Take Me Home

Persona: 30 year old manager at a tech company

Part 1: 

Bay area is dominated by tech professionals and I wanted to target them first for my smart watch prototype because of their unique needs, disposable income and tech savviness.
Interviewee 1: Abhinav is a married 30 year old professional at a fortune 500 company in the Bay area with a fondness for outdoors, food and travel. His interests translate into him going camping almost every other weekend to places far away from home (i.e places with bad network connectivity and no access to electricity). I visited his home last weekend to find out about his mobile usage pattern. I asked him about the last time he had difficulties trying to access and interact with their mobile phones. He immediately gave me a long list of complaints he has with his phone. Being a heavy mobile user, checking his social media accounts, whatsapps every half an hour, he has a hard time managing his phone charge. He almost always ends up with a dead battery by the time he gets home from work. He expressed dissatisfaction with the huge number of apps that he has to keep track of for every little thing. He also mentioned the discomfort he faces holding his huge phone to communicate something quick while he is driving or carrying something in his hands. The last time he didn’t have his phone handy when he needed it the most was when he needed to call his wife urgently on his way back from work and he couldn’t because his battery went dead. He recalled another time he was at a store’s checkout and couldn’t use an email discount coupon because he couldn’t retrieve his phone on time from one of his many shopping bags. He mentioned the following tasks that he wished his phone could do the better: 

1. sending his home address, emailid and other common details without typing the whole thing
2. responding to a message with a yes
3. sending his current location
4. he is busy in a meeting, can’t talk for a while
5. communicating that his battery is dying soon
6. calling someone quickly when hands are busy
7. taking a photo quickly with a gesture (Eg. Wildlife in a forest that don’t stand to pose)

I asked him to envision being able to do any of the above tasks using a smart watch. He gleamed at the idea of having a secondary device to quickly communicate with someone (either a short voice message or a text message or quick directions to a place or sending current GPS coordinates) when his phone is out of charge or when his hands are busy. He would prefer to have gesture and voice based input commands including efficient accent recognition (he is an asian). He also preferred icons and carousel like navigation over text and scroll features. He described that if there was a way he could use his watch when his phone battery was dying for his communications using voice/gesture based commands, it would be useful to him in both his day to day life as well as during his weekend getaways.

Summary: I learnt that people like Abhinav have a need to constantly be in touch with the rest of the world. This consumes a lot of mobile power which ends up draining out the battery when they need their phones the most in emergency situations like wanting to communicate a message immediately. This need is not very well addressed in the current spate of smartphones. Perhaps, this is something that can be solved with a smart watch which detects low charge on the mobile and turns delegates essential functionalities like calls/messages to the watch. 

Interviewee 2: Anup Mudbidri, my next interviewee, is another married 30 year old, always on the move, bay area resident working as a Manager in a tech company. He checks his phone 20 times a day and uses it for pretty much everything from checking and composing his office email to finding driving directions when he is out. Anup mentioned that the top situations where he faces a challenge trying to access cell phones is when he has misplaced or forgotten the device or while driving or while doing some physical exercise. Other interaction problems he highlighted were - holding the device in his hand for long periods of time, using it while lying down, preventing auto rotate, running out of charge or network connectivity and frozen screens. Several instances were cited by Anup, where the non-availability of a phone was an issue. The most important for him were instances where he was jogging or biking but prefers not to take his phone (due to its bulkiness). However, he likes to have the ability to text his wife while doing so, measure the distance covered, listen to some music and take some interesting photos. Top places cited by Anup to keep his phone were his pocket, car cup holder, desk or his couch.
Top tasks that Anup wishes to accomplish - text, reply to emails, read news, listen to music, take photos, play games and call people. Anup wanted to prioritize the tasks for a smart watch because he thought that his ability to consume or create content on his watch will be limited. He felt that the modes of output / input need to be altered to incorporate short/visual notifications, sound/voice, gestures and cross device connectivity. He would also limit only essential tasks to his smartphone and delegate all non-essential tasks to a larger device (phone/laptop) In addition to enjoying some of the benefits her looks forward to Anup is most excited to use his smartwatch to monitor his health. For eg: calories burnt, heart rate, blood pressure, sleep quality etc. He would want his smart watch to automatically check his vital stats like heart rate, temperature etc with minimal configurations and inputs and show it to him with a voice input without having him to open the app explictly.

Summary: Anup likes to use his smart watch like he uses his mobile - communication, entertainment and productivity. The thought of a smart watch evokes another need of being able to monitor his health, besides using it as a quick communication device. The biggest advantage of a smart watch according to him is the size and its non-intrusivity in tasks that involve his hands. When he is out jogging, he wants to listen to music a well as track his exercise and is put off by the idea of using two devices for each. He was excited by the idea of using smart watch for accomplishing medium (listening to music on the go) to short tasks (sending quick messages through voice, finding out map routes when phone is dead) 

PART 2

After my interviews, I came up with several ideas using the interview data as a foundation. It seemed to me like the “ 30 year old married tech savvy guys” are going to be most pleased with their smart watches if it’s able to seamlessly take over important functionalities like calling, messaging and mapping when their phone battery is dying. Some of the ideas are:

