Part One: Interviewing Users
Horse showcaser:
I learned a lot from this showcaser. His job consists of training, schooling, feeding, and showcasing horses that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. During tournaments, he takes a picture of his schedule for the day, called a card, and then he continually checks it on his phone throughout the day. He needs to do this checking while walking or riding a horse, so his hands are not as free as he’d like.
As such, when I asked him what could help him in an application that could run on a smartwatch, he had a few suggestions. For one, he would like reminders about when he should be where. I continued to ask him how he would like these reminders. He said via voice from the watch. I continued on to ask what if the tournament was very noisy and he couldn’t hear the watch while his hands were on the reins. He then suggested a vibration with the option to hear the notification aloud. I then asked how he would like to schedule these reminders. He said he’d like to be able to talk into the watch in the following manner “Remind me at 2 to be at Stable XYZ”.
Another need he has is to continually be in communication with the other members of his team while he is riding or walking the horse. He currently uses an app called Voxer that is a walkie-talkie application that allows one user to record their voice, and send it to another user. The communication continues bidirectionally in this manner. He said what could be useful is a walkie talkie type application on the smart watch that allows two users to communicate by speaking into the watch. He said he’d like to use the app by saying something like “Vox, connect to user X”. Then, User X could accept the incoming connection, and there would be an open stream of communication between two users. This would be different from texting because when texting you would still need to open the text to see what another user said. In this case, you would just constantly be talking back and forth.
Fundraiser for charities:
She said she would like to have real time information about people. Perhaps when meeting someone at a fundraising event (a potential donor) she would like to, on the fly, receive key information about the donor, for example who they’ve donated to before, what their previous donations to the organization she was fundraising were, where they live, their marital status, if they had kids, etc.
Graphic designer for video games:
He said that he would like to see the watch as a device to help facilitate social interactions. He had a hard time giving me specific examples so I tried to help him with some ideas I had. I suggested perhaps making the wearable into a key for your car. Already, we have keys that don’t require insertion into the ignition. All they require is proximity. I also suggested security. Perhaps your car or your house was left open and you’re in a meeting. You could get a small notification that says nobody has moved in your house for 10 minutes or an hour but the door is still open. Would you like to lock it? With a tap or a flick you could go ahead and lock the door. He said this would be something he would like to see. After this, he got his ideas flowing again and said he would want to have the watch let you know if something that you’re interested in is close to you. For example, if you had been searching for a book on Amazon, and you walk by a store that has that book, the smartwatch should notify you about this.
Surfer from UC Santa Cruz:
I learned that he constantly wanted to be updated about emails and text messages because he deals with lots of people on a day to day basis. He wants to keep up to date about what’s going on while in the water. He would want to reply via voice to these important messages. He suggested having a setting that allows you to only get notifications from specific people or groups that are important to reduce clutter and only get what is important to you while surfing. I asked if he may want to know about the swell or tide, etc. He said he wouldn’t mind, but he said in the contexts where he would want to know this information, he would already have his phone with him. He then suggested that what could be useful and specific to surfing would be if the watch was able to detect when you were tumbling under water below a big wave and tell you which direction was up. This guy said he also used to grow a lot of plants in his closet and he needed information about light and temperature. He said it would be cool if the watch was able to detect the intensity of light and temperature at a precise location and tell you whether or not that was optimal for a type of plant you were growing.
Third year transfer student studying medicine and health issues at UC Berkeley:
This guy said he’d like to see the watch help personalize medicine. He said he would want an application that tracks certain data (blood sugar, etc.), pushes this data to a server, and allows multiple health affiliates to pull the information. I then tried to lead him to another path. I asked him what he thought about making the wearable into device that helps prevent disease, rather than one that gives information to a health affiliate once someone is already sick. He said absolutely yes and went on to give me an example relating to type II diabetes. He said the only people that really check glucose, etc. are diabetics. So, he said if the watch kept track of your health regularly and notified you if you blood sugar was starting to rise to unhealthy levels, you could diagnose the problem earlier, making it easier to overcome than if you had waited until it was a serious problem. Also, if you have heart conditions, he said an application that told you your optimal heart rate to work out at could be greatly helpful as well.
Common Themes
Help while driving: maps and music. Literally everybody who I interviewed wanted this interaction. For everything else, the spectrum was extraordinarily wide.
Part 2: Brainstorming Ideas, Prototyping, Testing, and Feedback
Brainstorimg Ideas
Walkie-talkie application that allows people to communicate constantly
Reminder application that takes as input voice commands in a certain format and reminds users via sound/vibration at the specified time.
Surfing application that notifies you which direction is up when tumbling under a wave via vibrations. For example if you were upside down the vibration would start closest to your hand and get stronger as it worked its way up towards your elbow, notifying you that you are upside down.
Application that notifies you about the wavelength of light in the room, temperature, etc. Lets you see if this is optimal for certain plants.
Application that transfers the information of someone you just met to you immediately. Perhaps you have a mini earpiece no one can see attached to you and it reads to you important information about that person. In a fundraising situation, this could be previous donations, how many kids, marital status, etc. Perhaps when you shake the hand of another person you receive this information.
