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Sally individually takes a picture of each bike:
(Camera View)
And then quickly identifies where in the picture the bike is by using gestures to draw a bounding rectangle, ellipse, circle, or freehand hull. Specifically, this will be a touch and drag interface specifying exactly where the principal points of the shape should be in the picture taken.
Annotation View
All her pictures are aggregated into a grid, where she can select multiple to review at the same time:
Grid Selection View
Having selected the bikes of interest, the program opens a Reviews Shopping Cart," which contains a row for each selected bike, along with it’s automatically-determined brand and model number, it’s lowest price from a reliable vendor, and it’s rating from a reliable reviews site. Sally notices that although the Schwin (bottom row) is only $99 online (perhaps it is $169 at the store), that it is also only rated one star.
Reviews Shopping Cart View
She decides to get more information about the more expensive, but highly-rated Trek bicycle. To do so, she taps on the arrow in the Reviews Shopping Cart. This brings her to a page that shows price, description, and collections of reviews. After scanning it, she is decides to buy the Trek, right there in the store.
Product Details View
Analysis - Design A
Efficiency
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This time, Sally can collect information about all the products she’s interested in more quickly by taking pictures that each have multiple bicycles in them:
Camera View
For each picture, she indicates where each bike by outlining tracing them with her a finger:
Annotation View
She is automatically taken to the scrollable Reviews Shopping Cart, where the bicycles of interest are aggregated, and show best, reliable online prices and reviews are displayed.
Reviews Shopping Cart View
As before, she can look up more detailed information (description, multiple reviews and prices) about each bike by clicking on the arrow to go to the Product Details View.
Analysis - Design B
Efficiency
The efficiency has greatly improved from design A. The user does may not have to spend time taking a picture for each product he/she would like to view. There n pictures for n products. There is no pre-review selection page; objects detected are automatically loaded as products the user is interested in. Howeverappended to the Reviews Shopping Cart. However, the tracing arguably takes longer to annotate an object may take longer than the touch and drag method of Method A. There There is no obvious way to modify the outline of the object - the user would have to restart tracing all over again. Apart from the more complicated annotation method, the efficiency of the application has improved by making decision making more simplebecause the user must make fewer decisions.
The efficiency issue of comparing a rare or usually unimportant detail still remains: the user would have to travel back and forth between detail pages. Another case in which the design functions poorly in is if the user has to rearrange the products so that he/she can take a picture with all of the products inside the frame. In this case, it would be easier to just take a multiple of pictures. This design does not allow for multiple pictures to be in the same compare screenProduct Detail Views. Additionally, while allowing the user to annotate multiple objects in each picture could improve efficiency, it may not always be practical (e.g. you may not be able to arrange all products side-by-side). In this case, the user could simply take multiple pictures--the objects from each image are appended to the Reviews Shopping Cart View.
Learnability
Learnability has decreased in some respects compared to design A. The user must innately know to take a picture that incorporates several objects and annotate them in the same frame, or accidentally learn that the application allows for this. The user can also learn about this feature by watching other users. This is the only feature that is not obvious, and small instruction blurbs 'draw to annotate product(s)' would benefit he learnability of the application. We may not know that they can specify multiple objects in each frame.They could learn by accident, or by watching someone else do it. Regardless, we could improve on this by having an object counter in the annotation view. We could also add certain affordances, like animations drawing sample figures around objects. Otherwise, the user should not have a hard time learning that certain buttons on the compare screen bring up more details about that product. learnability is similar to or better than Design A because they don't have to select multiple objects from a grid.
Safety
Design C
Rather than take a picture of the bike, she simply takes a picture of it’s barcode. This does not require any annotation.
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