ProjectProposal-HirokiTerashima
From CS160 User Interfaces Fa06
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Project Proposal: Sign-in sheet
Idea: Use anoto pen and the specially-dotted paper for any sign-in process: for taking attendance at the beginning of class, for checking in when you visit the Sather Tower, or for those guestbooks that you see in Bed and Breakfast places (or hotels) throughout the world. The idea is to make the sign-in data easy to access, query, manipulate, and share.
Problem Description/Problem Context and Forces
Having sign-in records on paper is great- it's just a piece of paper, so you can have people sign-in anywhere, anytime. It is also user-friendly because almost everybody knows how to use a paper and pen to write down their names and other information. However, the paper-based sign-in doesn't allow people to search through it quickly with queries (such as name, number of absence, etc), or generate reports/summaries, or share with it others with ease.
The teacher, for example, would manually enter the attendance records into database programs (such as Excel) after class in order to enjoy the querying and reporting that a digitalized data affords. In a large class where attendance is taken by having the students sign-in on a piece of paper, the paper could get lost, or students might conceivably sign-in for another student who did not show up to class.
A Bed and Breakfast place in Scotland or Berkeley might want to share the wonderful things that its guests wrote on the guestbook so that other travelers might consider staying there, but with the current paper-only-based guestbook, converting this to a shareable form (such as a website) is no easy task. The guestbook idea using the Anoto pen and paper seems to have been thought up already by CERN, but I'm not sure because the website doesn't load for me: http://gridcafe.web.cern.ch/gridcafe/guestbook.html
Target User Group
Anybody that uses a paper to record sign-in information. It could be teachers, club organizers, dentist's assistants, bed-and-breakfast owners, and so on. These are people who do not necessarily have to be technically-oriented, but who would benefit from having the part where you convert sign-in information from written text format to a digitalized format. What to do with the digitalized format (e.g. make it into a web-page, report, etc) is different for each user-group.
Sketches