Application that makes your smartwatch into a car key. In the same realm, application that gives you complete control of your house (door locks, windows, lights in rooms, etc.). This could be especially useful if you were at a dinner party and left your kids home alone and didn’t want to constantly check your phone and be rude.
Application that notifies you that something you’ve been shopping for online is at a store nearby. Gives you details about the item, such as where the price is the best. Should you buy it now from the store since it’s on sale? Or does Amazon have a better price? Would take into account shipping, tax, etc.
Application that tracks blood sugar, heart rhythm, salt levels, sugar levels, etc. This information would get pushed to a server so that, in case of an emergency, all hospitals could pull information from this server immediately, instead of having to call a patient’s physician to get this information. Could also notify a user if he or she is leaving the healthy range of values so that a user could attempt to prevent the problem instead of letting it persist and making it harder to eradicate. Along the same lines, dehydration is a big problem in sports. An app that could tell you you are dehydrated could save lives, as many football kids in high school have died as a result of dehydration while playing in the summer heat under pounds of padding.
Application that allows you to listen to music that another person is listening to incase you’re tired of your own. Flick your wrist in the direction of the person whose music you’d like to hear and the music will start streaming to your headphones. Good for when studying and you don’t want to leave your spec page and IDE to search/change music on YouTube, Spotify, etc.
Based on proximity, application that finds you rides to places. For example, if you are at work and you need a ride to the East Bay from South Bay, while walking around all day on campus, the watch creates a list of other people driving to East Bay within, say, 5 miles of your house. When you walk by someone who is going to the same place as you and the same time, the watch can notify you so you can talk and make sure the person is a real person and consolidate plans on the fly. Would have functionality to coordinate phone numbers, email addresses, etc.
Proximity application that lets you know if someone you walk by has skills you need for your company, is interested in similar things you are, etc. Could notify you and the other person, sparking conversation. Could also help facilitate conversation at parties if you have something in common to talk about right away, rather than having to dig at each other for a while to figure this out.
Application that registers different career fairs on different campuses across the world. When you walk by a specific booth, the watch will give you real time information about the company, etc. so that you don’t have to keep taking your phone out while your resume and swag are in your hand. Could also notify you in real time about what booths are looking for candidates with the skills you have.
Continuing on a branch from the previous application, have an application that, when swiped over a device, sends over the resume to the company’s DB so recruiters don’t have to keep a stack and resume exchange is quick and easy. Could be extended to do payments in this manner, exchange contact information, etc.
Prototyping
I decided to make the application (10) that allows you to find a ride on the go because I think this interaction is one that could improve the lives of a lot of people; having this functionality on the watch is much more natural than having to check a notification on your phone that says that somebody is close to you that drives to the same place you do.
Design Flow/ User Test
This is what the user sees when they start the application.
A user can specify when and where they want a ride to.
The first time a user walks by someone who is driving to where they want to go and at the same time they want to go there, this screen pops up. This screen is confusing because it tells the user to do a thumbs up or down to proceed through screens, followed by a "swipe to continue". The user I tested this on tried to do a thumbs up instead of a slide. I learned that the interactions between screens should stay consistent and directions shouldn't confuse the user. If they do confuse the user, they're not good directions and I need to figure out a better way to present them.
Here, the user is notified with a picture of the person who can give them a ride. They accept with a thumbs up or thumbs down. The picture is there because the driver will be in close proximity if this notification pops up. This allows the user to identify the driver in person, if he or she wants to make sure the driver is legit, or just wants to find them to hash out details. The user I tested this on was able to figure this out and did a thumbs up leading to the following screen.
If the user accepts the ride, the app asks the user if he wants directions to the driver- in this case, Bob. The user I tested this on was confused here because the context that you find rides when you walk by someone was not clear. He thought that the watch was going to give him directions to where Bob would pick him up. The user I tested this on was also confused about how to proceed from this screen. He didn't know whether or not to do a thumbs up or down or to speak into the watch. Again, there needs to be a unifying action that enables the user from one view to another.
If the user accepts the ride and also wants directions to the driver so that the two can work out the details in person, the watch will give turn by turn directions, specifying how far to go in one direction. The user was able to follow these instructions decently. More work would need to be done to interface the turn by turn directions, though.
For whatever reason, if a user rejects a ride, they will get this screen that gives the number of the driver, in case anything changes, and they end up needing the ride. Since the user I tested this on did not decline anything, I did not get to test this screen out.
User Testing Proof
Key Insights
- The user experience should give major hints as to what type of input it expects from the user. If this is unclear, the user is unable to smoothly transition from one view to another, destroying the user experience. The user should not have to learn how to use the app; the app should make it so obvious that the user can use it out of the box, with zero training.
- It is hard to get many instructions on a wearable. One solution is to have one very simple instruction per screen and have many screens. I tried to implement this in my prototype, but my instructions were still not clear enough. Another, better, solution is to make the user interface imply the instructions based on image queues and voice instructions.
- We need to get away from text driven applications, and move toward other ways to portray information to the user, due to the real estate on the watch. Another reason for this is so that the user doesn't have to look down on the watch. The watch should notify the user with at most a quick glance, but nothing more. My application required too much reading and that took away from the quick access of information that the watch strives for.
Comments