My plan was to sit on the third floor of Rose Library, just outside the four study rooms to the left of the elevator when exiting, and observe how people behaved with regards to these study rooms. I would sit there, and take notes as I observed how long rooms would be open after someone left, the amount of people in the rooms, how long people left for, etc.

Condensed Field Notes

Rose Library
Monday, February 26, at 2:30pm

Location Summary - I am sitting in a chair on the third floor of Rose Library, along a wall with glass windows on it. In front of me, I see bookshelves, to the right, a few more seating locations, and to the left, four study rooms that are first-come-first-serve. Directly to the left of me is an opening to more study locaitons. Past the bookshelves in front of me, there are restrooms and a water fountain slightly to the right, and the elevator slightly to the left.

• All four study rooms are full. Two with two people in them, one with three, and one with one.
• At 2:33, one person comes out of the elevator, walks by all four rooms, and immediately turns to go through the bookshelves, seemingly to check the study rooms behind the elevator.
• At 2:37, one of the rooms of two both left, leaving their stuff in the room.
• At 2:40, a male and a female walk by the study rooms, looking in all of them, and then proceeded through the opening to the left of me.
• At 2:42, one of the rooms of two, both left, leaving their stuff in the room.
• At 2:45, a group of three walked by the study rooms, made disgusted faces, and turned around to wait for the elevator again.
• At 2:49, another person walked by the rooms, looking in to all of them, and proceeded through the opening next to me.
• Note: this seems to be a common trend, so I will no longer be writing down every single group of people who walks by the rooms.
• At 2:55, the two who left earlier, came back, both with coffee.
• At 3:00, the single person in a study room left, and the two people sitting next to me, already settled and studying, imediately got up and took the room the second that person left.
• at 3:25, one of the groups of two started packing up, looking like they were going to leave, and another group of two who just got out of the elevator, hovered around that room until it was vacated, and then entered.

Expanded Field Notes

It seemed as if around every five minutes, someone, or a group of people, walk by and took a look into the study rooms, and will often not even think about taking any of the open spots around me. People seemed to get pretty ticked off when seeing the last study room having only one person in it, since on the sign outside of them, it says you need 2+ people to use it, and when seeing that one of the rooms had stuff in it, but no people. There really was not any layover time between when someone left and when it was filled again.

Brief Account

It is clear that these study rooms are of high value. Often times, peoples motivations seemed to be to get a study room anywhere they can find it, not just getting a place to study. I can understand why, since you can talk in the study room, you get privacy, and you get a white board to write on/TV to hook up to. It was pretty crazy seeing how fast the rooms got snatched up after someone left. With there being no layover time where the rooms were empty, clearly these first-come-first-serve study rooms are in high demand. It makes sense why I have such a problem finding an open study room when I come to Rose looking for ones, considering how quickly rooms get taken after they become free.

Reflections

Observing was a pretty comfortable activity for me. I like to people-watch already, so just hanging out, watching people interacting with the study room was not a boring or tedious task for me.

To play Snake in Virtual Reality, first, you must take into account the main objective in snake: not hitting yourself or going off the edge; meaning the main function is to move up, down, left, and right, on the board. In VR, I would design it to be a First-Person game, meaning it looks like you ARE the snake, and you could use either a little controller with a joystick to decide which direction to go, or the turn of your head could decide where you would like to go, but I will be using a joystick for my example.
The game would be played completely differently than how you typically think of Snake. With you being in first, instead of third, person, finding the little things to eat, and noticing how close you are to the wall, become new challenges when trying to survive. You are constantly moving, since you are the snake, and you must look around to find the food and to be aware of your surroundings.
Making the user be in first person would be a major design challenge that would have to be addressed very early in the design process. Things like how wide of a range of vision, how easy is it to see the little foods, and others, would need to be addressed before development took place.
In comparison to a cell phone and PC, this game is completely different. Just like third person shooters compared to first person shooters, games played in these different modes provided completely different challenges. For this VR game, you now have to worry about finding where the food things are, as opposed to always being able to see them when Snake is played at its typical birds-eye view. This provides a whole new mechanic to the game, which could be enjoyable, or frustrating, depending on the player.

