As you may have already read in previous post, we held a number of the new Vibe-ing evaluation sessions. To be precise, through two weeks time we traveled to 4 different towns and cities in the Netherlands to meet our 9 possible Vibe-ing users.

We started off on the 29th of November, when we took a train to little village in Gelderland province of the Netherlands – Zaltbommel. There we met our first user. Everything went perfectly fine, except for the hard rain, which caught us just at the end of the interview. Luckily our participant didn’t think twice and offered us a ride to the train station.

The next trip followed on the 2nd of December and took place in St. Anthonis, Noord Brabant. It took us over an hour to get to the beautiful home of our participant on the edge of the village. Walk through the nature, the smell of animals and ready to sleep through the winter plants prepared us for hard work. This time we had in total four ladies participating, thus it took us approximately four and a half hours to show them the Vibe-ing prototype, let them experience it and interview them about their first experiences and ideas about garment. When these four interviews were through, the dark had already hit the sky, so we had to get moving back to Eindhoven. We packed our bags, tripods, cameras and headed towards the bus stop. To make sure that we don’t travel too short, we accidently took the bus to the wrong direction and increased the traveling time for that day at least with one half an hour. But OK, all in all we gathered a lot of valuable data and were half through with the user testing.

One day later we were back on the track heading to meet our sixth participant in one of the physiotherapy clinics, Schaafsma en De Jonge, in Utrecht. The trip was pretty adventurous, since we got stuck in the train just before the Utrecht’s central station. This gave us some stress, because we were at least 15 minutes late to meet our participant, excluding the time needed to prepare the interview setting (e.g. build up the cameras, find the righters spot to seat the participant, etc.). Although we were late, our participant waited for us and actually was really excited about the whole session. Once again, we have gathered a lot of valuable data about our prototype. And were already very much looking forward to analysing the data. But first, we still had to interview three more ladies.

The last three sessions took place in physiotherapy practice, Boerrigter Fysiotherapie, in the center of Eindhoven. There we were hosted by a great man – the head physiotherapist of the practice. He made sure that we have a private room to perform the interviews and, moreover, he opened the practice exclusively for us on the last day of user testing!

The two last participants were not able to meet us during the day and thus were scheduled for the evening on the 9th of December. Thanks to our host, Hans, we were done slightly after 9PM that evening. Monday the 9th of December was the last day of user testing.

Now, having one week left in the whole project we are reviewing what we have done, and collecting all the data from of the users. Today we have 9 love letters, 9 break-up letters, 9 long videos, 9 big reflection tables and much more other data to analyse. Exciting! And now, I better get back to work.

As you may guess, the next post will be about our findings. For now we say ‘bye’ and hope you get back to us!