Eilidh
going solo on the interaction design pilot year
Final Year Project: “Life is an act of balance” CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009 Advisor: Heather Martin
WHO IS EILIDH?
Eilidh is an energetic designer who has just graduated from the Interaction Design Pilot Year run by Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design. Prior to moving to Copenhagen Eilidh had a background in Product and Service Design, where she placed a strong emphasis on user-centered design, the value of experience prototyping and gaining inspiration and insights from real people and the culture they live in. She is also especially interested in how the use of emerging technologies can be applied to service orientated systems and is passionate about using her skills as a designer to help address the complex social and environmental problems that exist in our society. On completion of her undergraduate degree she started exploring service design within the public sector and became fascinated with the idea of designing with - rather than for – the user, harnessing their creativity and knowledge to co-create ideas. She has worked on projects at the London based service design agency “thinkpublic” and ran a service improvement project at Wigan Renal Dialysis Unit in the UK. While at University, Eilidh spent her summers in upstate New York working as a councilor for the Freshair Fund. This experience allowed Eilidh to work with people from all over the world each with their own valuable contribution to give. She likes to think it helped her grow in to the person she is today. When she does not have design on the mind, Eilidh loves playing hockey, snowboarding and trying new sports that involve speed and a little danger! Area of Expertise: Interaction Design, Service Design, Design Research, Scenarios & Storytelling Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
I AM INTERESTED IN AND INSPIRED BY For my final project I am investigating on how you give people the ability to change elements of their behaviour, in order for them to feel like they have a balanced life (subjective to the individual). This is acheived by either allowing them to become more aware and learn about their lifestyle habits, so they can make behavioural changes themselves, or by providing them with tools or services that will actively help them make changes to their lifestyle. I am especially interested to see if the emerging field of Personal Informatics can play a role in helping people achieve this. If you could track intangible information about your day-to-day actions would it trigger people to change their behaviour? I believe this new realm has huge potential to redefine the way in which we interact with the physical world and gain insights about our actions that make up our daily routines. I am excited that this greater awareness has the potential to help us to adjust and moderate our behaviour in a number of positive ways. Currently in our everyday lives we are commonly engulfed in specific contexts, which makes it difficult to see the bigger picture. I am curious to understand if personal informatics can enable people to pinpoint areas of their life that bring them personal fulfillment and support them to experience this more often. An area I see as an underlying thread throughout the project is addressing the issue of ‘time poverty. People need to feel connected to people, to places they live, even the food they eat. Traditionally this was much easier to achieve, as family all lived together, you knew all your relatives and you knew that your food had come from your back garden. These connections have been weakened because of a fast pace of life. The advance of new labour saving technologies has allowed us to achieve more in a shorter space of time, yet instead of using the time we save to ‘slow’ down, we are prone to making ourselves even busier.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
DESIGNING FINAL TOUCHPOINTS AND FILMING VIDEO PROTOTYPES
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AUGUST
FINAL EXECUTION OF COMMUNICATION PIECES
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FINAL EXECUTION OF
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RECORD | REFLECT | RECOGNIZE
IDEA DEVLELOPMENT, SCENARIOS AND INITIAL EXPERIENCE PROTOTYPING
SERVICE DIAGRAMS, BLUEPRINT AND DESIGNING INITIAL TOUCHPOINTS FOR PROTOTYPING
echo
FURTHER EXPERIENCE PROTOTYPING
DESIGNING FINAL SERVICE TOUCHPOINTS AND STORYBOARDS FOR VIDEO PROTOTYPES
JULY
DEFINING PROBLEM/DESIGN CHALLENGE
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RESEARCH ANALYSIS
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JUNE
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CONDUCTING USER RESEARCH
3
9
USER RESEARCH PLANNING
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DESK RESEARCH
1
MAY
BRAINSTORMING AND IDEA GENERATION
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PROCESS OVERVIEW
RELATED PROJECTS AND REFERENCES At the very beginning of my final project I collected some examples around personal informatics and mapped them out, purely to understand what was already available. Below are some of the more successful and interesting ideas I collected. They all focus on very specific areas of an individuals life, that helps them to monitor and control their behaviour. Nike +
