Testing the Product

As a group we have divided many of the tasks between the two of us. Some tasks will be carried out together, and other tasks we will be expected to complete in our own time. To ensure the product is at its best functionality for our deadline, we have carried out a number of tests.

A little after the work in progress phase of the product creation we had sufficient renders and functionality of the product to test it on a young deaf child. I took the product to my young cousin, age 5. I wanted to stay out of the testing as much as possible so I briefed his mother on the product and let her help my cousin start. He seemed to grasp the concept of the product and was interacting with it fairly easily. General comments that arose were

 The texture of the black character didn’t look appropriate as it had a green tint

We retextured the Black character and test rendered it until it looked accurate.

  The writing was difficult to read against the background

We assessed the colour of the writing and background and added an outline around the edge of the writing so it stands out more

 The Test section was difficult to understand as it wasn’t clear what the question was or whether the answer was correct

We created a correct and wrong symbol to be enforced on the page of the appropriate frame for the answer. Also we enlarged the Question and kept it as basic as we could.

This was helpful as changes such as these are fundamental for creating an engaging product. Colour schemes and writing are important to get correct.  We received positive feedback on the animation and was told it was easy to repeat.

 

Video Source Path Testing

For the videos to be displayed within our product, a source path is used for Flash to load the video from an external source. With this in mind, I wanted to make sure that the videos could be loaded and viewed once the product had been burned to a disc.

I initially tested this with a USB pen to see that the video would load up. This did not work however as the source path was not created correctly. After changing this, the path became much shorter with the video working.

To check that multiple videos would load into the same timeline, I converted another video file to .f4v, and tested the buffering time, video size and quality when exporting the file as .swf.

This is a screenshot showing the product with a working render imported into the timeline:

Font Colouring for Final Product

The colours for the text have been difficult to decide upon due to the gradients and colouring of the navigation layout. As the text box backgrounds change colours, the choice is either to change the layout colour scheme, the text colour scheme or both. As we have spent a long time deciding on our colour scheme, it has been suggested that we trial different text colours.

 In my opinion, none of these text colours really work for the product. Each of the examples show that the text is not easy to read at a particular part of the gradient background. I would suggest that the white writing is the best of these, with the grey writing pretty much useless.

I have attempted to outline the text with another colour to see whether this makes all the text clearer, without the colour of the background impacting the text.