February | 2012 | brietydesign

The assignment was to break off into teams and come up with an idea for some kind of interactive tool that will help people. Our starting point was the process diagrams or concept maps that we had previously been working on. With our group we had to device an interactive tool that could provide aid to our process. While formulating our tool we had to answer the following:

who are the potential users of this tool?
what are the users motivated by speed, money, coffee, praise, social engagement?
what task will the tool aid with?
when will the tool be used?
what other functions will the tool perform?
how will the tool be used? iPhone/smartphone, iPad, computer, kiosk, all?

The next step was to begin to sketch out several ideas for how the interface might look and work. While sketching it was important to keep in mind the ease-of-use when making decisions about the interface.

Next we had to plan a scenario of use and then build a paper prototype. The use scenario had to be a creative and entertaining story that will enable us to show our prototype in use through a stop-motion video. We had to decide on a “user”, the environment and the device to be used. The scenario had to show the user’s goal and motivation for using the tool along with the task to complete. Text and voice-overs were not allowed. Our team’s scenario involved someone who wanted to plan and time their workout. They created three tasks (jumping jacks, weight lifting, and ribbon dance) and added the time they wanted to preform each task.

After the scenario of use was created we had to start building a low-fidelity, paper prototype. Our materials included: pen, paper, markers, transparencies and scissors. Some of the other groups ventured into building their interface on the computer with the plans to manipulate it in the physical plane later. Our original idea consisted of our task manager being used on the computer. While planning out the use scenario and paper prototype we switch first to a mobile phone and then finally to an iPad. Once we decided on the device we could start creating the interface. We choose large buttons that could be easily tapped and kept the interface as clean. Our scenario started with the user accessing the tool from the iPads home screen. The next screen would be of the application’s home page. The page would have three options: new list, saved lists, and history. The history function will not be explored in the stop-motion video.