Introduction
I interviewed two people-- both middle aged women who work at or around UC Berkeley.
Person one was a 35-42 year old female Award Analyst at an Accounting company. She usually keeps her phone in her back pocket, and if she doesn't have a back pocket she keeps it in her purse or wallet. In summary of my interview with her, she prefers big screens on her devices. She currently uses an iPhone 6+ and one problem she faces with smaller screens is that it is hard to use the keyboard for typing. In her work meetings she often keeps her phone on the table, because that's what the other people do. The one thing that she misses when she can't take out her phone is making appointments on her calendar. She often writes them down and then puts them into her phone later.
Person two was a 25+ year old female Chief Admin Officer for ESPM at UC Berkeley. She usually keeps her phone in her hand, but is unable to use it in work meetings. She also has a vivosmart wrist band that tells her when she receives emails, texts and calls on her phone so she knows whether her notifications are important or not. She likes it because it is discreet, but not distracting to others like some of the newer smart watches on the market today. She usually keeps her phone in her backpack or hand. The main problem she had before she used this wrist band was that she would want to know what the notifications were on her phone, but she couldn't check because she was in a meeting. Now she knows when messages are important enough to pull out her phone for.
Ideas
Now that I had my interview done, I came up with 12 ideas of how I can improve meetings/the working life for people like the ones that I interviewed. I wanted to focus a lot of my ideas on wrist devices for quickly setting up meetings.
Here are the ideas that I came up with:
- Voice recognition for creating meetings
- A really simple user interface so that it can still fit on your wrist
- A list of meetings you usually have and choose from that, all you have to pick is the date/time
- Touch wrists with someone and a meeting reminder is created. You can then go back later and update the information about the meeting
- Touch wrists with someone to send an email reminder to create a meeting
- Touch wrists with someone and set the date/time
- See a calendar on your wrist and pick the times to have a meeting
- Use your wrist as a notepad
- Take a picture of the paper later to create a meeting
- Touch wrists with someone's phone if they don't have a smart watch
- The watch knows other people's times when they are free, all you have to do is say in what time period you want to have the meeting (1 week, 1 month etc) and how long the meeting needs to be, and the phone will pick the meeting time and set it up for you.
- The watch knows that you want to make a meeting before you even do anything (maybe it listens to your conversations?)
Prototype
The idea that I chose to prototype is the "Use your wrist as a notepad" idea because I feel like it can be used for many different purposes like jotting down any quick ideas or to-dos to remember for later.
In my prototype, a user does a certain gesture to open the note-taking functionality of their watch. Then they can use their finger to write short notes or doodle things to keep for later.
User Feedback
When I tested it with a user, the person thought that the app was not very useful because the screen space was too small. The person's wrist in the picture is of the user who I tested it with. They thought an actual notebook might have been more useful. They were also wondering what specific action would be used to open the app, and how to save the notes/view them later.
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