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Still as a student in the design degree, one of the college's projects was "to solve a problem in the classrooms that involved Internet of Things". Taking into account that it was not a programming course, concepts such as usability and user-centered design were more important than the technical viability of the solution.
Problem
How to reduce the time to prepare the projector in a presentation for teachers and students in the classroom?
Solution
Ensure that the preparation of the projector and presentations are controlled more simply.
Role
Design Student
Company
IFPE, 2017
With the requirements of the project and after a few brainstorming sessions, our team discovered a problem that we all went through every day: the difficulty that students and teachers had in preparing and using projectors in classrooms.
Some factors meant that classes that needed to use projectors were always more difficult. Connection problems with cables, blurred projector lens, or even incompatibility between the versions of the programs used to present, were some of the common problems in classes.
Our first step was to use the Hierarchical Task Analysis (HTA) method, which consists of analyzing a task flow completely to find problems in some part of the flow.
One of the task flows analyzed was the use of the projector via remote control as it is one of the main ways to control classroom presentations.
After analyzing some task flows, it was possible to elaborate the following statements:
• The buttons on the remote control are not intuitive and the tasks required are very complex;
• The need to use computers and cables made it difficult to perform the task;
• The lack of interactivity of the remote control means that the user has only one path;
To better understand how the problem affected the lives of students and teachers, we decided to conduct a semi-structured survey. The analysis of the responses generated an immense amount of insights, which we organized into summaries forming two profiles.
Lucas has 19 years, is a student, and uses the projector on some days of the week to expose their projects in the class. He thinks that prepare the projector for every presentation is not an easy task, principally when is necessary to do some adjusting on the projector's lens.
Helena is a college teacher, she has 44 years and uses the projector in every class. She spends a considerable time preparing the presentations in class, always having problems with the cables to connect the projector to the computer, and needs to do manual adjustments constantly.
After all the research, we started to define our first hypothesis for the solution of the problem: a simple application that was able to control the projector completely. Some essential functionalities:
• Hardware control: zoom, framing, color adjustment, and focus;
• Do not be a need for cables to make a presentation;
• Connection via Bluetooth and no internet required;
• Control of presentations by the application.
As the project did not aim to validate technical viability, we solved the issue of pairing the app with the projector through a fictional HDMI plug that connected with the smartphone via Bluetooth.
The first entry in the application teaches how to pair the cell phone and performs the initial calibration of the projector.
After the first calibration, the app is ready to present any type of file or mobile screen itself.
Through the settings, it is possible to have all control of the brightness, color, framing, and focus of projector.
This project was done as a team by amazing people: Arthur Pedro, Larissa Thaís, Bruno Correia and Jéssica Leite.
Some free resources were used in this project, such as the Inter UI font created by Rasmus Andersson, the Feather icon pack developed by the StdLib team, and the illustrations of the Isometric Devices Lineal pack available at Flaticon.