Appendix E: User Testing Summary
Purpose
The purpose of this first round of user testing was to determine the possible modifications we
could make to our mockups to improve their usefulness. The two mockups tested were the Shirt
Horn (method of putting the shirt on Elsa) and the pulley system (method of pulling shirt off
Elsa). Specifically, we wanted to see whether, in the short horn, she’d be able to put her arms and
head through the holes in the shirt independently so as to use the device. With the pulley system,
we wanted to determine whether she’d be strong enough to pull the string so that the shirt would
come off.
Test Methodology
Two of our team members visited the user, Elsa, at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC)
on February 12, 2016. Two mockups were brought along: the Shirt Horn and the pulley system.
The Shirt Horn was constructed largely with foamcore while the pulley system consisted of two
pulleys with a string around them and a clamp attached to the end of the string.
The tests were conducted at the RIC, and the entire session lasted approximately 40 minutes.
First, we tested the Shirt Horn. The user was asked to put her arms through the shirt on the Shirt
Horn, wiggle her head through and pull the string which would allow the shirt to fall on her
shoulders. We took multiple trials of this, recording the time it took her to do so and the
approximate difficulty of the task (from a scale of 1 to 10). The results are shown in Table 4.
Next, to test the pulley system, we asked her to pull down on a scale that measured the amount of
force she was applying. These trials were of 2 types: sustained force over a period of 12 seconds
(Figure 20) and force given on one downward jerk (Table 5). Figure 21 shows the fish scale used
during testing, and Figure 22 shows Elsa pulling down on the scale.
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