Handy Widgets

Transcript

Handy widgets Authors: Yenny Otero, Arne Alexander Salicath, Heidi-Christin BernhoffJacobsen, Jostein Follestad Malde, Daniel Christopher Treidene. Date: 21/03/07 1 The widgets concept Internet is an enormous repository of information where people can find anything imaginable. One main concern with this huge repository is that quality information can be hard to find and search engines do not provide the enough good information, in a simplified context and with little effort and as lightweight that mobile applications require. Creating advanced applications using open standards Web technologies is significantly easier and more-cost-efficient than using traditional technologies. A widget is a small Web application. Making a widget is just like making a Web page, except its functions are implemented as a stand-alone application. In software engineering, a Web application or webapp is an application that is accessed with a Web browser over a network such as the Internet or an intranet, for the purpose of this work, we will call them “widgets” and we will develop an example of a mobile widget using the Opera web applications technology. It was not easy to get an idea for a good mobile widget and, after a long brainstorming, we can divide the options in two types: the ones that enhance some functionality in the phone and the ones that bring new functionality. Enhance the phone: • Alarm • Calculator • Notes • Image editor New functionality: • RSS/News feed • Stock exchange feed • Currency converser or stock feed • Comics reader • Posten.no tracking interface • Dating Service (Bluetooth dependent) • Auction Watcher (QXL or Ebay) • Interactive Business card • • • • • • • • Advertising via Bluetooth Telefonkatalogen.no map Trafikanten information Translator (Sound recognition enabled) Product review Blog posting Flight arrivals: (or airport positioning with map) Pick up lines in different languages For the purpose of this project, we choose to work on designing and implementing an alarm widget that enhances the typical mobile phone alarm. We wanted to design something that is not available already and some of the above-mentioned widgets are already available for Opera desktop. The alarm was the best option for our project because, even being a simple application, it is still widely used by a greatly diverse group of people. By developing this simple application, we can reduce our technology integration challenges and focus on providing a flexible/powerful solution. At this point, we consider that a big challenge for the mobile web applications technology is to communicate the common users needs to the people with knowledge to design and develop good solutions for them. We know by our personal experience that killer application ideas are not easy to find. 2 Background 2.1 End users The potential user group for a mobile alarm solution like this is as broad as all the people that use a mobile phone. By using the Opera technology we are making our solution easily used in many types of devices but we still have a limitation for all devices that don’t support the Opera browser. To try to design a solution that satisfies any type of user is not very productive and instead, we will tackle the problem in a down-top approach by considering some potential users represented in the personas and using them as example to design our proposed solution. Their goal with an alarm is to wake up. Depending on many aspects from the user personality and their reasons to wake up, they may want to have a more relaxed alarm, something that ensures that they don’t sleep over or even something that they are looking forward to wake up for. We have to consider that different users will have different mobile phones, so our solution should be flexible enough to support the different standards of those devices. 2.2 Context of use We think that people will mostly use this solution in the night, before they go to sleep. This scenario suggests a quite environment, when the person has finished with his daily activities and he is about to . We should also consider, that this widget might be used as a reminder, then the context might be different, the phone might be hard to find (in a bag or under lots of paper), the user might be commuting (therefore it has to be easy to operate), the user might be in the middle of something important (so even in the “make sure he wakes up” mode there should be a mechanism to turn it off. It should be seamlessly integrated with the phone: silence mode should also affect the behavior of the widget. Privacy: Efficiency: Limitations: • Sound and noise • Light • Easy to turn off Due to technical limitations, it would be challenging to design an alarm that interacts with house technical appliances. Without these limitations, we could imagine a handy-widget alarm that wakes the user up by turning on the coffee machine, turns on the lights and even, 2.3 Competitors It is very important to consider our competitors and to understand them. We would like to include here a very curious note we found on the net about iti: Around the year 500 BC, the great Chinese military strategist, Sun Tzu wrote a treatise on the Art of War. This work is still relevant today with advice to both military commanders and businesses on winning against competitors: If you are ignorant of both your enemy and yourself, then you are a fool and certain to be defeated in every battle. If you know yourself, but not your enemy, for every battle won, you will suffer a loss. If you know your enemy and yourself, you will win every battle. The main competitor is the alarm clock embedded in the phone. The functionality of this varies greatly over different brands and models. There are many widgets and java midlets that provide either just time or an alarm, but not combined or with the same functionality as the HandyWidget alarm clock. None of them give you the possibility to select the amount of hours before going off. Other competitors could be the alarms people has at home and that they use in combination with the radio or as a small “standalone” little box. The advantage we have over those is that we are already included on something people carries all the time: the mobile phone, this brings simplicity to the idea of carrying the alarm. 