Designs

Sally is a college freshman. She notices that she spends a lot of time walking to and from her dorm and classes, and so she decides to purchase a bike. She doesn’t know much about them, and isn’t interested in spending a lot of time looking up reviews at home; instead, she simply goes to the nearest bike shop.

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 she can’t decide. Sally would like a very quick and efficient way of looking up information about the bikes she is interested in, comparing specifics about the bikes, and a getting a decent recommendation for which bike to buy.  Sally does not want to go home to her computer and search; she would like the opportunity to try out the bikes as well.  She takes out her iPhone and opens Schnap It!

Design A

Sally individually takes a picture of each bike:

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.

All her pictures are aggregated into a grid, where she can select multiple to review at the same time:

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 (it’s $169 at the store), that it is also only rated one star.

She decides to get more information about the expensive, but highly-rated Trek bicycle. To do so, she simply taps on the arrow in the Reviews Shopping Cart. This brings her to a page that shows price, description, and collections of reviews. After looking over it, she is decides to buy the Trek, there in the store.

Design B

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:

For each picture, she indicates where each bike by outlining them with her finger:

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.

As before, she can look up more detailed information (description, multiple reviews and prices) about each bike by clicking on the arrow.

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.

Once Sally has taken pictures of each barcode, she can compare them in a table by price, reviews, warranty, etc. Since the software can determine that bikes are being compared (based on the product classification of each bar code), it can also provide additional values that can be compared on, such as construction materials (e.g. tire type). Sally is most interested in comparing the warranties for each bicycle, so she taps that:

...And is taken to a table where each bike she imaged is compared.

Epilogue

Armed with the knowledge of external reviews and competitive pricing, Sally is confidentally able to select the bike that best fits her needs.