Reaction All Years

Project Description:

This project began with Ingenium, the organization that runs Canada’s museums of science and innovation, reaching out to our class with a problem: due to COVID-19, Ingenium’s museums saw a decrease in visitors and the organization lacked alternative programming and services to reach out to Canadians virtually. We were challenged to conduct research to understand how Ingenium could expand its reach outside of physical museums, to not only reach people when museums cannot be visited, but also better fulfill the organization’s mandate to serve all Canadians beyond the pandemic.

Our team chose to focus on learning about how we can engage the age demographic of 18-35, which Ingenium outlined as a current gap in the demographics they serve. Inspired by Ingenium’s use of play in their museums and their mission of “unlocking the curious and creative minds of a nation of innovators”, we first set out to answer the following question:
Does play have a role in the lives of adults?

We conducted a literature review to understand play, the role of play in adulthood, popular experiences for adults, the role of play in museums, and adult perceptions of museums. The key findings were that there is no “true” definition for play, play is perceived to be for children despite the fact that adults do play, and that playful experiences can provide many benefits to adults like improving mental health, increasing creativity, improving problem-solving skills, and providing community to name a few.

Having found that play has a role in the lives of adults, it was now time for us to conduct our own research to find out what play means to adults, and how Ingenium can create a playful experience for them. We learned how to conduct a mixed methods study consisting of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. We used UX research practices to design, test, and iterate a questionnaire, which received 158 responses from a diverse range of participants. We then conducted 15 interviews to get a deeper understanding of the “why” of the questionnaire responses. Next, we organized all of the qualitative and quantitative data to conduct comparative analysis. After analysis, we developed insights and recommendations based on what we found in our research.

Through our study, we learned that our adult participants had very busy lives, and despite wanting to engage more in play, they often lacked time or energy. The platform we are developing helps adults take a quick break to play by giving them regular creative prompts, delivered in-browser or through SMS, social media, or email. Each prompt is designed to facilitate a low-stakes, engaging, and hopefully silly experience. Prompts are flexible—adults can do them alone or with others, in person or virtually, and through different sensory mediums.

Our platform will help adults play more while also fulfilling Ingenium’s mandate to reach across Canada. As adults interact with creative prompts, they will see their surroundings differently, moving towards Ingenium’s mission of unlocking curious and creative minds—with some laughter along the way.

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Project Description:

The goal of the project is to replace the Festo Easy Port which displays the information from the 7 digital inputs, 5 digital outputs which use 24v, 4 analog inputs, and 2 analog outputs which use 10v from the Festo station.

Features:
HMI touch screen
Arduino Mega2560 microprocessor
Student designed PCB board
Arduino based programming
Custom 3D printed enclosure

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Project Description:

Overview: Ingenium Role-Playing Games RPG
The digital team of Ingenium, Canada’s national museums of science and innovation, have asked us to come up with an approach to engage Gen Z’s, 18-24 year olds, across Canada. This would be an approach that could be used across the 3 museums and across collections while being accessible to and inclusive of all Canadians of that demographic.

Solution Plan:
Ingenium museums would design role-playing games of different adventure-themed stories based around artefacts in their possession, gathering them in many contexts: eras, geographical regions, collections, technological progression, for example.

Adventure Planning
The manuals for campaigns, or main story arc, would be written by Ingenium historians/curators in collaboration with well-loved RPG authors. This would ensure that they are based on fact and history as much as possible in the set-up of adventures, but the storyline and game possibilities (including rules) would be designed by people experienced in role-playing games.
Playbooks, character sheets and other materials that define the game would be created and uploaded on Ingenium’s website as guides for users. The manual would include a quick guide with the basics as well as the in-depth story and rules. The sessions would be run on a messaging/sharing platform like Discord.

Genium Masters
Organizing and running the Campaigns (games) would be the Genium Master(s). They would run the (eventually automated) sign-ups on the Ingenium website and arrange the plan for the whole Adventure and each session. Sessions would be opened with the Genium Master framing the current section of the adventure and what the next steps are. Genium Masters could be curators of the museum or contracted professional Game Masters. As players become more engaged, they can become Game Masters.

Character Creation
Each player creates a character at the beginning of an Adventure with a Character Creation Guide. Users have the freedom to be whoever they want to be, so far as it fits the story. They do so by defining traits including interests, abilities and back stories. As this solution has as one of its mandates to be inclusive of all Gen Z throughout Canada, the character trait options will include diversity that represents the multiple cultures, different abilities, genders and other perspectives that are experienced throughout our country.

Character Avatars
Once the character is imagined, it can be depicted by the creation of a virtual character in a tool/app /platform with options to use their video & overlay IG (or Ingenium) filter on one’s own pic (like Snapchat) or build a completely new avatar.
Getting the Word Out
Posters/ads would be posted on Ingenium’s official social media accounts. IG, Facebook and Tiktok would be used for promotional purposes and to engage users in short interactive story hooks, polls, Q & A, and provide links and info on each RPG.
Campaign Booking
Users would click on story highlights in their social media and swipe up to read more on Ingenium’s website and sign up for the stories they are interested in the booking system maintained by the Genium Master(s).

Accessibility
Built into the solution would be aspects to meet and exceed Canadian and Ontario accessibility standards and be as inclusive of all abilities as possible.

