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GR2 - Designs
Scenario
Frodo Baggins, a recent college graduate, is working under a government contract to find optimal locations for new WiFi towers in Africa. He is new to using ANB, and is learning mostly by intuition because his boss is too busy to give him detailed training.
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Once he has this data, he wants to overlay the data sets on a map of Africa to help him evaluate how good the current WiFi coverage is. He wants to quickly find regions that have insufficient coverage. For each of these regions, he needs to find the location(s) for new WiFi towers to optimize coverage. Periodically, he'll want to share his findings with his co-worker, Samwise, and get his input. When he thinks he's finished, he needs to share a report with his boss, Gandalf.
Designs
Design #1
This design aims to offer maximum flexibility and efficiency by having many toolbars visible on the screen. It offers the user a lot of options, sacrificing some cleanliness and simplicity.
Storyboard
Frodo first logs in to his account, where he can view his existing projects and create new projects.
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After Sam tells Frodo that his analysis looks perfect and wonderful, Frodo is ready to "publish" a final report to his boss, Gandalf. Functionally, publishing sends only the a copy of the current project, and does not send real-time updates like sharing does. Ideally, Frodo would be able to select which parts of the project to include in the report, and provide extra commentary/analysis for his boss. However, since we are focusing on the UI for visualization, Publish will look essentially like Share, at least for now.
Analysis
Learnability: This design relies primarily on visibility, feedback, and external consistency for learnability. Because of the numerous toolbars, the user can easily see many features without having to click on submenus or buttons. The user will have to explore the toolbars for a while to become familiar with them. Real-time feedback also makes the interface more learnable. For example, the user can see the data in the right-hand toolbar changing as the mouse is moved over the map area. Clicking a checkbox in the left toolbar will instantly make the corresponding data set appear or disappear in the map. Many of the toolbars and icons bear resemblance to other programs like Google Docs, Google Maps, Photoshop, and PowerPoint. Some features that are not visible may present learnability problems, such as clicking on towers to edit its properties. In this example, a small tip could be displayed in the properties box when the mouse is hovered over the tower.
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Other considerations: The toolbars in this design may make the screen space cluttered and take space away from the visualization itself. However, in addition to the learnability and efficiency advantages, the use of toolbars makes the design highly extensible and customizable. The users can choose which toolbars to display based on which ones they use most frequently. Developers can also easily add functionality by adding a new toolbar, or adding to an existing one. The use of tabs also makes it easy for users to create multiple visualizations within the same project. The issue of displaying multiple visualizations at once is not addressed in the sketches above, but one possibility is to create multiple viewing panels, similar to the way many programming editors (Eclipse, Visual Studio) display multiple files at once. However, this method makes it difficult to decide what to do with toolbars. Another way is to drag one visualization onto another, e.g. drag a line graph onto the map such that the line graph takes up a smaller space in one corner. Then, toolbars by default will pertain to the main map, but the graph can be selected and edited using the same toolbars.
Design #2
The idea behind this design is to keep it very clean and simple. Manipulation is largely mouse-based and allows for a lot of real-time visual updates in response to the user's actions. The emphasis is on learnability. It should be intuitive for the user to move around the map, to choose and add layers, to select objects on the map to bring them into focus, to manipulate the time, etc. These actions should all map to actions that users are generally familiar with through other software and real-life activities. In addition, the focus on clean and simple design means that there are fewer aspects of the design for the user to learn. Efficiency may be sacrificed as a result, however, because in an effort to be minimal, certain things may be more than one click away, but the use of sliders for some functionality may help in that respect. As for safety, the user is fairly limited in their actions. They may accidentally add layers they don't want or change modes, but these errors are fairly simply undone.
Storyboard
| When Frodo logs in and uploads his file sets, this is the first screen he would see. At the top, there is a title bar indicating that he is in analysis mode. There is a flat very lightly colored gray scale map of the area in question (pictured here is the northern two-thirds of Africa). Similarly to Google Maps, Frodo can drag around the map with the mouse, as well as zoom in and out using the controls on the left. In the top left there is a button that toggles between month and year (other option can maybe be added) and corresponds to the slider on the bottom. For instance, if he is in month-mode, the slider will move through monthly averages of the data from January to December while in yearly mode, it would move from 2000-2012 or something of that nature. On the top right of the screen, there is a button titled "Layers" which when Frodo clicks on it, will generate a drop-down list that contains all the data sets Frodo had selected on logging in. The large arrow on the right of the screen allows Frodo to shift into the next mode (which for lack of a better name is referred to as the edit mode in this design), after he has finished his analysis of the data sets. |
| Frodo can then click on the "layers" menu and select the option, "demographics" (here written as population) for instance. The first consequence of this action is that a box with the name "demographics" and a small "x" will appear to the left of the "layers" menu. In addition, the data set will be added to the map. Color and specific shading can of course be determined later, but let's assume for this design that demographics is represented by the color red. In that case, a light red area representing the entire year's population area will appear on the map, and a bright, solid red will indicate the area covered in that specific month. There would be a similar outcome in yearly mode as well. |
| Frodo clicks on the "layers" menu again. We can see the menu pop open here. He selects a new layer, "rainfall" for instance, and it gets added to the map, in a different color from demographics, but overlaying the previous data set. |
| When Frodo is done setting the data, he can hit the arrow on the right side of the screen to move forward. The first thing to occur after this action is that the title bar will change to "edit" mode (here written as "edit hotspots"), and a pop up window will appear as the background fades out in some way indicating inactivity. The window will indicate some backend sort of magic occurring (not the focus of this class, so we will just assume it exists) that will generate a number of new hot spots, strategically placed on the map. |
| After the computer finishes generating the new towers, this last frame pops up. This is the "edit" mode screen that Frodo can actually interact with. Note that now the arrow is on the left side of the screen, indicating the way which he can return to the analysis screen (by clicking or perhaps with a keyboard shortcut). The layers menu button along with the current layers are still visible, although not editable. What is new, however, are the circular forms on the map. Each of these circles represents a new wifi tower as generated by the magic backend algorithm. There are also sliders (three sliders pictured, although more or less might be appropriate as needed for the parameters the users desire) in which Frodo can adjust things like total cost, quantity of towers, average strength of towers, power used, etc. These sliders would have an immediate effect on the representations of the wifi towers on the map, in that using the sliders would change the size of the circles appropriately. In addition, it would be possible to manipulate each individual tower by clicking on it. Clicking on a circle would display the information pertaining to that particular tower (i.e. location, strength, wattage, and whatever else is relevant). It would also be possible to drag it to change the range or move the circle itself. Frodo can use these manipulations in order to place the towers ideally based on whatever criteria is most important. Although not pictured, there would be a share button to the left of the save button which would allow Frodo to send a message to Samwise with the current design. Samwise could then respond through email or chat or something like that. The save button would both allow Frodo the option of saving the layout to his computer and also of submitting an official report to Gandalf. Thus, when Frodo is done, it is very easy and intuitive to save and submit. |
Design #3
This interface views important information in an efficient way, as well as an easily manuverable layout.
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