Representing Audio Narrations of Photos

📙 Inspired by an elderly woman with aphasia who loves to share stories using pictures, Amanda Legge has undertaken the task of designing a customizable, audio, photo-sharing toolkit. This toolkit, which is meant to bridge the paper and digital worlds, uses digital pens to attach audio to photos printed on special dot-pattern paper. Using rapid and re-iterative prototyping techniques to guide the design process of these audio photo-narration representations, Legge begins by exploring visualizations with both tactile and visual feedback. After gaining some initial user feedback from this pilot exploration, she goes on to create real audio prototypes of the most successful visualizations using genuine photo narratives. Usability testing on these audio prototypes exposes the visualizations’ best and worst features, but to ensure a proper evaluation, participants are also given the opportunity to create their own paper prototype of a personal photo. Each step of the re-iterative prototyping process reveals important insights as to the best representation of audio narrations on photos, and the chosen design ensures the creation of a successful, user-friendly, audio photo-sharing toolkit.