Speech

A speech-based snake game would provide a whole new take on the game. Instead of using arrow keys to move the snake around, you would just say “Left” or “Down” to get the snake to move up, down, left, and right. The visual aspects of the game would not need to change; the game can take up the whole screen because no touching or manipulation of the screen is involved in playing.
When playing, You would shout out commands as to where the snake should go next throughout the process.
A major possible problem that would need solving is how quick the game would be able to pick up direction changes. A big survivability feature in Snake is the ability to quickly switch from one direction to another, and then to another (i.e., when going right, quickly pressing up, and then left) to make sure you are covering as much of the board as possible. This would be difficult to accomplish, because you must speak the words clearly when wanting to change direction, but also quickly for better performance in the game.
In comparison to a cell phone and PC, a speech-based Snake would make the game much easier and less error-prone, because you no longer have to worry about pressing the incorrect button. But, in the heat of the moment, you may say the wrong direction, which provides a whole new mechanic of having to keep your words focused, instead of your fingers.

Touch

With touch, instead of using the typical approach of using arrow keys to move the snake, you would be using your finger to swipe in the direction that you would like to go. This is an interesting new mechanic, because you now have to cover part of the screen with your hand, while taking action.
To play, you just swipe back and forth in whichever direction you would like to go, and should see immediate results as to where the snake is going. A new mechanic is added with this type of Snake, because when taking action, you cannot see parts of the screen since you have to swipe, making where you swipe, part of the decision-making that will determine the outcome of the game.
One design issue would be how much diagonal swiping is allowed/when to swap from one direction to another, when analyzing the swipe. In the panic of playing, players will often not swipe in 90 degree angles, so deciding what kind of swiping is okay is a big design decision to make.
In comparison to a cell phone and PC, the differences are the swiping mechanic getting in the way of the screen, and the angle in which you swipe may determine whether the move gets read by teh game or not. This makes the game more difficult than the normal mediums that it is played in.

This page will display lots of information, such as past game scores, past game summaries, past game highlights, news about the teams, next game times and channels, and next game projections, which are all of interest to different kinds of users. This should allow for users to have to do less clicking around to find what they are looking for about their teams, as well as provide a new way for users to focus the information they want on their screens.

The layout of the page would be as follows: a left side of the screen that consists of the past, and a right side of the screen that consists of the future. Each team on each side of the screen will have its own rectangle, consisting of multiple sections: most recent/next game, a highlights video/talks about who analysts think will win, a recap of the most recent game/projections for the next game, and news about past and future things regarding the team. This will be a simple layout in which users can get the most out of the ESPN site with regards to their favorite teams. This new page will be useful for both the casual sports fan, who only cares about their teams, and the sports fanatic, who wants to know everything thats happening with regards to their teams.

This design is bad for one reason and one reason only: it’s too blurry. Seeing this on twitter will I’m sure make people happy that they will know the JMU dining schedule, but they will be very frustrated when clicking on the tweet and seeing the very blurry picture. It is not very difficult for JMU to make sure they have uploaded a clear picture of this document, but clearly they did not find that to be an important feature, which was a grave mistake. The only realistic way for my 20–20 vision self to read this document, is to zoom in really far to make out the words and numbers on the document, so I cannot imagine how annoying this must have been for people who need glasses.

This design really needs one main fix, which is a clear document, but this one issue is vital to its usability, which is why I chose this as my bad design.

One of this design’s best features is its ease of use. All it takes is holding your water underneath the faucet and pressing down the lever behind it, for water to come out, and when your bottle is full, you simply let go of the lever. This is a far superior way of filling up water bottles at water fountains compared to a fountain with no extra faucet, since you typically cannot fill up your bottle all the way, and with an inconsistent stream coming from the regular fountain faucet, it is easy to miss the bottle when using it. This design is also superior to the censored bottle fill-up mechanism in the village dorms. With that design, you are basically guaranteed to get water on the outside of your bottle and/or on your hands when you take it off the sensor spot, since the water will not stop coming out until the bottle is moved away, which is a huge pain.

Overall, this design is effortless to use, and is simple, yet effective, at filling up water bottles.