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Initial Designs

Point of View:

Arjun is a 40 years old father living in Mumbai, India whose son Raj is a working professional recently moved to San Francisco.

Arjun wants to recreate the narratives of his son's stories and better understand the place where his son lives.

Scenario:

Raj talks to Arjun nearly every day using Skype. During these conversations, Raj tells Arjun interesting stories:  

  • Driving to LA from SFO through Highway 1 along the Pacific Coast
  • Hiking to glacier point (Yosemite)
  • Visit to Google's Mountain View Campus
  • Visit to Stanford University's beautiful Palm Drive entrance and the oval

Raj also shares some images and posts on Facebook/Twitter describing his experiences.

When Raj is busy and unavailable to talk, Arjun wishes to recreate the stories that Raj has told him. He wants to learn more about San Francisco.

Goals

Raj's parents and friends back home want to create the narratives of his stories.

Subgoals

  1. When Arjun and Raj communicate in real time, Arjun would like more contextual information about the locations and events that Raj mentions.
  2. Arjun wants to catch up on the content that Raj has posted about his life in San Francisco when Raj is not around and "replay" stories that Raj has told to him in the past.
  3. Arjun wants to be able to explore the places that Raj has visited in an intuitive way.

Design Sketches

Set 1 (Anant)

 

 

 

This is an ultra-efficient interface. Also, it will work for illiterate users. Very simple idea -- Arjun calls Raj using Teleport. Teleport has in-built location recognizer that recognizes location names in realtime and displays a 3-D view of the locations. No user input required -- the service runs in the background.

Safety Issue: Some locations might not be interesting. User doesn't have control over which locations to see, which not. Also, if the location is incorrectly identified, there is no way to correct it.

This tries to address the safety issue, by compromising a little bit of efficiency.

Instead of directly opening the location, it generates a transcript of the call in realtime and highlights all the recognized locations. Hovering over the highlighted locations open the location in the 3D location window.

It's safe as user can correct the location (if system recognizes it incorrectly) and thus would show only correct locations. Also, user has the control over which locations to see and which not to see. 

This is a different kind if interface that gives users more control. It is a direct manipulation interface that les user explore any location they want. It also allows simulate walking or driving. It allows changing speed, pause, and resume. It stretches to ultra-safe as user can asynchronously explore a location.

Set 2 (Alex)

 

 

 

This interface allows Arjun to follow the photos that Raj posts during his travels. This interface organizes photographs geographically and in clusters. Because the photographs are laid out in this manner, Arjun is able to understand the spatial relationships between the photographs.

This design allows Arjun to keep up with Raj's social media (e.g. microblog) posts. This interface allows Arjun to play back a log of the events that Raj has participated in at his new home.

This interface is similar to the first sketch, in that it presents the user with a set of geotagged photographs. However, this interface is much simplified. Instead of being presented all of the photographs at once, the user is shown photographs one-at-a-time with some geographical imagery shown in the background.

This interface has the benefit of being extremely safe and extremely learnable, as it narrows down the actions that must be performed by the user to "Follow Me".

In addition, this interface would also be suitable for illiterate users, as information about the location is mainly conveyed verbally, through spoken narration that accompanies each photograph.

Set 3 (Katya)

 

 

 

Direct manipulation keyboard computer interface.

Desktop interface based on entering information verbally.

iPad/iPhone speech interface.

Final (Anant)

 

 

This interface is inspired from Skype Interface Left sidebar (3 main links) Contacts (to see all the contacts)

  • Recent (it shows recent 10 contacts -- efficiency)
  • History (History of all the chats/calls)
  • Top bar (search for any location)
    The Main Pane It is the main window for the active tab (in this case -- Contacts Tab)
  • For each contact shows the status (online/offline/away)
    • you can make a call
    • see a log of all previous callsThe interface (see the home page) uses the user mental model of chatting, calling and video calling

      Most popular tool used by people for international calling is Skype -- this user interface is consistent with Skype interface

A call session

  • Video/Audio call going on
  • Whenever a location is encountered in the conversation, Arjun is prompted by the system -- "Location detected -- Stata Center" with a button, "Take Me There"
  • Clicking on that button opens a direct manipulation interactive Stata Center map. 
  • The interactive, direct manipulation interface helps Arjun explore Stata Center by navigating through the 3D map, varying altitude and changing camera angels.

Arjun wants to explore the place after the call. He goes to Teleport and puts MIT Stata Center and clicks the button "Take Me here"

  • It opens a direct manipulation 3D interactive map which provides Arjun a way to explore a place by 
    • navigating through the map,
    • varying altitude, and
    • changing camera angle
      Alternatively, Arjun can go to history, pulls up the location from there and opens in the same 3D interactive location explorer.
      |

Learnability

  • The interface (see the home page) uses the user mental model of chatting, calling and video calling
  • Most popular tool used by people for international calling is Skype -- this user interface is consistent with Skype interface 
  • Auto-highlighting of locations is consistent with hovering affordance (people are likely to hover over highlighted text)

Efficiency

  • For direct manipulation -- only keyboard inputs (navigation controls, camera controls and altitude) to avoid switching latency (switching time between keyboard/mouse)
  • Avoids any effect of mouse sensitivity 
  • Allows random exploration

Safety

  • For screen 3: if location recognizer fails to recognize a location or recognizes wrong location, user can change it.
  • The interface is extremely safe because use can change location, camera angle, altitude, direction at any point of time

Speech and Touch (Katya)

 

 

STEP 1: Arjun talks to his son, Raj, on iPad or iPhone. Raj describes how amazing it was to drive to LA from SFO through Highway 1. Teleport automatically stores spatial descriptions mentioned by Raj.