Nike + is one of the most commercial and well discussed personal informatics tools currently available. The system is made up of a small chip that you insert into your running shoes, combined with a personal online service. The tangible UI which is imbedded in the sole of your shoes communicates with your Apple iPod (which has pre-loaded software) feeding it with information about your running to help you track your training regime. The system essentially becomes a digital personal trainer. After you have completed your training session you can plug your iPod into your computer and log into your personal Nike + account. What I think has greatly contributed to the success of the Nike + system is that even though you have a personal account you are part of a community. Your web based account allows you to provide training tips and advice to other people and recommend good running routes. By being part of community I really believe that it makes peoples actions feel more valued.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Wattson
The Wattson is a new kind of home appliance that is networked to a sensor attached to your home’s electric meter box. Using colours and numbers, the Wattson device displays your energy consumption and stores it on an online database making it easy for you to manage your electricity usage and therefore save money. Not only is the system hugely informative and practical… the device also looks great. Google Power Meter How much does it cost to leave your TV on all day? Which uses more power every month — your dishwasher or your washing machine? Is your household more or less energy efficient than similar homes in your neighborhood? These are some of the questions you will be able to answer with a new prototype Google are experimenting with. Google Power Meter helps you become more energy efficient and save money by pinpointing which devices are using specific amounts of energy. You can even have friendly competition between your friends and neighbours. Last Fm Is an online web tool that monitors your music habits by connecting to your itunes or other media software. Every track you play will tell your Last.fm profile something about what you like. It suggests friends based on your music tastes and recommends songs from their music collections and yours too. Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Dopplr
Dopplr is an online tool used to track your traveling habits. Dopplr members can share personal and business travel plans privately with their networks, and exchange tips on places to stay, eat and explore in cities around the world. Each year you get an annual review of all your traveling, including when your travel plans have overlapped with friends and how much impact you are having on the environment. What I really like about dopplr is the flexibility it provides, you can update your profile on your personal profile, through your mobile or on other social networking sites, and you can sync it all to you iCAL or outlook calendar on your computer. It appears to be very seamless. References Johnny Holland, The Power of Personal Infomatics http://johnnyholland.org/magazine/2009/04/the-power-of-personal-informatics/ Addressing the issue of ‘time poverty’ http://www.slowmovement.com/ Tools for knowing more about your body and mind http://www.kk.org/quantifiedself/
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Frog Design on Personal Informatics http://designmind.frogdesign.com/blog/greener-gadgets-saving-the-worldone-meter-at-a-time. html Personal Informatics, Matt Jones & Tom Coates http://www.slideshare.net/blackbeltjones/polite-pertinent-and-pretty-designing-for-the-newwave-of-personal-informatics-493301 Behaviour is our Medium, Robert Fabricant (Frog Design) http://www.slideshare.net/frogdesign/interaction-design-is-not-about-computingtechnology?type=presentation TED talk on meta data http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6t1JxElEVw&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2 Finbox%2F%3Fref%3Dmb&feature=player_embedded Pervasive Design article http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/009745.html
MY STARTING POINT My starting point was a curiosity to investigate how design can be used to change people’s behaviour especially within the context of life balance. This interest was very much inspired by our TUI project at CIID that focused on using RFID technology to create an awareness of the environmental impact caused by certain food products transportation. On completion of this project I further investigated it by writing an article on personal Informatics for an online Interaction Design magazine called Johnny Holland. During this I found out that there are currently a number of personal informatics tools on the market to help people balance their lives, mainly focusing around health, finances and energy consumption. Some of these have been a great success while others are just a waste of time. When looking at these examples I was disappointed by the lack of imagination that was driving this emphasis on data displays and was very skeptical that any bar chart on a screen would actually motivate anyone to change his or her behaviour. I was interested in how to trigger an emotional experience to motivate behavioural change and find a more specialized area that could be addressed by personal informatics to help people feel more balanced.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
