In one project we were involved in, the aim was to explore how a mobile device might be used in conjunction with digital interactive television. From the fieldwork, ➤
which involved watching users and talking to experts involved in interactive TV design, scenarios were developed to highlight problematic issues in current use of TV along with others to illustrate design proposals. We reproduce an example of the latter here (Turner, 2004).
• Problems addressed:
◦ Knowing which programs of interest are scheduled to be broadcast
◦ Recommending a television program to a friend.
• Envisaged system use:
◦ Recommending a television program to a friend
◦ Recording a program of interest using a Personal Video Recorder (PVR).
Tom’s friend Lucy enjoys watching the same sort of history programs as Tom. Lucy is a little more organized than Tom and will usually check the television listings to see if there is anything on during the week that might be of interest. If she sees something that looks interesting she will usually email Tom to let him know.
While looking through the television listings for the week, Lucy happens to notice a documentary about Mary Queen of Scots that she thinks Tom would also like to see. They both studied the Tudor period and like to see how this period of history is presented on television. The program is on BBC3 at 9.00 pm on Tuesday. Getting her mobile phone out, she launches the TV highlights application. She selects ‘Find Program’
and enters the program name. The system returns a list of programs with that name and Lucy selects the program on BBC3 on Tuesday night.
Information about the program is displayed and Lucy selects ‘Recommend Program’.
She selects Tom from her list of buddies and in the text field enters a short message for Tom. The system asks Lucy to confirm that she wants to recommend this program to Tom, and she does so.
Tom’s mobile phone beeps, indicating that he has received a new message. An alert pops up informing him that he has been recommended a TV highlight. He can tell that this has come from Lucy because the system has matched up her number in his address book. He selects the alert and a screen pops up showing information about the program.
The program looks interesting, so Tom selects ‘Record this Program’.
He’s not sure whether he will be in on Tuesday night, so he wants to make sure that he doesn’t miss the show. The program gets added to the ‘to be recorded’ list for Tom’s PVR. Tom writes a quick message back to Lucy to thank her and selects ‘Send’.
The system asks Tom whether he’d be interested in receiving details of other programs like this. He selects ‘yes’ and can see that ‘History Documentaries’ has been added to his list of favorite types of programs. ■
5.5 PERSONAS AND SCENARIOS 167
S U M M A RY
The methods discussed in this chapter are about finding out what matters. What are the users’ values and why do they hold them? What activities are performed and how are they carried out? How does the situation constrain and facilitate these behaviors?
The answers to these sorts of question are used to identify additional applications of mobile technology as well as working out the best ways to meet market opportunities identified earlier. The range of functions required and the forms they might be delivered in can be addressed.
As in most things in interaction design, work in understanding users involves applying a mix of tools and techniques; some have scientific roots (such as the data-mining log analysis), others artistic ones (such as the cultural probes).
Mobile service investigations differ from those for conventional application development in at least three ways. First, there needs to be greater reliance on user self-reporting techniques to compensate for the more limited opportunities for first-hand investigator observations. Second, in many situations, design is considering unconventional, unfamiliar juxtapositions of computing technology and everyday life along with novel interaction methods. For these reasons, greater effort is needed to engage users creatively in the articulation of their requirements. Finally, product development life-cycles lead to an increased pragmatic emphasis on discount methods.
Data from all the user-understanding methods has to be transcribed, categorized, analyzed and structured in order to draw out the key elements and issues. We’ve reviewed several approaches and highlighted the popular, practical methods of personas and scenarios.
W O R K S H O P Q U E S T I O N S
• Before the workshop session, talk with three people who work in ‘mobile’ environments: a coffee barista, a street newspaper vendor, a train station official, for instance. Ask them what questions they get asked by members of the public. In the workshop, relate their responses to the contexts and discuss potential mobile services suggested by the observations. What issues are there in terms of location and other context awareness?
• Write a program to log elements of your computing activity during a typical day. For example, record all the web pages you access, or generate a prompt at random intervals that asks you to write a brief description of what you are doing. If you don’t want to write a program, use your mobile phone and look at the text messages you’ve sent or photos you’ve taken over a period of say a week. During the workshop, discuss issues relating to the logging process and outcomes and think about any patterns or insights the data gives you.
• Ask a colleague to talk you through the artifacts on their mobile – the calendar appointments, images, text notes, music and so on. Get them to explain where they were and what they were doing when they created the document, its purpose and subsequent use. Swap roles and repeat the process. What opportunities for new or improved services can you identify?
D E S I G N E R T I P S
• Check your field impressions with people who spend much of their time on location – flower-stall workers, newspaper stand vendors and the like. Ask them what they see and hear, too.
• Read blogs relating to mobile life and technology; engage in the debate by posting comments and contact the writers directly to provoke their opinions.
• Typical and ‘average’ users are of course important. But look out for those people who are doing intriguing things with the technology – appropriating and subverting it. Seek out interesting-looking activities and people who are in mobile contexts but who are not using mobile technology – someone sketching in the town square, a local community action group meeting in a caf´e, etc.
• Use focus groups mainly with users in brainstorming phases, to inspire designs. Be wary of using the input to inform detailed design.
• Think about how you might mine your company’s or client’s customer service usage logs. What future bits of mobile ‘meta-data’ might you find useful if it was automatically logged? Talk with engineer colleagues about capturing such data.
• When developing personas and scenarios, be aware of the temptation to exaggerate or fantasize. If these artifacts are to have any credibility with software engineering colleagues, they must emerge mainly from the facts rather than speculations. Provide background documents with the field data as a support.
CHAPTER 6