STEP 2: After talking to Raj, Arjun scrolls through spatial descriptions stored and picks one. Avatar ask whether he wants to travel by foot or car and then how would he like to describe the route: 1) by start and end 2) by landmarks 3) by a reference object.

Step 3: Depending on the option there are three possible moves: 1) say start and end locations; wait while the animation is generated; watch the animation. 2) say landmark locations; wait while the animation is generated; watch the animation. 3) say the reference object; use 'move forwards','move backward', 'turn right' and 'turn left' commands to navigate around the object.

STEP 4: Interaction viewing of animation. While watching the animation by tilting the phone to the right or left Arjun can interactively change viewing angle of the animation.

STEP 5: By Tapping over the objects Arjun can see additional information, such as name of the object, the weather at the moment of the conversation or even additional images if added by his son.

Learnability

  • Interface extensively uses visual clues that make interaction extremely intuitive for elderly people who are often not accustomed to the use of conventional desktops. Visual clues take advantage of conventional metaphors and colour.
  • The use of metaphors and colour scheme are both internally and externally consistent.
  • Furthermore, speech based interaction reduces cognitive load by sequentially offering relevant options.
  • The interface implements animated icons that symbolise receiving speech or avatar's speech, giving a clear visual representation of system's state.
  • The problem with learnability might occur if the system fails to recognise the speech command because it can be extremely difficult to explain to the user what is wrong in the way they say things: users might be pronouncing words not sufficiently clear, there may be background noise, users can use out of vocabulary words.
  • In order to convey what verbal input is expected, questions are designed as either 1) restatement of the phrase used by the avatar (e.g. "Choose one of the following options…" expects a direct restatement of one of the options), or 2) when possible questions prompt a one word response (e.g. "Name the first landmark" or "Name the start of the route").

Efficiency

  • Speech based interaction alone may be inefficient for users who use the system very often. The fact that the system asks the same questions can become irritating after some point.
  • Nevertheless, the targeted user group is elderly people for whom physical manipulation often may pose additional challenges. From this point of view the interface is considered efficient.
  • The interface combines speech and touch which allows to delegate problems that would be difficult to solve with speech only to a touch based interaction. For instance, In order to get additional information about an object the user needs to tap over the object. Another example is that the system records a history of spatial descriptions that the user can scroll through because memorising all the location is not feasible.
  • Difficult to convey which statements will work. To help the situation the system asks questions that prompt one word response, such as "Name the first landmark" or "Name the start of the route". The system also provides and animated graphic representation of the expected input.
  • Generating an animated video of a route can be very time consuming.

Safety

  • The weakness of the system is that there is infinite number of speech commands that users can try.
  • The interface improves safety of the system by making it to ask questions sequentially and in case of noisy input ask additional questions that help to disambiguate input.
  • Generating animated videos of the route can be time consuming, therefore, there is a risk that users can get impatient and start tapping the screen or giving additional commands.

Story Search (Alex)

 

 

Arjun wants to talk to Raj, but Raj is busy. Arjun remembers the trip to Yosemite National Park that Raj told him about a few weeks back and wants to find out more about it. He logs into Teleport, and selects "Yosemite Park" from the stories that Raj has recorded in California. Arjun remembers Raj telling him about seeting a bear, and performs a search to see if Raj has any content that records that experience.

Arjun can now see the search results: In the "SEE" section of the results, Arjun can see that Raj has taken a picture of the bear and annotated it with a caption. Similarly, in the "READ" section, Arjun can see that Raj he has posted several tweets about seeing the bear.

Arjun now wants to know more about bears in the Yosemite area. Are bear sightings rare? Is Yosemite safe if there are bears all around? To do this, Arjun activates the "Explore" mode, and is shown interesting content relating to bears in Yosemite National Park. For example, Teleport pulls up a map of bear sightings in Yosemite that aggregates tweets like Raj's. It also brings up a list of news articles about bears that are published around Yosemite.

Learnability

  • The interface is extremely simple and does not require much of the user. Thus, we expect that this interface will be very learnable. 
  • The interface makes use of common affordances, like search bars and buttons.
  • General function of buttons is conveyed through use of externally consistent icons.
  • If users have not discussed all of the stories in the past (i.e. over email or in person), then the "Stories" section might be difficult to understand. The user might have to explore several stories until his finds the one that he is looking for.

Efficiency

  • The interface allows the user to search through stories efficiently by first selecting a location and a story. The user can also filter based on the type of content that he wants to see: visual, textual, or aggregate. This allows faster access to the type of content that the user is interested in.
  • If the use is unclear about what he is looking for, he can select "Explore" to see suggestions for content similar to what he has sought in the past. This allows the user to find relevant information automatically, rather than having to manually search the web based on "hints" from the stories he's heard.

Safety

  • Because the user interface is modal, it may be possible for the user to make mode errors. For example, say Arjun was looking at information about Bears, then suddenly wanted to look up a picture from Raj's trip to Stanford. Because the interface implicitly filters content based on the story that is currently selected, the search would not return anything, perhaps leading Arjun to falsely believe that Raj has not posted anything about Stanford. To make mode errors less likely, the interface provides visual feedback that indicates which mode is currently activated.
  • The search bar will provide an autocomplete function, allowing the user to select only terms which will provide meaningful results.
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