Initial Designs
Point of View:
Arjun is a 40 years old father living in Mumbai, India whose son Raj is a working professional recently moved to San Francisco.
Arjun wants to recreate the narratives of his son's stories and better understand the place where his son lives.
Scenario:
Raj talks to Arjun nearly every day using Skype. During these conversations, Raj tells Arjun interesting stories:
- Driving to LA from SFO through Highway 1 along the Pacific Coast
- Hiking to glacier point (Yosemite)
- Visit to Google's Mountain View Campus
- Visit to Stanford University's beautiful Palm Drive entrance and the oval
Raj also shares some images and posts on Facebook/Twitter describing his experiences.
When Raj is busy and unavailable to talk, Arjun wishes to recreate the stories that Raj has told him. He wants to learn more about San Francisco.
Goals
Overall goal:
Raj's parents and friends back home want to create the narratives of his stories.
When communicating in real time, Arjun would like more contextual information about the locations and events that Raj mentions.
Arjun wants to catch up on the content that Raj has posted about his life in San Francisco when Raj is not around and "replay" stories that Raj has told to him in the past.
Arjun wants to be able to visually explore the places that Raj has visited in an intuitive way.
Design Sketches
Set 1 (Anant)
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This is an ultra-efficient interface. Also, it will work for illiterate users. Very simple idea -- Arjun calls Raj using Teleport. Teleport has in-built location recognizer that recognizes location names in realtime and displays a 3-D view of the locations. No user input required -- the service runs in the background.
Safety Issue: Some locations might not be interesting. User doesn't have control over which locations to see, which not. Also, if the location is incorrectly identified, there is no way to correct it. |
This tries to address the safety issue, by compromising a little bit of efficiency.
Instead of directly opening the location, it generates a transcript of the call in realtime and highlights all the recognized locations. Hovering over the highlighted locations open the location in the 3D location window.
It's safe as user can correct the location (if system recognizes it incorrectly) and thus would show only correct locations. Also, user has the control over which locations to see and which not to see.
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This is a different kind if interface that gives users more control. It is a direct manipulation interface that les user explore any location they want. It also allows simulate walking or driving. It allows changing speed, pause, and resume. It stretches to ultra-safe as user can asynchronously explore a location. |
Set 2 (Alex)
Set 3 (Katya)
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Direct manipulation keyboard computer interface. |
Desktop interface based on entering information verbally. |
iPad/iPhone speech interface. |
Final (Anant)
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This interface is inspired from Skype Interface Left sidebar (3 main links) Contacts (to see all the contacts)
- Recent (it shows recent 10 contacts -- efficiency)
- History (History of all the chats/calls)
- Top bar (search for any location)
The Main Pane It is the main window for the active tab (in this case -- Contacts Tab)
- For each contact shows the status (online/offline/away)
- you can make a call
- see a log of all previous callsThe interface (see the home page) uses the user mental model of chatting, calling and video calling
Most popular tool used by people for international calling is Skype -- this user interface is consistent with Skype interface
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A call session
- Video/Audio call going on
- Whenever a location is encountered in the conversation, Arjun is prompted by the system -- "Location detected -- Stata Center" with a button, "Take Me There"
- Clicking on that button opens a direct manipulation interactive Stata Center map.
- The interactive, direct manipulation interface helps Arjun explore Stata Center by navigating through the 3D map, varying altitude and changing camera angels.
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Arjun wants to explore the place after the call. He goes to Teleport and puts MIT Stata Center and clicks the button "Take Me here"
- It opens a direct manipulation 3D interactive map which provides Arjun a way to explore a place by
- navigating through the map,
- varying altitude, and
- changing camera angle
Alternatively, Arjun can go to history, pulls up the location from there and opens in the same 3D interactive location explorer.
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Learnability
- The interface (see the home page) uses the user mental model of chatting, calling and video calling
- Most popular tool used by people for international calling is Skype -- this user interface is consistent with Skype interface
- Auto-highlighting of locations is consistent with hovering affordance (people are likely to hover over highlighted text)
Efficiency
- For direct manipulation -- only keyboard inputs (navigation controls, camera controls and altitude) to avoid switching latency (switching time between keyboard/mouse)
- Avoids any effect of mouse sensitivity
- Allows random exploration
Safety
- For screen 3: if location recognizer fails to recognize a location or recognizes wrong location, user can change it.
- The interface is extremely safe because use can change location, camera angle, altitude, direction at any point of time
Speech and Touch (Katya)
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STEP 1: Arjun talks to his son, Raj, on iPad or iPhone. Raj describes how amazing it was to drive to LA from SFO through Highway 1. Teleport automatically stores spatial descriptions mentioned by Raj. |
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STEP 2: After talking to Raj, Arjun scrolls through spatial descriptions stored and picks one. Avatar ask whether he wants to travel by foot or car and then how would he like to describe the route: 1) by start and end 2) by landmarks 3) by a reference object. |
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Step 3: Depending on the option there are three possible moves: 1) say start and end locations; wait while the animation is generated; watch the animation. 2) say landmark locations; wait while the animation is generated; watch the animation. 3) say the reference object; use 'move forwards','move backward', 'turn right' and 'turn left' commands to navigate around the object. |
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STEP 4: Interaction viewing of animation. While watching the animation by tilting the phone to the right or left Arjun can interactively change viewing angle of the animation. |
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STEP 5: By Tapping over the objects Arjun can see additional information, such as name of the object, the weather at the moment of the conversation or even additional images if added by his son. |
Learnability
- Interface extensively uses visual clues that make interaction extremely intuitive for elderly people who are often not accustomed to the use of conventional desktops. Visual clues take advantage of conventional metaphors and colour.
- The use of metaphors and colour scheme are both internally and externally consistent.
- Furthermore, speech based interaction reduces cognitive load by sequentially offering relevant options.
- The interface implements animated icons that symbolise receiving speech or avatar's speech, giving a clear visual representation of system's state.
- The problem with learnability might occur if the system fails to recognise the speech command because it can be extremely difficult to explain to the user what is wrong in the way they say things: users might be pronouncing words not sufficiently clear, there may be background noise, users can use out of vocabulary words.
- In order to convey what verbal input is expected, questions are designed as either 1) restatement of the phrase used by the avatar (e.g. "Choose one of the following options…" expects a direct restatement of one of the options), or 2) when possible questions prompt a one word response (e.g. "Name the first landmark" or "Name the start of the route").
Efficiency
- Speech based interaction alone may be inefficient for users who use the system very often. The fact that the system asks the same questions can become irritating after some point.
- Nevertheless, the targeted user group is elderly people for whom physical manipulation often may pose additional challenges. From this point of view the interface is considered efficient.
- The interface combines speech and touch which allows to delegate problems that would be difficult to solve with speech only to a touch based interaction. For instance, In order to get additional information about an object the user needs to tap over the object. Another example is that the system records a history of spatial descriptions that the user can scroll through because memorising all the location is not feasible.
- Difficult to convey which statements will work. To help the situation the system asks questions that prompt one word response, such as "Name the first landmark" or "Name the start of the route". The system also provides and animated graphic representation of the expected input.
- Generating an animated video of a route can be very time consuming.
Safety
- The weakness of the system is that there is infinite number of speech commands that users can try.
- The interface improves safety of the system by making it to ask questions sequentially and in case of noisy input ask additional questions that help to disambiguate input.
- Generating animated videos of the route can be time consuming, therefore, there is a risk that users can get impatient and start tapping the screen or giving additional commands.
