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With assistance from a salesman, she tries a number of bikes, and eventually narrows down her options to several different brands and models. She likes all of them, but can’t decide. She'd like an efficient way to look up and compare information on each. She already at the store, and wants to go home with a bike, not come back after looking up reviews at home on her laptop. She takes out her iPhone and opens Schnap It!
She wants to accomplish three goals: 1) get information about bikes, 2) compare bikes, and 3) be assured she is getting unbiased reviews. We now present three designs that address these points and give analysis for their advantages and disadvantages.
Design A
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:
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Design A Analysis
Efficiency
In this design, the user has a different screen for each decision. The user also must individually take pictures of each object. Then when all of the pictures have been taken, the user decides which objects to review together. This isn't the most efficient design since the user isn't likely to take pictures of products she isn't interested in. Efficiency can be improved by aggregating the 'snap picture' and 'choose objects to review' subtasks into less screens. For instance, one picture could be taken and the very next screen shows the shopping cart with information about each object specified.
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