INITIAL EXPLORATIONS After conducting some initial desk research on personal informatics and existing tools to help people balance their lives, the majority of my time was spent on planning (1 week) conducting (1 week) and analyzing user research (1 week) Research Objective My objective for my user research was to gain an understanding of what it means for people to live a balanced life, what are people’s personal values, what do they need to feel comfortable in their lifestyle, how does this change depending on what stage of their life they are at and do they use any tools or strategies to achieve this? To understand how people’s values change at different stages of their lives I conducted research with three different user groups; students, couples working and families. Within these categories there were also some extreme users that included an avid sportsman, someone with diabetes and two people that were away from home frequently due to work. I was interested in hearing if people who had more extreme lifestyles had different strategies to keep themselves feeling balanced. Mapping Research Candidates STUDENT EXTREME USER
HAS CHILDREN
PERNILLE
ERIC
RUNE
LIVING WITH PARTNER/HUSBAND
LIVING ALONE
AMANDA
MARTIN
FRANCESSCA
KRISTIAN
JON
LAURA
RUNE. P
WORKING
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
KATE
DAVID
Reasearch Candidates
Amanda Bligh, USA
David Kearford, UK
Eric Stevenson, USA
Francessca Mustaffi, Italy
Jon Wettersen, USA
Kate Pilkington, UK
Kristian Kørrup, Denmark
Martin Wøldik, Denmark
Laura Ceriol, Italy
Pernille Christoffersen, Denmark
Rune Bottzauw, Denmark
Rune Dittmer, Denmark
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Research Planning Out of 12 people I conducted nine 2 hour research sessions in person, 2 Skype interviews to the US and one remote experiment in Italy. During the research sessions I used a number of reflection tools I had designed to help facilitate the session and provoke conversation. I also had a set of questions on more specific areas, that I adapted depending on how the discussion evolved. These questions covered areas such as typical daily routines and habits, enjoyable parts of their day, things they don’t have time to achieve and why, how they manage their time to meet all their priorities, use of labour saving technology, triggers that make them feel stressed, how they deal with conflicts in their time, what their ‘feel good’ activities are, and how their priorities have changed as their responsibilities have changed. Conducting Research
Figure 1: Rune using the mapping tool I used a Card sorting activity where I got people to choose from a list of things they do either on a daily, weekly or random basis. This was used as a warm-up activity, to get people starting to think about what was important to them. It was a great conversation starter, as you could then question them on their answers.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 2: Mapping tool I also designed a mapping tool to get people to think about more specific values they need to achieve to feel in control and what really brings them meaning in life. This exercise was very valuable as it forced people to take a moment and reflect on what was really important to them. People found the exercise difficult, especially when they started to realize that they were achieving very few of the things that were important and a priority to them. Although the task was challenging almost everyone I interviewed found it beneficial to have a moment of
Figure 3: Diaries During my research a few people also kept a diary so i could gain insight into their routines, sleeping and eating habits. After completing the diary I questioned them to see if they had gained any value from writing in it each day. People responded with saying that they felt like they wanted to be more productive throughout their day so they had something positive and interesting to write in it. This shows that actively logging your activities can lead to increased motivation to do well.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 4: Emotional timelines During some of the interview sessions I got people to draw an emotional time line map of a certain period of time that they decided upon. The peaks in the diagram are when they are feeling out of balance. This allowed me to see that periods of inbalance are often due to a change or transition in their lifestyle. This often included moving to a new city, leaving home or starting a new job. Although these are not negative situations to be in, the uncertainty and the anxiety of starting something new can make people feel out of balance. The remote exercise in Italy involved an extreme user (Laura, who is rarely at home due to work related travel). I asked her to keep a detailed diary for one week. Here she recorded her day-to-day activities and routines, including eating and sleeping habits. I also asked her to reflect on how she felt throughout the day and in the moment while she was doing certain tasks. If anything made her feel stressed she had record it and the same goes for if she was happy. She also took photographs of the following: 1. Things that you do on a regular basis that make you feel comfortable and content. 2. Any tools or strategies that help you meet your priorities. 3. Things that you make you feel uncomfortable or unbalanced in your life. The result of this exercise provided detailed and rich information, with a number of key insights to what it is like when you are continually on the move.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 5: A sample of photographs from Laura’s photo diary Research Analysis On completion of my user research I created character boards for each person, writing down key quotes and observations from their session. At this point, I then filtered the information again and selected the most intriguing and surprising quotes from each respondent. Within these insights three underlying themes were formed. These were: 1. Communication with Family and Friends 2. Food and Eating Habits 3. Personal Prioritising and Planning
