GroupBrainstorm-Group:Team42
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
Contents |
Members
In-Class Brainstorm
We started off by looking at one of our individual proposals, and then branched off into related categories and/or industries from there. Whenever the brainstorm seemed to be flagging, we brought in another one of our individual proposals, and this list was the result:
- Organizing
- Daily planner (see Dexter’s proposal)
- Handwritten post-its for desktop
- Communication/Community
- Digital business cards / phone contacts
- Collaborative brainstorming
- Collaborative signing of cards
- Multiple recipients (see Mike’s proposal)
- Speed dating (see Eric’s proposal)
- Digital blogs (see Eric’s email)
- Guestbook at weddings, etc.
- Handwritten instant messages
- School
- Digitized lecture notes – searchable
- Digitized lecture boards – download
- Money
- Banking – checks
- Bookkeeping – credit card receipts
- Invoices
- Travel
- Texture rubbing
- Drawing maps
- Labels for luggage
- Trip diaries/photo blogging
- Artistic
- Sheet music
- Sketching with an Anoto pencil
- Food
- Waiters taking orders (see Patti’s proposal)
- Seating people at restaurants
- Health
- Patient records (see Eric’s email)
- Health forms for elderly, etc.
- Medical test records for diabetes, etc.
- Body writing as in Nip Tuck
- School
- Alphabet learning w/ OCR, audio
- Permanent records of kids’ art
- Digitized essays for SATs, etc.
- Science experiment write-ups
- Games
- Crossword puzzle
- Pictionary / photo recognition (like retrievr)
- Raffle tickets
- Flash cards?
- Madlibs?
- Modeling
- Architecture blueprints
- Fashion design sketches
- Drawing pictures that become 3D-ified
- Other
- Sports playbook (see Patti’s proposal)
- Sports timekeeping to track trends
- Parking tickets
- Post office uses – envelopes, signatures
- Shopping lists for inventories, routes
- Proofreading
- Super secure passwords
- Continued on 9/17
- Learning Asian languages
- Other games or learning tools?
- Keep track of tickets/things that expire
- Handwritten e-cards w/ computer animation
Idea Selection
Initial Voting
- Daily planner - 3
- Digital lecture notes - 3
- Online pictionary - 3
- On site waiters - 2
- Trip planner - 1
- Speed dating or variation - 1
- Handwritten e-cards - 2
- Super secure passwords - 1
- Proofreading - 2
- Playbook - 3
- Multiple recipients - 1
- Post-it-notes - 1
- Architecture blueprints - 1
Narrowing It Down
- Daily planner - very useful
- Everyone uses one
- Probably requires building a new interface
- Good to have both physical and digital copy
- Digital lecture notes - very accessible, can test out here
- A combination of the digital notes and digital boards ideas
- Add an automated organization (left margin, like pdf table of contents)
- Merge with daily planner?
- What about revisions? More importantly, what about Anoto's OCR (in)capability?
- Online pictionary - fun, but not very useful
- Hard to draw with a mouse
- Save paper by overlaying with a transparency
- Or can Anoto paper be reused if there is no ink?
Final Pick
After much discussion, our group finally decided to go with our very first idea, the daily planner. To make this decision, we first reviewed the results of our initial brainstorm session, and then each wrote down a few of our favorite ideas. We went around the group and talked about why we picked those ideas, and made a tally wherever people had the same favorites. We then picked apart the ideas with the most votes, and tried to determine the extent of their usefulness to society, relevance to us, and appropriateness in terms of project scope. After we narrowed the list down to our top three, we quickly eliminated online pictionary as not being useful enough, and then debated between the daily planner and digital lecture notes. Ultimately, we decided on the former because we felt that it required less change of habit on the user side, and it was a safer choice than betting on the Anoto system's OCR capabilities. (Being able to erase the board easily and without changing core habits was too much of a difficulty at this point in time. Perhaps if there is an Anoto pencil that can utilize an eraser, the Lecture Notes idea would be more feasible.)
Project Description
Target User Group
Our target user group includes all those who use physical and/or digital planners to help organize their lives. The daily planner is intended for anyone from students to secretaries, coordinators to managers, and various other professionals. Some of these users rely completely on physical planners, which we know from experience cannot be recovered once lost. Others keep their schedules on their computers, using software like Outlook or iCal, or web-based solutions such as Google Calendar or Yahoo! Calendar. For them, accessing digital schedules can be problematic, especially when there are no nearby power outlets. Still others synchronize their PDAs with scheduling software, but this is not an affordable option for many, nor does it have quite the same feel as pen and paper. As such, we believe that a hybrid of physical and digital planners will provide an alternate solution to this user group.
Problem Description
Being able to backup, share, and digitize your organizational processes has been costly and constrained (e.g. power, size, weight, etc.). This solution aims to solve this problem by providing the ease and mobility of the traditional dialy planner (pen and paper), yet have the benefits of its PDA/tablet/laptop counterparts.
Problem Context
Many students can easily relate to this and use this completed project for their everyday activities on campus. They can then customize their events further via computer by setting privacy and inviting guests. Using it is no different than any other planner today, however there is a digital copy which can be translated into a scheduling program on a local machine and/or online.
Suitability of Anoto
Our project will utilize the Anoto pen and paper to create a daily planner identical to those currently on the market (e.g. a simple spiral notebook with monthly/weekly/daily/hourly increments). By making it identical to current daily planners, people can easily migrate to the Anoto based system which has several key benefits over the digital or physical planner:
- Sharing
- Users can share their planner with others.
- Invite guests to events.
- Privacy
- Based on the way blocks of time are filled/shaded in (e.g. diagonal lines), various privacy settings can be imposed.
- Redundancy
- The digitized version of your annotated planner can be stored on your computer/online to allow you to keep a back up copy. This allows you to access the alternate copy in case you do not have access to your planner. If lost, you can even reprint your entire planner so that you can continue without skipping a beat.
- No power limitations
- By utilizing a simple pen and paper, your planner is not bound to the power limitations of PDAs, tablet PCs, and laptops.
- Reminders
- Since the events are now digitized, the system can allow for reminders (audio, email, other).
Solution & Sketch
- Creating an event
- Events can be set by simply boxing when an event occurs and writing in what the event is as well as option details such as where and with who.
- Note: Since OCR is not supported by Anoto, the simple image of what is written will be displayed. Later versions may provide for OCR.
- Simultaneous/overlapping events
- Simply split an event box vertically to create a simultaneous or overlapping event.
- Setting privacy
- If the background of an event is not shaded, the default privacy settings will be used. To alter the privacy settings of an event, simply sketch in diagonal lines in an event box. The system will recognize the markings and enable the appropriate privacy settings.
- Adding notes
- Additional notes for an event can be written on the margins and directed to a specific event.
Solution Sketch
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"Class" at 8am.
| "Class Bring stuff" at 8am.
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"Secret" at 3pm. Private event.
| "Party!" at 10pm. Shared with
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