Week 43: Usability issues

Our great idea

A service for reading magazines which is learning from its reader and which therefore is able to provide perfect personal usability. 

What we have done

1.Research
The first step to anticipate a future scenario was to find resources that provide a realistic forecast about future technology and society. By reading blogs, articles and papers we got an image of what the future might look like. One demonstrative example for our resources is a short film about everyday life in 2025. Furthermore we did some research about intelligent environments, artificial intelligence and human computer interaction as well as magazine usability.


2. Creating a general future scenario
Ongoing we were able to agree on a specific future scenario of the year 2030 including following main issues:

Intelligent environments

Constant availability of high bandwidth wireless broadband 

All devices connected and synced wireless to a smartphone 

Thin, light and flexible tablets 

Energy saving houses 

Vehicles with autopilot 

Electrical bikes that charges wireless (via a solar energy system) 

Intelligent speech synthesis 

Very realistic surround speaker-systems 

Electric power from renewable energy 

Better battery life 

Payment with smartphones

www.trendir.com, www.welt.de, technofaqweb.co.cc

3. Establishing personae

To anticipate problems and needs readers in the year 2030 might have we established four personae which represent a future society. We included a 16 year old girl, a 24 year old student , a 35 year old mother and a 52 year old female teacher. We described their social background, their reading habits, their daily life and their usage of digital devices. Finally we were able to anticipate their needs.

4. Deducing the functions for our service
Knowing the future needs of our future target group we deduced the functions our service should have, e.g.: Synthetic voice that reads out an article, when the reader is interrupted: System has to recognize the interruption and the kind of interruption / Learn the daily routines / Track location and provide fitting articles

5. Sending interview requests to experts
For substantiating our predictions we would like to have an interview with an expert of human computer interaction, intelligent environments or artificial intelligence. We already sent requests to persons that might give interesting insights.

What we are going to do

Hopefully we find an expert who is willing to talk to us. Before we do the interview we will have a project meeting to define the questions we want to ask. After having conducted the interview we will do a common evaluation. Based on the evaluation we will adopt our future predictions and the system to a realistic scale. 

Problems encountered

In the discussion concerning our project plan we became aware of the fact that we were occupied by thinking about usability methods we can carry out with subjects. So we were just thinking about which research we can do in the present instead of concentrate on future scenarios and futuristic products. Facing this problem we convened a project meeting where we had to revise the whole project plan.

Changes in the project

The problem we had with our first project definition led to fundamental changes in the project plan. Instead of thinking about how to make current products better, we now want to create a service that is adapted to the needs of the future and that provides perfect personal reading-usability embedded in an intelligent environment. By changing our main idea we also had to change the methods we are going to use. The former project plan included research tools like usability tests and focus groups, which are really connected to the presence. Now we have to work differently.