GroupBrainstorm-Group:GGiD
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Brainstorm
Ideas
- Meeting: Facilitate voting and discussion without the need for laptops during meetings – making the process more personal and useful for large meetings.
- Editing: Allow multiple distant editors to collaborate on document editing for a single author.
- Greeting Cards: Provide the ability to revise messages and allow multiple people to contribute to greeting cards purchased online.
- To-Do: Sort a prioritized to do list and add due dates to a digital calendar, allowing for subsequent lists to be used in the future.
- Music Composition: Compose music on-the-go with the possibility of playback from a digital device.
- Inspection: Allow multiple individuals to contribute to a single form.
- Survey: Distribute responses automatically to the respective groups analyzing that particular data.
- News Reporting: Replaces reporter’s notebook in the field and transfers data to the editors.
- Ear Training: Evaluate notes written in response to audio recognition of notes instantaneously.
- Scantron: Provide a cheaper, quicker, and more accurate way to process restricted test responses.
- Origami: Share instructions online by folding Anoto paper and then outlining lines, then processing the lines into steps
- Battleship: Provide user isolated input over distances for the game; the pen inscriptions and page identification allow for verification.
- Check Book: Auto-balance checkbook by uploading all written checks to the appropriate source.
- Sports Game plays: Coordinate play details between coaches in real-time during a game.
- Art: Two way information exchange, students can see in a digital presentation what the professor is drawing and the professor would not need to walk around to evaluate student drawings.
- Maps: Mark map on Anoto paper to get directions, along with annotating the route with geographically relevant information presented by a GPS device during the trip.
- Prescription: Allow for verification, archiving, and retrieval of prescriptions.
- Prescription Refills: Check box on Anoto printed bottle label to request refill, reducing wait time.
- Company Digg: Congregate and prioritize articles selected from numerous reading sources, especially useful for financial traders and consulting companies.
- Shopping List: Record items selected while looking through a catalogue and compile a final shopping list, which can be processed remotely.
- Tattoos: Allow artists and customers to communicate about a sketch design online before the actual tattoo, saving driving time.
- Golf: OCR score cards to keep records and provide analysis tools to the players.
- Time Sheets: Track handwritten records about time worked and transfer this information to the administrative department on a time based retrieval, eliminating the need for making copies and dropping off the sheet.
- Travel Guides: Mark desired destinations and once docked, the application will compile the most ideal route with current information and provide an itinerary.
- School Book/eBook Annotator: Eliminate the need to bring books to school by providing an electronic copy of the book which will be annotated with markings from the physical book.
- Animation: Allow for different elements in an animation to be drawn separately and then combined/changed as necessary later.
- DMV: Save time at the DMV by using OCR to transfer forms to a computer rather than manually input.
- Written SAT grading: Transfer of written SAT to all related parties, saving money on shipping.
- Lab environment: Processes class lab statistics without having to physically collect data from researchers.
- Teaching Writing from a computer: Teach how to write (type or cursive) from a computer by providing feedback to characters written on the paper.
Idea Selection
Our choice of the article ranking system (idea #19) is rooted in its unique usage of the Anoto pen. Rather than enhance the pen’s traditional role in authorship, the system utilizes the stylus to instead highlight already inscribed text. From the customer’s perspective, the system can potentially provide an array of benefits. For example, a collaborative aspect will be brought to an otherwise solitary, though proven crucial, research step for companies. At the same time, the same system can provide a publishing channel, allowing customers’ clients to view an otherwise completely intellectual work. In addition, the system has low overhead and little foreseeable learning curve. Printed publications are already a dominant information source in the corporate environment; the system would require replacing (rather than adding) items, allowing a nearly seamless transition. Lastly, the project is not riddled with infeasible technical challenges, such as personalized recognition systems. The dominant task is region recognition, which can be quantified and computed.
Target User Group
Our project will focus on helping financial professionals working in large institutions, such as Merrill Lynch or Charles Schwab, to better do their job. Typically there are many people at these companies whose job entails combing through newspapers and magazines for information on the businesses they investing in. This news may include anything from new, to journals, to stock quotes in all forms of national and international paper based media. As these are financial (in lieu of technology) professionals, they are likely more comfortable combing through paper-based mediums for news instead of online sources. Thus we aim to target those who typically use paper based mediums to acquire and compile business news for large financial companies.
Problem Description
In the corporate setting, mental digestion of published material is essential in order to stay on top of current events. This information provides the puzzle pieces necessary to assemble insight into an otherwise convoluted future. As a result, business professionals dedicate significant time and effort towards mining through numerous newspapers, reports, and publications. However, this task’s purely mental labor makes it difficult to easily gather aggregate information, such as article priority, amongst coworkers. In addition, this process does not directly produce results viewable by clients from which to justify spending on such work. Our project strives to amend these shortcomings by implementing a portal where an individual’s article selection (captured through pen annotations) contribute to a ranking based on popularity, allowing for other employees to quickly identify important information. Additionally, this outlet will give visibility to this research aspect for clients to see.
Problem Context and Forces
Within a corporate environment, the communication of information is vital. For financial/business-type institutions, the information communicated to the workers from the outside world may be just as important (if not more so) as the information that is exchanged within. Knowledge of timely news such as a natural disaster that affects a global supply chain, crashes of the stock market, recent unveiling of revolutionizing new technology, etc. can be the difference between making or losing money for the corporation.
Technology enthusiasts solve their news needs by looking to news aggregator sites such as Slashdot or Google News. These websites handpick (or algorithmically pick) articles from around the Internet; from skimming over these, readers can get a sense of the best of the news for the day without spending a lot of time hunting for news. More recently, community-driven news aggregators such as Digg and del.icio.us let the readers themselves judge whether articles and news items are worth being shared and widely viewed. These examples are similar in concept to our proposal, which would extend the benefits of online-community-based news aggregation to a closed corporate audience whose non-tech-savvy members may still prefer reading their news in a paper format.
Why the Anoto System is a Good Technology for the Problem
The problem with many ideas involving Anoto is other devices could do the job at least as well; two devices that typically come to mind are scanners and tablet PC's. If either of these porvides a suitable solution to the same probelm being soplved by the Anoto pen, it trivialies the use and novelty of the Anoto pen as a solution to the problem.
Our project does run into this issue. Because our users are interacting with newspapers, magazines, and other paper media, an Anoto pen provides the _only_ solution. Both a scanner and a tablet PC cannot ib eused to implement a solution to our problem that is not more complex than the current solution. In fact, with a scanner, our idea would be difficult if not impossible. Not only owould the user be inconvenienced by having to scan his newspaper, but analgorithm would have to be implemented to extract relative information about the scanned article in order to "digg" it. Using a tablet PC would not be much better; with a tablet, a user is basically just reading articles online, and it woul dlikely jut be easier to mark articles using a mouse, making tablet PC's ireelevant here.
But enough about why other techonologies are not good. Anoto pens work well for our idea because they keep a familiar interface for the user. Our project requires almost no change on the users' part; the medium by which they do their work is still the same. The only difference would be putting a quick mark tnext to articles they found interesting, which they might do anyway (dog-earing, tearing out the page, etc). It is important the user does not have to change their routine much; it is obviously one that is time tested and proven satisfactory by users. To quote one of the readings, "newer is not always better". Thus our idea here in the Anoto based interface: we seek more to help users better benefit from the results of their experience while changing the experience of browsing newspapers itself more or less the same.
Solution Sketch
