Topiary: A Tool for Prototyping LocationEnhanced Applications

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Topiary A Tool for Prototyping Location-Enhanced
Applications
University of California, Berkeley Carnegie
Mellon University Intel Research Seattle,DUB
Group, University of Washington
Yang Li Jason Hong James Landay
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Location-Enhanced Applications

• Provide useful services by leveraging knowledge
  about the location of people, places, things
• Examples ATTs Find Friends service, Tour Guide

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Problems Building Location-Enhanced Apps

• Require a high level of technical expertise to
  build
• Sensing technologies are complex
• Location-to-place inference necessary to make
  useful
• Hard to prototype, evaluate, iterate on designs
  
• Several toolkits for developers
• No tools for interaction designers
• Cannot be tested with end-users until built

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Goal of Topiary
Allow interaction designers to quickly prototype
test location-enhanced applications

• Lower the barrier to entry
• For interaction designers
• Speed up iterative design process
• No application or infrastructure development
  required
• Get early feedback from users
• Make major changes when inexpensive

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Location Design Tasks Challenges

• Modeling location contexts
• Enable exploration of a wider input space than
  keyboard mouse
• e.g., when Alice enters the library, when
  Alice is near Bob
• Specifying location-enhanced behaviors
• Interaction sequences integrating both explicit
  input (e.g., click) implicit input (e.g.,
  location contexts)
• e.g., Show the library map when Alice is in the
  library
• Testing a design in realistic situations
• Settings often in the field mobile with
  changing contextual input
• e.g., Give a user a PDA and let them walk across
  campus

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A Quick View of Topiary
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Outline

• Motivation
• Active Map Workspace
• Storyboard Workspace
• Test Workspace
• Evaluation
• Conclusion Future Work

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ActiveMap WorkspaceModeling Location contexts

• Model a geographical area
• Import a map image as background
• Create entities on the map
• People, places things
• Capture scenarios
• Scenario producer tool captures scenarios
  describing contexts

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ActiveMap WorkspaceModeling Location contexts
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ActiveMap WorkspaceModeling Location Contexts
ActiveMap workspace gives designers a visual
languagefor specifying these contexts
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Scenarios

• Represent a collection of location contexts
• Used as triggers conditions for specifying
  location-enhanced interactions

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Capturing Scenarios
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Abstracting Scenarios
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Outline

• Motivation
• Active Map Workspace
• Storyboard Workspace
• Test Workspace
• Evaluation
• Conclusion Future Work

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Storyboard WorkspaceLocation-Enhanced
Interactions
Location-enhanced interactions
Traditional UI Interactions
Explicit Input
Actions
conditions
triggers
Scenarios
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Storyboard WorkspaceSpecifying Location-Enhanced
Interactions

• Similar to traditional storyboards
• Pages links (e.g., DENIM, SILK DEMAIS)
• Different from traditional storyboards
• Explicit implicit links
• scenarios as conditions for explicit links
• scenarios as automatic triggers for implicit
  links
• Can incorporate context components

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Storyboard WorkspaceExplicit Implicit Links
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Storyboard WorkspaceContext Components

• Display spatial temporal information
• Encapsulate common location-enhanced interactions
• Enable continuous interactions
• Five context components
• Active Map component
• Distance component
• Nearest Entities component
• Location component
• Temporal component

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Storyboard WorkspaceContext Components
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Storyboard WorkspaceContext Components Active
Map Component
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Storyboard WorkspaceContext Components
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Storyboard WorkspaceContext Components Nearest
Entities Component
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Outline

• Motivation
• Active Map Workspace
• Storyboard Workspace
• Test Workspace
• Evaluation
• Conclusion and Future Work

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Test WorkspaceTesting Analyzing a Design
End-user UI
Wizard UI
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Test WorkspaceTesting Analyzing a Design
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Outline

• Active Map Workspace
• Storyboard Workspace
• Test Workspace
• Evaluation
• Conclusion and Future Work

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Evaluation 1An informal evaluation on an early
implementation

• Settings
• an IBM T20 ThinkPad with a 700MHz CPU, 512MB RAM,
  14 inch display, a Wacom Graphire tablet
• Tasks
• create a tour guide for either Berkeley or San
  Francisco
• Participants
• 2 ubicomp researchers, 3 professional UI
  designers, 2 undergraduate students who took a
  UI design course
• Results
• Gave positive feedback areas for improvement.
  Resulted in
• Storyboard Analysis Window
• Zooming to support large designs

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Evaluation 2Our Experience Applications we
prototyped using Topiary

• Riddle-based Geo-caching
• Tour guide nearest friend finder
• Context-aware reminder
• Searching for available meeting rooms
• In/Out board
• Thing finder
• Car navigation
• Conference Guide

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Evaluation 3Our Experience From prototypes to
a real application
Informal Prototyping of Tour Guide
Informal prototype
The real application
Made four designs in three hours
Trajectorytrail
Tested with three people in the field
Made a new design in 1 hour
Tested with three people in the field
Built the real application in 2 weeks
Path to target
Region of possible location
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Future Work

• Modeling the ambiguity of sensor data
• Enabling more kinds of contextual information
• Improving the scalability of storyboards
• Further evaluating Topiary
• being used by students in both undergraduate
  graduate courses at UW CMU this term

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Conclusion

• Topiary is the first tool for interface
  designers to rapidly prototype location-enhanced
  applications
• Demonstrate location contexts via an Active Map
• Specify location-enhanced behaviors via enhanced
  storyboards
• Test analyze a design using either Wizard of Oz
  or sensor input

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Topiary A Tool for Prototyping Location-Enhanced
Applications
Download available at http//dub.washington.edu/
topiary