Scenario:
Local Linda has a friend from high school visiting her at college. She wants to show her friend around the city, but hasn’t done many of the “touristy” things herself. Linda uses Torch to find a good walking tour that hits many landmarks and they follow it over the course of the day. At the end of the day, Linda decides that there were a few landmarks that would have been better-suited for the tour, and creates her own.
Our Three Tasks: Find, Follow, & Form
1. Ways to find a tour
- Map displaying landmarks that the user can include & list of tours (clicking would go to map)
- Map displaying landmarks that a user can include, auto-generate tour based on that
- Map displaying possible tour routes & filter using a list of landmarks with checkboxes
- Some way to do search/filtering (slide-down, parameter search, etc).
...
- Modifying a tour by making changes while following
- Drag your finger in between landmarks on a map
- Drag-and-drop tour ordering
- Adding locations to a database, don’t specify tour route
Storyboards
Storyboard #1
- Map displaying landmarks that the user can include & list of tours that include those landmarks (clicking would go to map)
- Map view with current location and a route to follow (like an iPhone)
- Drag your finger in between landmarks on a map to create new tours
...
- Learnability
- A lot of text is required to explain actions
- Long presses are hard to discover, as is dragging between points
- The GPS portion will be familiar to users and easy to understand
- The selection of the list of tours will be straight forward and easy to understand.
- Efficiency
- Long presses and dragging are efficient and fast to use if you know they're there
- There are a lot of steps before you are actually following a tour, which is not efficient
- Long pressing to see info on every landmark might be time consuming
- Safety
- Easy to accidentally include or not include a landmark in your filter by accidentally tapping or double tapping
- Easy to accidentally add landmarks to the map
- Hard to misuse the GPS feature, since the only input is the arrows, which are easy to undo (they are a form of direct manipulation)
- Adding or removing a landmark from the filter is easily undone
- Dragging between landmarks, it might be easy to make a mistake, but again this is direct manipulation, so it is easily undone
Storyboard #2
- Map displaying landmarks that a user can include, auto-generate tour based on that
- Shows you the next step and then landmarks that are nearby/related/on the way
- Adding locations to a database, don’t specify tour route
...
- Learnability
- Unique icons for each type of location may not be implicit.
- Finding detailed info by clicking on icons shown on map may not be obvious.
- Ambiguity on "type" of location (Is a bar recreation or restaurant?).
- Map areas behave as expected (no additional learning if already familiar).
- Icons are used consistently throughout the tour process to solidify/clarify their purpose.
- Efficiency
- User cannot see selected locations while choosing additional ones.
- User cannot get an estimate on time/distance until all locations have been chosen.
- Several different screens to navigate to add a location (home page -> map page -> location page).
- Using map in substitute of address input saves time (starting spot, new location)
- Hard to add a specific place if it isn't on the map (have to go to the "advanced search" page).
- Finding a "subtype" of a more general "type" can be inefficient since each location has to be looked at individually (for instance, finding an authentic Italian restaurant among a wide variety of other restaurants).
- Safety
- Requires several deliberate button presses to add an event (good for error prevention)
- Easy to remove unwanted locations
- Directions to locations are not very detailed (just show the map, leaving potential for user to get lost).
Storyboard #3
- Map displaying possible tour routes & filter using a list of landmarks with checkboxes
- Show you a picture of the next landmark with description, direction (like a compass)
- Modifying a tour by making changes while following
Storyboard #4
- Some way to do search/filtering (slide-down, parameter search, etc).
- Ordered list of landmarks on the route potentially with a guide (landmark #, picture, name) with which step you’re on and perhaps with a small map
- Drag-and-drop tour ordering
...