Goal

Cosmos was conceived for a class assignment on designing a future mobile application. Specifically, to design a mobile phone tool for use in the context of travel.

Challenges

• Small screen (176x208 pixels)
• Jumping highlight navigation (smart phones were not on the market yet)
• Finding a tourist-oriented need for use in the mobile-context
• Context of use (wandering and planned travel)

Role

This was a highly collaborative process; all three of us recruited participants, conducted interviews, and were deeply involved in every step of the analysis, conceptualization, and design. I contributed much, including the concept of customizable, downloadable, shareable map layers.

Results

See the Cosmos Demonstration [html].

Our professor recommended we patent part of our concept. However, after researching patents, we determined that the value of a single, isolated patent was not worth the cost of securing it.

Process

Interviews & Affinity diagrams

To gain an understanding of tourists and potential mobile opportunities, we conducted two rounds of directed storytelling interviews. We set few limits in the first round; we hit tourist destinations and interviewed anyone who looked like a traveler. After identifying Wander travelling, we conducted a second round focusing on it.

Wander travelling

We discovered that travelling fell into two types; "planned" traveling and "wander" traveling. Planned traveling is fairly self-descriptive; the travelers planed before-hand what they were going to do and when. Wander traveling, on the other hand, consisted of showing up and wandering around; seeing what you ran into and exploring the place. We chose to focus on wander traveling because of:

High incidence: While most trips were a mix of the two types, all had at least some wandering planned into their trip. Three of our interviewees did almost pure wander traveling.

Mobile need: By definition, there is less preparation and less knowledge of the area in wander traveling. We saw an opportunity for the phone to provide a safety net or to augment the experience.

Challenge: All but one interviewee had a cell phone on them, but did not want to use it. They all said they had it as a back-up. Almost all asked friends and strangers for advice. How do you design a mobile system for someone who wants to be in the "real world" and not on their phone?

Extreme Persona

See our Overview and Persona presentation [html] for details.

To focus our design efforts, we created an extreme persona. The persona was not a typical user, but one whose extreme characteristics would be easy to design for and would cover the needs of a large portion of our target user base. We based our persona on one particular wander-travelling interviewee. Through several iterations, we made her older so she would have more friends to visit throughout the world. We gave her a job that supported more freedom to travel.

Scenario of use

As part of the design and testing process, we iterated and refined a scenario of use. We also used the scenario to illustrate how Cosmos served our target user group. The scenario focused on:
Non-intrusiveness: our persona likes immersing herself in the environment and avoids overdependence on the phone.
Exploration and discovery: our persona enjoys discovering and experiencing the unique.
Memories and sharing: our persona has a desire to share and remember the things she happens upon while traveling.

Brainstorm & Design

Through sketches, discussions, and brainstorms, we quickly decided on a map-based system. The target users were very much in the physical space; they need information in reference to location and proximity.

We also invented the ability to share location-specific information with others. Interviewees wanted to learn by word-of-mouth; to get recommendations from friends and local special interest organizations. So we created the ability to "mark" places on a map with "memories" on the spot. This allows friends or peers previous travel experiences to enhance current travelers' experiences in a novel way.

We designed for fast transitions with minimal button-presses required. The small screen size, however, required some additional steps in order to fit enough information on the screen. After drafting multiple flow diagrams, we decided to push much of the functionality into menus in order to have space to present enough map information. However, we kept the map semi-visible in the background to help keep the sense of place.

Design validation & iteration

To evaluate the intuitiveness of our design, persona, and scenario, we conducted think-aloud-based studies of our prototype. For the purposes of the class, we were asked to use our fellow students as our participants. As they were not our target users, we gave each participant the persona and a scenario to work from. We got some solid data on basic usability issues and some more direct feedback due to the participant's background in design.