Part 1: Observing and interviewing
Jennifer, 26, Teacher Assistant at daycare center
Jennifer is a teacher assistant working at a daycare center in Peninsula; she first starts her career in early childhood development three years ago. Now, Jennifer also works as a part-time babysitter. Jennifer owns an iPhone 5 and a MacBook Pro 13”.
In our conversations, she told me that her smartphone handles everything from scheduling, dealing with parents’ emails to managing contacts. Jennifer thinks smartphones are already sufficient for organizing her daily life, but when she gets to work, it’s a different story.
How a typical day looks like for Jennifer: In the morning, she checks her calendar on the phone while she’s having breakfast; hence she gets briefed on today’s events. When she gets to the daycare center, she checks email on her phone and check if any parents has emailed her about absence or picking-up/sending-in their child late. Everything works fine until the children come in, then Jennifer says that she had no hands to interact with her phone. From my observation, the children are shouting and running around, and she needs to talk to parents. At the meantime, she has to keep an eye on about 15 children, making sure they are not doing something dangerous. If a child cries, she has to carry that child and do some patting. Sometimes, Jennifer has to change diapers for them as well. During my stay, I heard some notifications and email alert sound coming from her iPhone, but she is too busy with take care the children.
A further conversation also reveals a similar situation when she is a part-time babysitter. Jennifer is usually in the kitchen preparing baby food while the baby is sleeping upstairs. There is a baby monitor, but it she has no hand to hold it. The baby monitor’s volume is too soft and kitchen stuff often covers the handset of the baby monitor, so sometimes she can’t notice the baby has waken up or started crying.
Arsenio, 27 & Chenche, 25 —waiter at a Brazilian BBQ restaurant
Aresnio and Chenche both started working in this restaurant 2 years ago. Arsenio owns an iPhone 4s, and Chenche owns a Nexus 4.
They like their smartphone very much. Similar to Jennifer, their smartphones can totally take care their personal life, but it’s not useful at work. As you can see from the photo, they are walking around with large loaf of meat in hand; there is no hand for them to check the phone. They always have to look at the kitchen window to see if there are any dishes ready to serve. On a side note, chiefs in kitchen still uses a thick, printed recipe book and multiple timers to make sure the meat are not overdone. When I asked if they would like some sort of hands-free information, they greatly appreciated it. They said it’s going to boost their work efficiency.
How a typical day looks like for them: Go to work in uniform, then phone stays in pocket. “It’s very tempting. I really want to reach for the phone and check if I missed something important. However, I’m carrying a 8-pound meat loaf with both of my hands,” says Arsenio. Moreover, they need to keep an eye on the kitchen window for newly cooked food.
To sum up the interviews:
a. Smartphone works well in most use cases, unless they couldn’t spare their hands
b. They don’t want to read a ton of information in detail; instead, they want a peek of information
c. They need more than one way of notifications (sound, vibration...etc.)
d. Speaking of smart watch, they all told me that they are going to use it more at work than any other places.
Part 2: Brainstorm and prototyping
Ideas:
1. Secure Perimeter – With cheap tracking tags, a alarm will be sounded when a child breaches the perimeter
2. Baby Stalk – Wirelessly connects to baby monitors, vibrate and sound an alarm when baby cries or wakes up
3. Wrist Recipe – Displays different cooking status for each stove and recipes instructions in large text and animation
4. Info Peek – Displays important info from your smartphone, e.g. calendar, text messages
5. Customer Call – shows which table is calling for service, can do kitchen calls as well
6. Emergency Card – contains your emergency medical and contact information. Can be invoked manually or automatically when it detects heart attack
7. Commuter – contains public transit information based on your current location
8. Open Table – when you walk into a restaurant, it shows seats available or waiting time, and also wait-time for food. Can also put you on the waiting queue, and alert when your table is ready. Also gives you suggestions for the fastest/best restaurants near you.
9. Voice recorder – record a lecture or a voice memo, synced to phone and cloud as well
10. Passbook – Pay for shopping, use it as your boarding pass
11. Shazam – Tells you what songs or movies is playing around you
12. Pedometer/Personal Trainer – Tells your calories burned today. Can be set in running or biking mode, use GPS to track distance.
13. Speedlight – For photographers, quickly change settings on flashes that are far from a photographer’s reach.
Prototyping my watch and app – Open Table
I chose this idea because this is what most people need during lunch and dinner. When we are in a lunch rush, we need to find a fast restaurant. When we are looking for a dinner during weekend, we need to get us in line, and then go do something else without worry about losing our place in line. This also can practice showing concise information and button in UI.
Prototype Description
In my prototype, we can see the watch screen is being displayed on the watch. The apps screen and a notification screen can be seen on the left most column of the storyboard.
After the app starts, we can choose Lunch or Quick Lunch. When we choose quick lunch, it gives a couple fastest restaurants nearby; if you tap the right arrow in the lower right corner, it shows you a map and provides step-by-step guidance. When we choose lunch or dinner, it gives us a list restaurant by balancing ratings and wait time. And we can get us on the wait queue by telling the restaurants the size of our group. At the meantime, an estimated is displayed; we will be notified when our table is ready. Special offers from the restaurant can pop up anytime; we can redeem it right on the watch.
Field test
When I was field-testing the watch, I started off by showing user the watch screen then the apps screen. Then I provided them with a very basic scenario: getting lunch or dinner. After that, the user will pick a series of UI sketches from the storyboard to complete their tasks.
Feedback and Insights
- One of the users got confused when switching between lunch, quick lunch and dinner. He told me it’s not intuitive about swiping between those 3 modes. A UI improvement can tackle this issue.
- Fat fingers issue. On the restaurant check-in screen, we can change the group size by swiping up and down, but both users said it too small to land their fingers on. Also, the check-in button is too small. From the storyboard, we didn’t utilize many screen space, if we fully utilize screen space, the buttons and texts can all be bigger.
- How to temporarily hide notifications? Where can I find them back? Both users are confused how to get that “special offer” screen back. They suggested that we should be able to bring up that special offers screen and warning screen at anytime.
- Relying on the geo-locations to raise “Late for final exam” warnings might cause a lot of false positives, because GPS can be very inaccurate when you go to indoor area. This can solved using cellular network and Wi-Fi location services from the phone.
- UI texts need to be thicker, and a lot of key information should be bolded. Also, they said the UI is kind of messy with a bunch of raw texts. This can be fixed by developing a grid system when placing UI elements and texts, thus achieving a more harmonious relationship between them.
Both users give good feedback on my watch design. They all successfully completed their task of find a restaurant without guidance from me. However, there’s still lots of improvements can be made to the UI and animations, hence, we can further optimize it for a small watch screen.
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