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User Study: We located one research subject who was currently looking to purchase a laptop. We asked him how he makes purchasing decisions. He responded that he typically uses a variety of metrics such as price, appearance, functionality, and reviews. In order to find reputable reviews while at stores, he uses web-services such as Amazon to type in queries for products he is on the verge of purchasing. Despite its slow speed, he prefers to use a text-based query input method. He argued that picture-based product lookup applications from Amazon or Google do not work well because he found them difficult to use. He often wanted to specify multiple objects. In other words, he found the user interface inadequate for this needs because he was unable to easily specify the products he wanted to lookup. More explicitly, he pointed out that product ratings are relative and that the most important measurement is a relative cue. He wanted to be able to compare two products, not just see absolute ratings.
Proficient Users
Overview: Another type of user demographic are the power users of technology, but not necessarily innovators. They adopt working technology into their lives, but do not necessarily necessarily use it its full potential. While such users are aware of online services like Amazon.com, they are comfortable shopping without them. Consequently, in order for to foster rapid adoption of technology into their lives, products must have high learnability. Once they learn how to use the software, they will continue to use it.
User Study: We brought one research subject to a furniture store and asked her to buy a sofa. Since this subject identified herself has a proficient but not savvy user of technology, she immediately located a salesperson and asked questions about the couch. The thought of using her iPhone to lookup information did not occur to her until we asked her about it. Upon explicit prompting, she stated she would normally lookup products on her personal computer at home before going to the store. Upon this reminder, she also stated that she wanted to go home to lookup sofas before making this purchase. She did not want to use an iPhone application because she often found them both a) rude to use in a store, and, more importantly, b) worried that they would be biased. In this vein, she felt that if she looked it up on Amazon, they would make their own products look better and preferred to shop using an independent source. User Study: Subject B, female, stated that because furniture is also a relatively large purchase, she would have previously gotten an idea of what price ranges to expect by Googling products from home. When told that one of the three selected products was not initially found in their online searches, she said she would talk to the salespeople and later go home, look it up and come back. When asked if she ever looked up pricing and reviews from her phone while at the store, she said that she would consider doing it if she was alone, but not if she had already engaged a salesperson as she felt doing so would be rude.
Causal Users
Overview: The final demographic we consider are users who only use a casual amount of technology in their life. These users are typically characterized by senior citizens. While they rarely use technology, when they do they need it to work reliably and minimize mistakes. Indeed, these users need safety and simplicity. They want to just see information about one product.
User Study: Subject C, male, stated that After finding a more senior research subject (i.e., postdoc), we brought them to a coat store and asked them to determine which coat to purchase. Again, this user went straight to the salesperson. When asked about computerized lookup methods, they would first want to try it on and then subsequently look up reviews for determining how durable it is. Their chosen method for doing so was to "awkwardly type in the product name into Amazon."they stated they normally do not use them because they do not want to cumbersomely type in product information. When we explained the idea of our project, they agreed it would be very useful, as long as it worked well. They thought they would use it because it only required a few clicks to work.
Summary
Our preliminary experiments indicate that while a mobile product look service would be useful and impact, user interfaces are slow and awkward. We believe that by developing an intuitive user interface for mobile image annotation and recognition that we can build a useful product lookup service. In
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