1. “Shopular” app like notifications on smart watch that give you instant coupon information when you enter a store
2. Youtube streaming from smart watch
3. Show important email, SMS or other messaging notifications
4. Divert calls to the google account that’s running on the watch when the phone battery dies
5. Taking you home or temporary accommodation in the area when the phone is lost or dead
6. Leaving traces/sending location to others so that they can track you and get you when you are out hiking/camping and your phone is dead
7. A tiny projector in the smart watch for quick presentations
8. Play music to car stereo and sync with other smart watches to share music
9. Using smart watches for payments in stores or movie theaters.
10. Monitor sleep quality, heart rate, temperature and movement etc and give summaries
11. “Bump" like feature for contact information exchange
12. Gesture based camera for taking quick photos

After considering all the ideas, I decided to prototype the app, “Take Me Home”, which is a app that helps you reach your home or hotel safely when you are lost and your phone is running out of charge. I picked this idea because it’s an issue that has not been properly addressed till date and is something that would be useful to everybody at some point in their life when they are lost and need to find their way back home. I created a watch with a rectangular dial made of cardboard and soft black straps made of two layers of cellophane tape held together (similar to rubberized straps) with the sticky ends holding the dial together. The watch is very comfortable and looks sporty. The screen has been created using a stack of post-its that can be flipped to see screen navigation. I chose a rectangle dial because it more closely matches a smart phone screen and leverages people’s familiarity with smart phone gestures and operations besides providing better text and map readability compared to a round dial.

The basic assumption behind ”Take Me Home” is it’s most useful when your phone is running out of charge. Take me home has both mobile and smart watch versions. The phone app lets you set addresses of your favorite places among other settings. When your phone has less than 10% charge, you can configure the app to automatically activate “Take Me Home” on the watch. 

First, the smart watch receives a notification to turn on “Take Me Home” when the phone is running out of charge. You can turn on the app by swiping on the screen. The app then syncs with your phone to retrieve addresses of your favorite places. You can see your favorite places and add new ones if needed with a voice command. On swiping on “Add New”, the smart watch turns on GPS automatically and fetches the address(es) of the place. You can select the appropriate address by tapping the result. The new address is then added to the list and app is now activated to listen in to your voice commands.

The user can now relax and continue doing his/her work. When it’s time to actually find their way back, they can activate the app using a voice command - “Take Me Home”. The user is then taken to a screen with a list of favorte places. They can swipe to navigate through the list and tap to select a place. The address is located using GPS and Maps API to show a list view of directions to the destination. Once the user gets to the destination, the user can either quit “Take Me Home” or start over with a different address. 

Prototype demo/feedback

I ran this prototype by my interviewee #2, with my sample set of screens. He tested it by keeping both the watch and phone next to each other and flipped post-its on the screen to show the flow. He checked out the first screen of turning on the app on the watch and felt it was intuitive and non-intrusive. As we proceeded to the next few screens, his first reaction was that it was too much work setting favorite address on “Take Me Home” and suggested it synced this with Google maps. He went on to tap the arrows to navigate the list instead of swiping it. He was led to the subsequent screens where he could add a new favorite place where he was confused between swiping and tapping to select an address. Upon telling him, he quickly learned that the arrow icon indicates swiping.

He was quick to notice the grey “TMH” icon on the notification screen and asked me what it was. I told him that the app is now activated and is running in the background. He then gave the voice input ‘Mariott Hotel’ and realized nothing happens. I told him to first say “Take Me Home”, to activate the app. He then moved to the screen where he could select where he wanted to go. He was now familiar with this screen layout and was able to make a selection without help. His next screen showed him a list view of directions. He said although he didn’t mind the list view, he would have been more comfortable working with google maps like interface. He asked if the list would refresh as he drove, I said it would. When he saw the “Destination is on your right”, he looked at the bottom for the “exit” button and found that the screen also had a “start over” button. He asked why it was needed, I told him that it’s an option for people who want to go to another place from there and he said he wouldn’t really be using that option. 

Conclusion

I have chosen this persona because these users are the ones that are most likely to adopt new technology with open arms and are willing to try new apps in order to fulfill some of their unmet needs.
Most people living with their family have a strong need to communicate or be safe or get to a particular place without getting lost. And they are paranoid about being lost in a new city running out of phone charge or simply running out of phone charge on the road within their city.
Creating a physical prototype was a great way clear out my thoughts and focus on what needs to be on the screen. This additionally helped me think about how best to keep the watch interface simple and clutter free. I was able to tie most of the loose ends by just sketching out screen layout and eliminating unnecessary features, buttons and navigation because the app was designed specifically to conserve charge and get you to a familiar place asap.
My prototype worked well for sometime but soon lost it’s adhesive and was falling apart. I realized the design is not very robust especially when I have to test it on multiple users for feedback. However, the process of getting user feedback using my prototype was extremely helpful in demonstrating how a user would actually interact with my app. The user, although still very new to the idea of a smart watch, was able to quickly appreciate its niftiness. It took him a bit to appreciate and become comfortable with the tiny dial but was able to learn the gestures and navigation in a short time because he saw similarities in interaction between the watch and his own android smart phone. I came to realize some of the common errors and assumptions I had made while designing the prototype that was very obvious to me but was not intuitive to the user. The process of getting feedback was fruitful in that it helped me get rid of my own biases (Eg. list view VS map interface) and put the interests of users before my own assumptions.