Perform the Magic! Usability testing for Magika, a Multisensory Environment fostering children's well being

This paper describes the result of an Usability Test over teachers’ control interface in Magika, the powering engine of the Magic Room, a low-cost MultiSensory Environment (MSE) that enables new forms of playful learning for children, especially those with special needs. Magika offers a set of activities integrated in a synesthetic way; it incorporates digital worlds projected on the wall and on the floor with a large number of connected objects, such as toys and materials, that allow children to experience tactile, auditory, visual, and olfactory stimuli. The MSE has been installed in two elementary schools, therefore it is an essential requirement that the system can be controlled completely autonomously by caregivers. A preliminary research, based on teacher’s needs, enlightened some basic requirements and allowed us to design a System Control Interface that enabled them to manage the experience within the MSE. The goals of testing the interface usability include: define a baseline of user performance, establish and validate user performance measures, and identify potential design concerns to be addressed in order to improve the efficiency, productivity, and end-user satisfaction. In this work, we explain in detail the administration of the experimental protocol to ten teachers, tested for half an hour each, of two main scenarios: the Create modality, where users explored how to configure activities and the Play modality, where they had to manage the room. Thanks to a background agent script that tracked number, position and time of each tap and results collected from SUS (System Usability Scale) questionnaire, we were able to obtain both quantitative and qualitative data useful to possibly improve our work and precisely evaluate the control Interface usability. Results appear to be consistent with the Usability of the control interface, as long as, no result was inferior of a score of 68 at SUS.