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 6: Transcription of Interviews
Figure 7: Character board
Figure 8: Mapping out my insights
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 9: Understanding what each quote means
Figure 10: Creating How might we statements
Figure 11: Voting on the most interesting insights Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Within each of these themes I used the IDEO method of asking what does each insight mean, and then writing “How might we statements” for them all. At this point there were still a number of areas I could choose to develop, but I decided to focus on personal prioritizing as this is where I felt most challenged, excited and saw potential to apply personal informatics to. Some of the key insights in this theme were: “I transfer work trips to our calendar at home, but only a few weeks before, mainly so Mas [husband] can’t see what’s ahead of him!” (Kate, UK) Meaning: People only really use a ‘public’ calendar for really important events that are necessary to share. “I don’t currently write in a diary as I imagine someone reading it, so I won’t put anything personal in it…….I like the approach of this diary, I actually find that I want to be more productive just so u can write something positive in it, kind of indirect motivation”(Eric, USA) Meaning: Having to actively record you activities allows you to reflect and become motivated to do well. “I would love to be able to schedule time for reading…….but it sounds kind of dorky….so I would love to be able to track some of these things I would like to be able to do without having to actually track it” (Amanda, USA) Meaning: People feel silly scheduling ‘me time’ but are interested to understand what they spend their time on and when. “I keep a personal to-do list, I prioritise everything, so when I have been neglecting something I move it up the list, I keep it on my desktop so I can always see it” (Jon, USA) Meaning: People need to have a constant reminder of what it important to do otherwise they will ignore it. “Hobbies are great when they are built into your life, I love it, but when you don’t do it for a while you forget how much you enjoy it until you do it again” (Pernille, Denmark) Meaning: People easily forget how important something is and how much they enjoy it when they stop doing it. “Prioritizing is difficult, it would be good to have ground rules, or a rule of thumb to follow” (Francesca, Italy) Meaning: People like to be guided in some way when it comes to making personal decisions. “I found writing in a diary can be really helpful, as it gave me a very good chance of stopping to have a deeper insight into my thoughts and feelings” (Laura, Italy) Meaning: Periods of reflection are a positive thing!
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
DESIGN CHALLENGE Due to an increased pace of life and personal competition with ones self to become ‘someone better’ people are continually busy, going from one task to the next. This has been heightened by a more prominent use of technology in our lives, which has resulted in lifestyle barriers that used to exist have been broken; people can now work anywhere, contact anyone anytime and achieve much more on the move. The result of having this fast pace of life is that people become absorbed in ‘achieving more’ and detached from what their day-to-day life looks like and what brings them a real sense of enjoyment. Within their busy lives, people find it hard to prioritize when making decisions in their own life and would often like to be guided in some way. Some people use diaries and calendars to schedule (make time for) ‘practical appointments’ but very rarely for personal activities. Yet they are interested to understand what they spend their time on, especially for things they enjoy doing, but rarely have time to do. In order for people to have a balanced life on a bigger scale, they have to first reconnect to themselves, and focus on what they need to be content rather than everything that is possible. The design challenge is: How might we create a flexible and customizable platform that will help people to reconnect to themselves, enabling them to prioritize in their lives by keeping track of and reminding them of past experiences that they can then use as a reference point to make more informed decisions? Other Questions to probe for brainstorming 1. How can we create a greater awareness of elements of our lives that bring us enjoyment? 2. How much time we actually spend on these activities? 3. How might we compare what your day actually looks like with what you would ideally like it to be? 4. How can the act of recording these experiences be seamlessly integrated into your lifestyle?
