point of the data and see... how their data compares to that of others, which is quite interesting.
So, just... Just to give you a quick view, this is some of the data. This is our website. This is some of the data we are collecting right now in Somerset House.
So again, it gets visualized in real time on our website. And so, sensors are currently deployed at Somerset House in London, so if any of you happens to be around in the next few weeks, I encourage you to go have a look. And with that shameless bit of self-promotion, I'd like to end and thank you all for your attention.
Thank you. And are there any questions? Hi, Michal Reynat. Good work, really nice. Thank you.
I wanted to ask you about the colorful, big button. phenomenon? Did you find people maybe willing to cooperate but less interested in the content than in the interface? Yes, that's a very good question.
We did consider that and we did actually explore this quite extensively in the data because we thought, you know, are they just playing or are they really giving us their data? And we analyzed the results from two different events because we were there on the day and we saw that the mood was quite different. There were a lot less people.
And we really saw this difference reflected in our data. And we further looked at the interactions to see if people were just flicking things, just jumping back and forth, and basically just analyzed the interaction for playful behavior. And we saw that they were really moving the sliders up and down, really considering discussing with others what do we do.
So we really saw them considering their answers. Can I ask another one? How about the collaborative aspect? Because this is a more multi-user maybe environment.
It is, yeah. And that was actually something that we also tried to encourage a little bit because we feel that at an event when someone comes up to you with a questionnaire, it's very isolating as well. You're just doing this by yourself.
So we actually didn't consider it a problem that people are doing this in groups because we just want to get a feeling of what's happening at the event. Obviously with the census one, it becomes more individual. But we also try to account for that with the design, so it's a bit more private. But the VoxBox, we definitely encouraged collaboration rather than discouraged it. Thanks.
No worries. Well, if there are no further questions, thank you, Connie. Thank you.