The stress is starting to hit me. There are four weeks left but it feels like it isn’t enough time to do everything I want. I started the week off by testing the laser cutter on a paper print out of my kōrero cards. Through my test run, I discovered that I needed to add more bleed to my cards to account for any errors the laser cutter might make while cutting. 

I also got in touch with the printing place and they said the turnaround time is one day. Since it’s so quick, I decided to hold off for a little bit longer in case I wanted to change the visual design of the cards. I had a gut feeling that this was going to be the case because I still hadn’t decided on the visual design for the main box which obviously the cards would have to be consistent with. 

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This week, I organised a user testing session with some of my peers. So, I spent a lot of time preparing materials for that. In particular, I wanted to test the Actor Mapping tool and the Mahi Board because I hadn’t tested them at all. I did some printing, cutting and glueing to create some very basic low fidelity prototype. In the process of preparing the Actor Mapping tool and the Mahi Board for the testing session, I also created a cardboard prototype of the fold out Value Pursuit Board. 

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This was a good opportunity for me to test the way it folds out and also get a feel of the size. Anyways back to the user test. The test of the Actor Mapping tool went mostly as expected.

Everyone understood the instructions well. However, it was a bit difficult for them to recall the different Mana Kai values. For the final prototype, I want to mitigate this by providing every participant with an aid card that describes all the Mana Kai values, and also define relevant te reo Māori words/terms. 

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The test of the Mahi Board went a lot less as expected. Just to refresh, here’s an explanation of the rules of the Mahi Board.

Initially I had assumed that the participants would spent the most time voting and deliberating on which goals they wanted to complete. It totally caught me off guard when they spent more than half an hour just defining the goals. I suppose in hindsight this makes a lot of sense, because my assumption was based on the idea that if my toolkit were implemented in actual co-design workshops, the participants would already have a general idea of the different goals they’re going to accomplish. So, it was interesting to see how everyone in the user test spent so much time and energy just defining the goals, when the activity was originally designed to bring the participant’s attention to prioritising between different goals. 

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It was also really interesting seeing how everyone perceived the tokens. For them, it was not just a matter of number of tokens, but it was also relevant to consider whose token it was. For example, sometimes they talked about how the government should contribute mahi elsewhere because that was what they expected from a government body. 

I also went through my Miro board and marked all the different places I needed to update and add more information to. I started resolving some of them this week and will continue to do so until the end of my project.

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