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
FURTHER EXPLORATIONS Brainstorming and Idea Generation After I had formulated my design challenge that I felt was the correct combination of being open enough to generate lots of wild idea’s, but not so open that I would have no theme running through them, it was time to start brainstorming. I facilitated a brainstorming session to generate ideas surrounding my design challenge. This was a huge success!! A lot of creative ideas were generated that proved to be great inspiration and triggered new thinking. After completing the brainstorm I spent a little time clustering my ideas before going through them. Some the clusters that formed were goal orientated tracking, tracking with sensors and using tangible objects to visualize behaviour.
Figure 12: Clustering brainstorming ideas Initial Seed Out of all the drawings and post-its that were filtered I picked 5 and sketched them out further, thinking of possible solutions of how they could be implemented into people’s lives. By the end of this short exercise there was already one idea that was stuck in my mind. The idea was based around tracking your happiness at different locations through GPS and inputing who you were with and what you were doing to add a specific context.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 13: Initial Seed of an idea (tracking happiness to your location) Experience Prototype #1 At this point I decided to do an initial experience prototype to test the basis of my idea. For the experiment I recruited 4 people and on a map of Copenhagen I got got them to plot their weekends activities, after giving them step-by- step instructions to. These were: Step 1: Write a list of priorities you like to do on (i) a daily basis (ii) a weekly basis. Step 2: On different coloured post-its categorize these priorities, how do you divide up your time. Step 3: On the map of Copenhagen mark where you live and work. Step 4: Plot your weekend activities by writing individual activities you did, at what time and with who. Write these activities on coloured post-its corresponding to one of the categories you already defined (use the color code you set). Step 5: Place the post-it on the map at the location of where the activity took place Step 6: Give the activity a rating out of 5, of how satisfying it was (writing on the post it as well) 1 being low and 5 being high.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 14: Ujjval completing the map experiment
Figure 15: Comparing different peoples maps Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Experience Prototype #1 learnings 1. People are unaware of how much they actually do, or how busy they are, until they actually sit down and think about it. 2. People have very different approaches about how they categorize their time. 3. Using colour to show different categories, very quickly enables you to see patterns in behaviour, especially related to the home and workplace. 4. Putting priorities into categories allows you to see what areas you spend most time on in your life, and then you can go to a deeper layer of data to find out specific activity etc. 5. The people who you are with often has a huge influence on the satisfaction of the activity you are doing. To learn more about these patterns and behaviours I decided to test the experience prototype on myself as well. But instead of putting a few days on a map, I recorded everything I did each day on a new map. This way I was able to compare each day individually, and see the patterns and routines that occured. Scenarios After these initial experience prototypes I could see that there was potential in my idea, especially by the reactions of the people I had tested it on. My next step was to develop the idea further, for this I first created a simple system diagram of the service and then started on a detailed scenario, showing how the system would work, the user experience and the critical touchpoints. During this time I thought of the different stages of the service, how the data would be recorded, any feedback the user would get, how would the user review their data and reflect on it and how the service could be expanded in the future. The result was a very detailed and slightly overwhelming scenario!
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 16: Detailed scenario
Figure 17: Detailed scenario turned into a book for midway reviews Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Service Blueprint After the scenario was produced, i decided to look at the service on a more generic level, and created an initial service blueprint. This allowed me to focus and establish the key user interactions, the role of the service provider and the touch points of the service that need to be designed for my experience prototyping and my end communication. I have also come up with a name for the service (“echo”) and started working on the branding at this point, as i felt this was an important factor to make my service appear believable! Throughout this process of mapping out my service i was able to continually develop the idea, seeing where there were holes that needed to be thought out and coming up with new touchpoints that could add to the over all experience. I was very focused on creating tangible touchpoints throughout the service, so it wasn’t purely screen based.