2.4 What makes the HandyWidgets different from other widgets The word 'handy' was used for two main reasons. One because 'handy' is the German word for Cellular Phones. ”handy” also implies a ”usefulness” or a ”practicality”. The Handy Widgets are specifically targeted at the cellular phone market. Many widgets implemented for desktop computing can easily be transformed into a widget for a cellular phone, however the aim of this project is to design examples of widgets that utilize the different specialties of the cellular phone. The mobile telephone industry has in the later years of battling fierce competition put up many features that in context are unique to the mobile telephone. This includes Bluetooth, a specialized Java for mobile telephones, infrared communication, low resolution cameras and in many new devices a secondary LCD display to display the most important information. 2.5 The project platform The original intent for the project was to develop Widgets made for mobile telephone browsers. While it is uncertain whether the system will require a mobile phone browser running or if the widget will be able to run independently by itself, we will make the assumption that it will be able run as a stand alone application constructed on the foundation of a mobile phone browser. 2.6 The technology Widgets are stand-alone web applications using technology, which include HTML, CSS, AJAX and Flash. Widgets are perfect for displaying real-time information taken from the web like an RSS feed or photos from an online album etc. but more advanced functions are also possible as long as the technology allows it. They require an engine to run. Examples of engines are: Yahoo widget engine, Opera’s cross platform browser (PC, Mac, mobile), Apple Dashboard, Google Desktop. 3 Conceptual design 3.1 Personas A big criticism of personasii is that personas they don’t have definite relationship to real customer data and therefore cannot be scientific. (Chapman & Milham, 2006) In our case, it has been quite challenging to find statistical information about the potential users of web applications so we have set some parameters for the personas we will create: • • • Use a mobile phone that supports the technology. Have technical knowledge (or curiosity) to install a web application (something that should be as easy as installing a java game) Afford to use the GPRS network cost. Personas bring many benefits, including these: Users' goals and needs become a common point of focus for the team. The team can concentrate on designing for a manageable set of personas knowing that they represent the needs of many users. By always asking, "Would Jim use this?" the team can avoid the trap of building what users ask for rather than what they will actually use. Design efforts can be prioritized based on the personas. Disagreements over design decisions can be sorted out by referring back to the personas. Designs can be constantly evaluated against the personas, getting better designs into usability testing.iii 3.2 Ellen Name: Ellen Lund Age: 26 Education: Nationality: Swedish, born in Umeå. Quote: “I shouldn’t be late, I shouldn’t be bothered” Work: Sales for Siemens, travels every week to visit some customers and partners. Goals: Improve her time management skills and not be late for her morning appointments and work. Needs: • She is not a morning person and has problems waking up on time. • Has just got a new Nokia phone and does not like the alarm provided, misses her old Samsung. Context of use: • • • I travel so should be easy to carry Set it in the night: o Would be nice to decide how many hours of sleep instead of being told... o Easy to set up On wake up: o Something that really forces me to wake up o And sometimes I just want good entertainment to wake up happy Most important for her: The product needs to be flexible, give her the possibility of something that really wakes her up or something that gives her pleasure when opening her eyes. 3.3 Willy Name: Willy Knickersen Age: 54 Nationality: Norwegian Work: Carpenter in his own firm Married 4 kids He is part of the old school; early up every day, work hard, loves the nature and takes every chance he gets to take trips to the family cabin. He only needs 6 hours of sleep but is tired of always have to set his alarm 6 hours ahead, would like to set it to go off after an amount of time. He now uses his wife’s egg timer, which she is fed up with having to get from the bedroom when she needs it. He has also gotten used to the sound and doesn’t hear it ring. Needs: • An alarm he can set to ring after a given amount of time • An alarm with different random sounds or easy to change on the fly • Waking up to the radio without a clock radio • Happy wife Context of use: • Fast setup • Give amount of time in hours instead of setting it to a certain time • Differ between workdays and weekends 3.4 Angela Name: Angela Francesconi Age: 20 Nationality: Italian Civil status: single Occupation: informatics student Angela studies in California at UCLA. She is an informatics student and a passionate programmer and gamer. She loves living away from home, and all the freedom that comes with the fact that she doesn't live with her parents any more. She also loves spending time with her new friends at campus, and they often go out for coffee and attain parties at late hours. But, when she doesn't hang with her friends, she