In this blog post I’m going to talk a little about our first user trial of the mobile application developed by Tim for the capture and tagging of user videos at the marathon. The functionality of the app allowed users to film video, while the system records timing, locative and view cone metadata. (Check out Tim’s post on the application to find out about view cones.) Subsequently they can replay the recording and add tags to identify runners by tapping on their image in the video and entering their runner number. The intention would then be to use the metadata and tags to position the runner within the marathon course as part of the presentation to an online user.
At this early stage of development the evaluation we were planning was a formative user trial in a realistic context. We had two main goals for the study. Firstly to test out the post hoc method of tagging that we had developed, how would users find the task of selecting runners from the video, is the tagging interface intuitive and what could we do as designers of the system to motivate them to complete it. Secondly to investigate how the practices of capturing video in a running event, do users try and catch the overall atmosphere of the event or are they more focused on capturing particular runners. In conducting the trial we teamed up with the University of Nottingham Student Union’s athletics club who have regular training sessions on our campuses. Luckily for us they were willing partners in taking part with the trial. However during our negotiations with the club we talked quite a lot about not interfering with the runners’ progress and focus. Even though we were only looking at recording a training session the club made it really clear to us that having the runners carry mobiles or having technology interfere with the pure sports of distance and track running was off limits. We were able to reassure them that we didn’t think that this would be a problem; we were focusing on the use of technology by the spectators.
I only have room here to talk briefly about the results so will just mention a couple of interesting things that came out of the trial. We found that the post hoc tagging system whilst an effective method of tagging the runners within the videos it came with a couple of caveats. When users were tagging they weren’t capturing and several users reported that they had missed some of the action whilst trying to number users. Secondly there were some cognitive issues with tagging after the video was taken. We found that not all videos had a clear image of the runners’ numbers so users had to try and remember the number to enter it for tagging. An obvious usability issue for our system, however what was interesting was that users attempted to deal with this problem by calling out the number whilst videoing, so when they watched the video back the number was in the audio stream for them to enter. Maybe an idea for a more technologically complex system would be to use speech-to-text APIs to recognise these numbers automatically as the video is captured.
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