Figure 18: Paper based service blueprint
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Experience prototype #2 When I felt I had my service mapped out fully, I wanted to start doing more experience prototyping, to test different elements of the service. I conducted a quick experience prototype to test of few questions I had about my idea. From my first prototyping session I wanted to learn: 1. How much effort is it to log your daily activities and the goals you want to achieve? Do you gain something from doing so? 2. What is it like to have to quantify your happiness after doing certain tasks, and what is the the most natural way to do it? 3. What does it feel like to receive friendly nudges of encouragement and motivation from the service? Do they work or does it just become irritating receiving them? During the experiment I asked Sarah to track specific tasks she wanted to achieve by sending an SMS to the service (my mobile phone) when she had completed it. At this point, she also had to quantify her happiness and satisfaction by using a set of cards I had given her. These asked her to illustrate how she was feeling in a variety of ways i.e with words, colour, icons. While all this was going on, the service was also sending her prompts and motivation by SMS’s to encourage her to complete her goals!
Figure 19: Experience prototyping pack Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009 Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year, 9th June 2009
Figure 20: Experience prototyping instructions
Figure 21: Everything needed to get started! Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 22: SMS sent to the Echo “service” during the experience prototype After the experiment was complete I interview Sarah to get her feedback on the experience. Experience Prototype #2 learnings 1. Receiving messages and reminders worked as a good support line. 2. By recoding what she was doing, it brought things to her focus, she started to realise why she was or wasn’t doing something. 3. She liked that the service was personal, so she felt more commitment towards it and responsibility for her actions, as it was something that was helping her. 4. It was easiest to quantify how she was feeling with a number or slider, or sometimes using words to describe it. 5. Seeing what you have achieve is very motivating, and remembering how good you felt when you did it is encouraging to do it again. 6. Knowing it was a person on the end of the phone and not an automated message made her feel more motivated and responsible. So how can the service be personal to each user and seem like a buddy or friend? Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Experience prototype #3 During my third experience prototypeI wanted to question what motivates people to stick to a program and how would people react if they are rewarded for it? During this experiment, like the previous one I got Mimi to track certain tasks she wanted to complete, and alert the service (me!) when she had done so through either an SMS or by leaving a physical note on my desk. When Mimi was doing well I would give her rewards in different ways…these included: 1. An email with a reward voucher attached to it that she had to print out and bring to me to then exchange it for a gift. 2. A surprise gift and note left on her desk one morning. 3. simple “well done” messages to her mobile phone.
Figure 23: The activity sheet that Mimi filled in (what she wanted to achieve)
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
Figure 24: Some of the rewards Mimi recieved Experience Prototype #3 learnings 1. The system has to be flexible enough to deal with changes in people’s schedules and spontaneous events that may happen. 2. When a gift was a complete surprise, it was better than knowing you were about to receive something in advance. 3. Big rewards were not expected as part of the service, but it was nice when the little surprises were personal and tailored to the individual as it makes you feel like the service knows you. After conducting these prototyping sessions and consolidating these learnings, I made some small changes to some of the feedback mechanisms that would be used in the service. I then started to think about the final communication of the service. I created a storyboard for my final scenario, this allowed me to imagine a real person using the echo service as well as see how many props and service touchpoints I needed to design and produce to communicate the idea in my video. From this point on the focus of my work was producing the final interfaces and physical artifacts.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009 Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year, 9th June 2009
Figure 24: Paper based service touchpoints needed for the video
Figure 25: Interface shot of Echo software Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
MY CONCEPT Who Is it for? Anyone who know that they have an unbalanced life and are unhappy about it. They want to become more aware of their habits and understand their behaviour so they know where to make changes. It is for people that currently live a busy lifestyle and find it hard to prioritize, often sacrificing the things they really enjoy doing, so they can achieve more in other areas of their life. These people are motivated to do well and want to change! What is the idea? Echo is a service that provides a platform for people to self reflect and become more aware of their lifestyle patterns by helping them pinpoint areas of their life that bring them personal enjoyment and supporting them to experience it more often. How does it work? It works by using GPS tracking and direct reporting (data input) through the users mobile phone to build up a map of how they spend their time, with who and how happy they are. The data that is tracked and recorded is then transformed into different visualizations that the person can interact with, reflect on and see opportunities for change in their behaviour. What is the Value? Giving people a tool to reflect, allows them to reconnect to what their day-to-day life looks like and understand what they spend their time on, with who and how happy they are. In turn this allows them to pinpoint areas of their life that bring them personal enjoyment. By giving people the platform to see these trends and patterns in their behaviour and opportunities for change they might normally miss, it can help people moderate their behaviour in a number of positive ways. The service is not designed to control behaviour, but to monitor and display actions in a way that will raise questions with the person.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
