- Understand the barriers that prevent people from walking
- create a way for people to share information about resources, amenities, and quality of path
- Which would encourage or make it easier for people to walk.
As we progressed through the Milestones our focus changed and modified to reflect the nature of the iterative design processes.
A quick recap!
Contextual Inquiry
We conducted a survey with over 90 responses and 10 one-on-one interviews.
The main findings from this were
- Motivation - there were two main reasons people walked, for pleasure or for purpose, which effected their goals.
- Things that Influence Walking - Barriers and cost vs. benefit of walking
- What Walkers Want to Know - Specific Locations of Things, Type or Condition of Path, and Time and Distance Information.
- Accessing and Sharing Knowledge - How and why they Contribute and how they access and gather information currently
Another important finding was that although people care about the environment and sustainability this is not what motivates them to walk. They choose walking over driving because it is more convenient. There was also a sense that the environmental impact of each instance was not what matter, but instead to make in impact one must make a lifestyle change.
How this changed our focus
- It helped us narrow down the barriers
- Showed us the real motivations
- Informed us specifically what information they wanted
Personas and Scenarios
We created personas and scenarios to reflect our interviews. Our personas were broken down into three tiers based on likely use.
Safety was a large concern for women but not men.
- 1st tier users walked mainly for a specific purpose and the environment was only moderately a concern.
- 2nd tier users walked both pleasure and purpose and the environment was a large concern.
- 3rd tier users walked mainly for pleasure and the environment was a large concern.
How this changed our focus -
- Helped us identified most desirable features
- Narrowed focus to Ann Arbor
- Even balance between Purpose and Pleasure, which changes how they use it
- Determined main stakeholders
Lo-Fi Prototype
In last milestone, we had created 7 distinct personas showing their goals , background and daily life. According to personas, we establish what kind of information should be provided to user when they are walking.
Based on these personas, in our lo-fi prototype we developed 5 main function including recording, searching for direct searching for path, tagging and history. There are 5 buttons on the main menu. When user open our application, and press the menu button on the gphone, the main menu will pop up for user to chose which function they need.
The results of the contextual inquiry and personas/scenarios along with technical considerations formed the basis of developing our lo-fi prototype.
How this changed our focus -
- Had to think really hard how to achieve user goals in a functional way
- Started thinking about types of mental models and how to construct our goals into a workable app.
Hi-Fi Prototype
Before developing our Hi-Fi we made changes to the way our lo-fi worked. The main changes were to the menu and how the record functions worked. We moved a few features to be ever present instead of having them in the menu function.
At this point our project focused had changed slightly.
We decided for sure to develop a mobile application for the Android platform which allows
- users to contribute walkable areas to generating a walkable map.
- to see how they are making an impact on the environment and also their wallet by walking
- allow for users to search for walkable directions and
- and search for paths for leisure, or specific goals
- save, rank and comment on paths
- tag the current location to identify certain types of real-time and contextual information
Results of User Testing
For our user testing we conducted 4 user tests. Each person was given a direction goal to achieve based on each of the functions of the application and then asked to do some general exploration of the application.
Over all the application worked as they expected and it made sense.
The common themes that came up
Issues brought up during the critique
- How do you get to critical mass
- Solution - We would work with a dedicated user group such as the WBWC since they are already a committed group of people to promote walking and biking. They would be motivated to enter information and share, since they are already doing this in a more informal way
- Virtual Journey, make the starting scale smaller to see the impact sooner
- Solution - Change scale to reflect distance walked more positively
- Add Alert option, if people want to be updated if comments are added to a path
- Solution - Do testing or surveying to see if this would be a desirable feature for users
Where do we go from here?
We will meet over the break to discuss and prepare for CHI 2010
