On Sunday 9th June, James and I spectated at the 'Race for Life' in Nottingham. This was a 5k run around the Victoria Embankment, near to Trent Bridge. This event raised around £300,000 for charity so was a busy and popular event, giving us a good opportunity to test our application at a run with a high volume of people. This was also our first opportunity to test out the 'live tagging' interface that has been developed, which allows the user to tag runners using an on-screen keypad whilst they film.
This was a valuable experience for us because it helped highlight a number of bugs in the current application. For example, on James' phone, a Samsung Galaxy S2, the application recorded videos as expected, whereas on my own phone, a Samsung Galaxy S4, the application recorded videos but when these were played back it was found that actually only audio had been recorded properly and video consisted of a series of green and pink fuzzy lines.
With regards to live tagging, this event helped highlight how difficult this may be, particularly at a high volume event. A lot of the participants at this race were walking rather than running, yet live tagging was still a significant challenge. At future events we should test the live-tagging interface further by improving the on-screen keypad. Currently it was very fiddly to use and a lot of my own personal errors in tagging came from the fact that I wasn't able to accurately type in the runners number and had to keep correcting myself.
For now, the application is at a stage where it will benefit greatly from iterative design, prototyping and testing. Key goals for the next event to trial the application at should be consistently successful video capture and an improved on-screen keypad.