SERVICE STAGES Sign Up Before the user can start using the service they need to log onto the echo website and decide which subscription they would like. At this point they will commit to the service and make a payment. Shortly after they will receive a confirmation email to reassure them that their order has been processed. Implementation: set-up and sync A few days later the customer will receive the echo start up pack in the post. The pack contains everything needed to get started including a welcome letter, a URL link and serial number for the smart phone application and offline software, a membership card and a set of instructions. The user will input where they live and work on a geographical map of their town or city. They will also make a list of activities they want to achieve on a daily, weekly and occasional basis and then place these in customized categories, for example ‘me time’, work time and play time. The last stage is to create an address book of friends, family and people they spend time with on a regular basis. Once this has been done, they can then sync their phone and computer, so they are ready to start logging their behaviour. At any point the user can go back to their profile and edit their personal settings. Use: Recording Data Through the echo application, the smart phone’s GPS will be activated, seamlessly tracking their location and storing the information. When the user completes one of their priorities, they can capture their activity by using a simple user interface, entering what activity they are doing and who they are with from the database of information they have already created - alternatively they can choose to enter a new activity or person on the move. Reflection in the moment, and on the go feedback When the user has completed the activity they then have the opportunity to reflect in the moment. They can rate their happiness on a scale from happy to sad and can add another level of context by either recording a voice clip or by tagging the location and event. They can also receive gentle feedback nudges and motivational messages to inform them of how might they can change their behaviour in real time. These include friendly prompts about activities they haven’t completed, well done messages, reminders of past happy experiences via MMS when they walk past locations they have previously tagged and a monthly personal review of their actions.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
View data and reflection over time At any point the user can view their interactive data visualizations through the echo software, seeing how they have been spending their time, either on a specific day or on a weekly basis. The data can also be filtered to ‘happiness mode’ so they can pin point when and what they were doing when they are happiest. More specific data on how well they are meeting their priorities, when the last did an activity, or spent time with a certain person is also available. This tool for reflection aims to provide information that is actionable, helping people see patterns in their behavior and therefore able to make more informed decisions. Expanding: Building a community and international travel As the echo service grows there are potential opportunities for people to share their data with friends they trust through an online platform. This could lead to exchange of advice and suggestions based common interests, or even finding similar interests with friends, that they didn’t know they had. The service could also be expanded so subscribers to the service could receive customised maps based on their personal priorities for travel abroad, helping them to carry out their ‘happy activities’ while in another city or country. To view my project demo video or user scenario video that will visually demonstrate the concept please go to http://www.eilidhdickson.co.uk/thesis.html
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
FEEDBACK
Figure 26: Kate (original user) viewing my concept videos At the end of my project I was lucky enough to have time to go back to one of my original users to get feedback on my idea. I let Kate see both my videos I then waited for a response! Originally kate had told me that she “missed time just to do stuff, like making phone calls to friends and going to the cinema” Hearing her feedback after she watched the video was one of the best moments of the project: “the more I watch it the more i want to use it.... I really like the idea of having reminders about non everyday things....and knowing when you last spent time with someone. It’s also good that is doesn’t control your life!” The fact that she completely understood the concept with no further explanation was fantastic! It was even better that she saw potential in the idea and could see herself using it, especially as the solution was based around one of her intial problems I established during my user research.
Eilidh Dickson, CIID/DKDS Pilot Year 2009
web: www.eilidhdickson.co.uk mail: cosies_rule@hotmail.com ph: +[44] 7845822854