spends quite some time at the computer, coding or gaming. Easily she forgets the time, when coding a numerical problem or when in the depth of a character in a role-game. This usually pushes her bedtime towards the early morning, and it's probably not necessary to say that it makes her a hard sleeper in the morning. Angie is a freak for new tools to use on her new pink Nokia N76, and the new alarm clock from handyWidget is perfect for her needs. And as she wants everything to pink for the time being, she can even here set the color of the alarm clock to be "Panther Pink"… With this widget she can set the alarm so that the sound of the alarm is turned off by solving a game or an equation, and as the number cruncher she is, the equation solving is often the wake-up method of her choice, something that doesn't make her dose off. One of the reasons to choose a university so far away from home is that Angela loves surfing. She hangs with her surfing-friends as often as possible, but that mostly means the weekends and holidays. When it is weekend/holiday she tries to sleep in. Depending on what the next day holds for her she tries to get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep, but never more than 9. And handyWidgets alarm clock does the trick for her as she can set the alarm to wake her up after a certain amount of hours. Her Goals: To never miss class, and to surf as much as possible. 3.5 Freddy Name: Freddy Robinson Age: 65 Education: A mayor degree in social science, ex-military Nationality: American Work: A mayor, English newspaper Children: Johnny (age 40) and Clarissa (age 42 and pregnant), both living in Washington Married to: Angelica (age 63) living in New York Goal: Deliver an article every weekend. Freddy Robinson is a 65 years, married, has 2 children. He is working in a mayor newspaper as international correspondent. Every Friday he has a deadline at midnight CET for delivering articles that will be put into Saturday’s newspaper. His favourite radio channel is BBC. He loves spending time with his family, but because he travels so much, he need to find out their local time so he knows when he can call them. By nature, he is adventurous, and he is used to being in war zones. 3.6 Scenarios Scenarios are useful because they help us understand under which circumstances our personas will use our solution and it is the natural next step in the UCD process. Scenario 1: Ellen has just been in a meeting with a client where she sold a product worth 1.5 million Euro. After long negotiations with a client, she finally goes to bed around midnight. She will then have to catch a plane to UK for meetings with one of Siemens partners. The plane would not depart before 6 am, so she decides to get 4 hours of sleep. She sets the alarm to sound after 4 hours, sets the alarm to play a radio station. She then sets the alarm to stop by playing one of her favorite games. After 4 hours, the alarm rings. She then gets a Tic-Tack-Toe game, which takes her 2 minutes to solve. She is now awake and gets to the plane in time. Scenario 2: It is Sunday and Willy wants to set the alarm for next week. Willy sets his Alarm widget to sound after 6 hours. He then selects a random radio station. He then sets which days the alarm will apply. After six hours, a random station is playing, and he feels that he got a great start to the day. Scenario 3: Angela has an early lecture every Wednesday, starting at 8 am. Before she goes to bed at midnight, she sets the alarm to ring after 7 hours, so she has time to get a descent breakfast and a good shower. She sets the alarm to stop by solving an equation. When 7 hours has passed, the alarm suddenly starts to ring, but she just wants to turn it off. She gets a window with an equation After 5 minutes she solved it, and the alarm stopped and she is fully awake. When it is finally Saturday, she wants to sleep longer, so she sets the alarm to ring after 9 hours. She then wants to play a game. Then the alarm rings new game shows up, and the alarm stops when she solved the game. Angela seems to be happy with her new panther pink alarm, which made her really wake up. Scenario 4: Freddy is on a mission in Iraq. He is working on a story about a family in Baghdad. It's Friday evening, and he has set the alarm to sound 30 minutes before deadline. 30 minutes to deadline: The alarm sounds. He knows he has to finish his article within 30 minutes and send it to his head quarter. 10 minutes to deadline: The alarm rings again to remind him of pulling out his satellite transmitter. When this is done, he connects to the internet and posts his article on the newspaper’s mainframe computer. From the world clock he sees that the clock is around 6 pm in Washington and New York, so he knows that it's all right to call his family, so they can know that he is alive. When he calls Clarissa, he finds out that she has given birth to a beautiful daughter who now is a couple of days old. 4 Interaction design 4.1 Use cases 4.1.1 Changing the method to stop the alarm: 4.1.2 Changing the local time: 4.1.3 Turning the alarm on and off: 4.1.4 Changing the method to start the alarm: Sound: Can be configured to have the same volume or incrementally rise. 4.1.5 Changing the method to stop the alarm: 4.1.6 Adding an alarm message: 5 User interface 5.1 Screen shots Main window Set time, time zone and clock format Select how to stop the alarm. Here the game option is chosen Setup screen for the key phrase option. 5.2 Color schemes The user has several colors options Miss-usability: on the uses and misuses of usability testing R. Stanley Dicks 6 References: i http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/aware/competitor-analysis.shtml http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personas#Criticism_of_personas iii http://www.usability.gov/analyze/personas.html ii