Design 01 - CS160

• Interviews

Four people were interviewed. They all work in restaurants, cafes or clothing shops.

1. 21-year old cashier in Sheng Keep’s Bakery. She mentioned that there are certain circumstances that she does not have her phone readily in her hands. When she’s at work, she put her phone in in her handbag, which is not reachable when needed. This makes receiving and rejecting calls and viewing text messages very difficult. Many calls were missed since she sometimes was not able to hear the ring tone. She has never heard of smart watches. After I have shown her pictures of some smart watches, She wishes that the watch could help her receive phone calls, text messages and social network net messages when her phone receives any. Also, she hopes that she can perform simple tasks replying those messages, for example, rejecting the phone call by selected text messages. Another situation is when she’s walking. She puts her phone in her backpack when going to work. As a personal who does not have a car, she also think that it would be helpful if the wearable device can offer Bart and bus schedule so that she does not have to take out her phone and search for them.

2. About 26-year old fitting room assistance in Bancroft Clothing. She always has her phone in her pocket when at work, and has easy access to it any time. As one of the people who are addicted to their phones, she hopes that she can find her phone any time she wants, if she temporally forgets where she put it.

3. About 45-year-old owner of the restaurant Guyue Piaoxiang. Most of the times he puts his phone in his bag. As a busy businessman, he receives many phone calls everyday, some of which he would not like to answer. After I have described to him what smart watches are like, he hopes that a smart watch can help him filter the phone calls and messages. For example, he answers business calls during working hours and only receives personal phone calls and some certain calls after 9 pm. In addition, he thinks that it would be convenient for him if he can see the caller’s number on the smart watch before he decides whether to get the phone call.

4. About 24-year old part time waiter in the restaurant Guyue Piaoxiang. He has his phone with him any time, but it is not polite playing with his cellphone in the restaurant since people may think he’s being inattentive to the costumers. He likes to see his friends chatting in his We Chat group, but not necessarily replies. A program displaying the group messages on a wearable device is going to be helpful. He images that he can scroll to see the group chat messages and also one-click mark some of them for later use when he gets less busy.

Conclusions:

Those people share some common needs: quick access for phone calls and messages. Since they cannot seriously reply to calls and messages such as answering the call and editing messages during busy hours, smart watch help them in a way that they can be immediately informed the callers’ and senders’ information and messages, and give a quick reply (such as pre-edited phone rejection templates).

• A dozen ideas:

1. An application that vibrates the watch when there are incoming calls on the paired mobile phone, and provide one-click sending pre-edited call rejection text messages.

2. An application that starts live updates on Bart and bus schedules and automatically displays them on selected times (for example, one hour before work everyday)

3. An application that can send a signal to the paired mobile device and makes it ring or vibrate, similar to when a person call their his phone number to find the phone that he left underneath a large pile of books.

4. A call filter application on smart watches. The filter enables black list and white list, to which user can add specific numbers as well as characters such as area code. When there is an incoming call, the smart watch displays the caller number of unwanted calls and vibrates if the number passes the filter.

5. An application displaying messages on various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, TecentQQ and WhatsApp. Different from displaying news feed, this application only receives messages (both personal and group) and enables user to one-click mark or copy to notepad on selected messages for later use on other devices.

6. Sometimes users only want to read group messages instead of frequently replying. An application designed for displaying incoming messages can satisfy the need. If group messages are abundant, eliminating the reply button though disables some functionality, may speed up the software and provide better display.

7. Jobs such as restaurant waiter has peak working hours. Besides the peak hours, the waiters can rest for several minutes before the next customer needs service. During this time, an application providing short jokes will help them kill the time.

8. Based on calendar and GPS info, an application that notifies you being late for an event.

9. An application that tells users how long will it be till end of work not using a clock, timer or calendar.

10. A smart watch application that temporarily blocks Internet traffic from specific sites such as Facebook, in order to force the user to focus on working.

11. Staff of a large shop or restaurant needs to communicate at distance. A chat application that enables a number of users to join a group via Bluetooth in which audio a text messages are shared. It works like a walkie-talkie but messages can be recorded and forwarded.

12. In this application, all staff in a shop or restaurant shares their working hours. One user can easily see whom will he work with today.

I choose to combine idea 1 and 5 because these ideas are similar in the way that users need a quick way to view calls and messages. An application that integrates phone calls, SMS and all social network messages.

• Prototype

This software has two pages in default: call logs page and text messages page. After the smart watch has been paired to a mobile phone, the new calls and messages will be displayed. When there are incoming calls, the application, while ringing, will display an answer button and a reject button. By clicking the reject button, users can reject the call as well as replying a pre-edited message such as “Sorry, at work. I will call back later”. Users can add any social network account to create an additional page. They can swipe left and right to switch between pages and see messages from different accounts. A list of conversations is displayed on each message page. Both personal conversations and group chats are supported. Any conversation can be long-clicked to stick on top. Click the conversation to view details, in which every message will have a small “favorite” button next to it, which enables users to either “copy this message to calendar”, “copy this message to notepad” or “mark as favorite”. Users will also be able to reply in any conversation, using a mini QWERTY keyboard on screen. A list of “favorite” messages can be viewed by clicking the “favorite” button at any page. Detailed information of this message such as time and sender will be saved.

• Evaluation

I picked a male cashier in Sheng Keep Bakery to help evaluate this prototype. After putting on the watch, he could instantly tell that this app is made for call logs and messages. He tried to “answer” the call by clicking the button, which indicates that the call logs page is very straightforward. I asked him to imagine a situation when he is at work so that he is forced to reject call. He rejected the call with a message with just one click, which he thought would be very convenient in real life. However, he did not figure out at first moment how the other accounts work. After I told him that swiping left and right would enable more functionality, he swiped to the text message page, read the messages and then successfully “replied” to a sender. Then he became familiar with this app, automatically swiping for more pages, and signed in to his Skype account and Facebook account. “It’s like a Facebook messenger”, he said, “but I can have more accounts.” This shows that the user could understand the functionalities of this software very soon after he started using it. He browsed the list of conversations and randomly selected one. He noticed that there were heart-like buttons next to each message, but was not sure what they mean. I let him try clicking on the button, after which a menu popped out. The three items in the menu appears straightforward. At last, he opened the favorite messages page and think it’s a good idea to collect all favorite messages on one page.

• Some insights from the test

1. Swiping left and right to switch pages may not be obvious to first time users. Some instruction pictures are needed the first time this app is in use. Alternatively, add some arrows between page titles so that users may know there are more content pages on the right.

2. The “favorite” button next to each message is not obvious. One solution could be displaying instruction pictures the first time this app is in use. Another solution is to select a dynamic image, for example a beating heart, as the button image to attract user’s attention.

3. The “favorite message” page is a page that pops out by clicking the button on conversation page. This requires redundant operations to view the page and a return click to get back to the call page. It is better to create a “favorite message” page in parallel with the call logs and message pages. Thus, swiping left and right not only move users between call and message pages, but also to the favorite message page, where all marked messages are displayed immediately.

4. Since a lot of accounts may be messy for users to interact with the device, it is better to have an account management page at the right of all pages. On this page, users can arrange the order of accounts, add and remove accounts, connect or disconnect from a mobile phone.