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Project Description:

Introduction to Project
AskPolly is a self-service tool for market research created by Advanced Symbolics Inc. (ASI) that uses artificial intelligence to study what people are saying online on social media. A person enters a query of what they want to measure (e.g. trucker protest), and the population they want to measure (e.g. residents of Ottawa). Polly then returns what conversations people are having online, how people feel about each of the conversations, and the demographics of the people. Though a powerful tool on the back-end, AskPolly’s engineering-first interface design was in need of improvement. ASI approached our team to research and design a new interface for AskPolly that makes the product easier and more intuitive to use.

Our Roles
Muhammad Khan: UX Research
Joyat Joseph: Interaction Design
Zhi Wang: Data Visualization

What We Did
We began the project by conducting a literature review and a heuristic evaluation of the current product. We also conducted interviews with engineers and augmented research managers at ASI to gain a better understanding of AskPolly and its function. We organized the information architecture of AskPolly and researched data visualization techniques that we could use to output information on a dashboard.
Using what we learned during our initial research we created a low-fidelity prototype using Figma that makes several changes to the original product to fill gaps in the user experience. First, we simplified the search page to have a single entry for a query, rather than having to manually add keywords one by one in separate entry boxes. We also added a loading screen, to improve the experience during the 5 minutes that it takes Polly to gather information for the dashboard. On the dashboard, we introduced a new card-based interface to make the conversations easy to digest. We also introduced simplified graphs to quickly provide users with an overview of the information related to the conversations they select. We also added functionality to add and remove graphs so that the user can customize the dashboard to their needs.

Next Steps
The next step of this project is design validation. We will be conducting usability testing on our design, and iterating it over 4 weeks to ensure that it truly meets the needs of users. During the tests, we will also be collecting important information on how users enter queries into AskPolly, which will be used to improve Polly’s ability to understand user inputs. Once we have a validated design, we will present a high-fidelity prototype and our research findings to Advanced Symbolics Inc. so that the engineering team can implement our recommendations.

We would like to thank the team at Advanced Symbolics and Jed Looker for the opportunity to work on this project and for all their help!

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Project Description:

The concept for DocConnect was developed by Alek Golijanin, a local community builder looking to make a difference in the lives of others, especially Canadian youth.
DocConnect is a web-based application designed to be used by high school guidance counselors to help students who do not have a family doctor. A postal code is entered, and DocConnect returns a list of nearby doctors and clinics. Necessary enrolment forms are also provided ready to print, to make the whole process as simple as possible.
This was a continuation of work previously begun by Algonquin College students in an earlier semester. There were some issues involving the initial set-up of the database account on the Firebase platform that were resulting in the DocConnect site being nonfunctional, so this was the highest priority. After resolving that issue, our work shifted to expanding the scope of DocConnect beyond Ottawa by increasing the number of cities represented in DocConnect’s search function, starting with Edmonton. This way, DocConnect could best fulfill our client’s goal of improving kids’ lives. Some alterations with made to the administrative, reflecting the expanded search scope in the database administration.
We also worked on finetuning the look and feel of DocConnect’s user interface to ensure a straightforward and effortless user experience.
Over the course of our work on DocConnect, several unexpected shifts in project requirements meant we had to be quick to adapt and flexible with our planning, pivoting between features as needed.

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Project Description:

The Team is working on website design using Angular, Node.js and NPM. The particular components asked for are revamped website with a more modern look, a live chat, chatbot features and database for user accounts storage.

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Project Description:

“The pandemic has made my job more difficult. When the courts closed, our case numbers doubled because cases were not being resolved… It has become more challenging to stay mentally well during the pandemic, as some of my strategies for self-care were thwarted.” (Victim Service Provider)

Stay-at-home orders in response to the COVID-19 pandemic changed the delivery of victim services, increasing the challenges for service providers to support victims and survivors of crime. We were interested in further exploring this topic by answering the following questions in a paper for the Department of Justice:

1. How have pandemic restrictions related to COVID-19 affected the delivery of victim services?
2. How have these workplace changes affected service providers?
3. How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted the overall well-being of victim service providers?

In our national survey of 564 service providers across Canada, respondents indicated an increase in workload and that the need to adapt to shifting public health guidelines generated additional stress. Service providers shared different perspectives on how they had been affected by working from home, with some finding it more flexible because the work happened in their own positive space, while others found it more difficult because they felt the work was invading safe spaces in their own homes. The majority of participants working full-time or part-time indicated spending more time working from home during the pandemic. Approximately three in ten service providers who reported these increases also reported a decrease in their work-life balance and 42% reported that their overall mental health had decreased as a result of these changes. More than seven in ten reported that their level of stress had increased. These findings suggest the need for flexible and diverse approaches to service delivery after the pandemic. Greater choices should be available for both victim service providers and survivors about aspects of services that are best suited to meet their needs. Additionally, the increased use of technology has introduced the possibility of survivors meeting with victim service providers or participating in the criminal justice system virtually. For some, this offers a safer and more inclusive service environment, which is worth retaining post-pandemic. However, it also introduces barriers for those without access to technology. Service providers felt that virtual services introduced additional barriers for survivors without access to technology, while providing others with safer and more inclusive access to support. Findings also highlighted a disparity in the resources and compensation available to service providers working in different sub-sectors of victim services. This study also suggests the need for increased and on-going financial support to ensure that victim service organizations are equipped to meet the needs of their clients.

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