Storyboard 3 - Personal Exploration
The three storyboards above show a sketch of how our user, Jack, will interact with the interface. Reiterating, Jack a college sophomore who has been following the popular TV reality show, Miami Ink on Discovery Channel. However, because this is his first tattoo, Jack doesn’t really know anything about the tattoo process. He decides that he wants something small, intricate but cool, as his first tattoo piece.
Because Jack has some misconceptions about tattoos, that they can be arbitrarily small an intricate, he has in mind something small but detailed. However, Jack doesn't know where to begin. He pulls up our interface and begins browsing random tattoos just to get some sort of inspiration. By doing so, Jack learns a bit more about realistic tattoo designs and soon begins to realize that maybe his tattoo idea may not be too realistic.
Next, Jack begins to get a conception of the different styles available, but he isn't aware of the different genres. No matter, Jack begins dragging art pieces he likes to his Sketchpad onto the right of the screen, as in the second image. He can delete any he doesn't want. Finally, he is happy with the little collection of selections he has made, and is ready to learn more about it. He clicks Analyse my Selection and goes to the third image.
The computer then analyses the designs he has selected and gives him some sort of feedback about it, telling him about what tattoo genres he seems to like, and also (based on some weighted function) recommends tattoo artists he should look for based on the styles he likes and the distance from a specified location. This also means that there will be a database of tattoo artists, which includes their specialties, locations and preferences. By repeatedly browsing the different tattoos at random and seeing what sort of choices he likes, Jack learns a bit more about what sort of tattoo genre he likes, and can kick start his tattoo design process.
Learnability
The interface may be slightly challenging to learn because it may not be immediately obvious what to do at the beginning. However, I believe that the learning curve is shallow, because of the familiarity of drag and drop. I think the learnability of the gallery interface is also good because most people are immediately familiar with what can be done or what cannot be done with a gallery interface, and also drag and drop has become quite ubiquitous. Finally, there are not many buttons (mostly just the Analyze button), so the usage should be quite straightforward.
Efficiency
I believe that this interface should be quite efficient because there really isn't much for the user to do except to select the images he likes and to drag them to his sketchpad and analyze them. The simplicity of the layout should help also. There are also two main modes of the interface - browsing, and analysis. This is easily toggled using the close button and the Analyse button, I believe this interface is fairly efficient.
Safety
I believe that the interface is quite safe to use. There isn't anything difficult to go wrong, because it is simply not allowed by the interface. However, there can be two places where it might be unsafe.
1. Firstly, the user may erroneously drop something into the recycle bin and be unable to get it back. This can be made safer by adding an undo button, but there can only be so many history choices that can be saved.
2. Secondly, the user may accidentally hit the back button of his browser, and lose his chosen items. This can be solved using cookies in the browser, or if we implement a log-in feature where the user's selections can be saved immediately.