World Window

First book prorotype

Building a functional prorotype:

In building our first pass functional prototype, we decided to focus on the memories and connection aspect of our application. We’ve found that similar products built on tablets have struggled to gain adoption because of the difficulty in reading small text, selecting small buttons, consuming data in new formats and informing new users of all the possible interactions. For example, pinch to zoom and even selecting the corner of a page and dragging it with your index finger are difficult for most elderly users to adopt without significant instruction.

With this in mind, we are always focused on leveraging the large screen format and making sure our interaction gestures bring as much of the learned physical world to the digital realm as possible. For example, the proper way to digitize opening and reading a book instead of learning the newsfeed model, using a digital phone to initiate a conversation instead of ‘click to video call’, etc (see Wizard-of-Oz testing).

We ultimately settled on the book format for our first prototype. The page we prototyped is focused on presenting data from a relative of our user from Twitter and Facebook, presenting individual status’s and picture updates in the form of a book. Users can use simple swipes to turn the pages and later close the book. In future iterations, we plan to experiment with enabling easy and instant contact with the specific person by waving to an animated user avatar.

Going forward, we plan to extensively user test this presentation format and possible interaction gestures, as well as building out the connection aspects of our app.

To do summary

CS 247 - Winter 2013

Sam King, Stephanie Guo, Sheta Chaterjee and Nicholas Stevens