Scenarios
Methodology
Just some of our ideas
Once our team had created our user personas, we prepared to write context scenarios in order to illustrate how our proposed product would help our personas achieve their goals. At that point we still had a number of diverse project ideas and directions that we were considering, so we went through a process of analyzing them and deciding which direction we would ultimately take.
Ultimately, we decided that our final product would be a mobile application that has the following attributes:
- map-based interface
- allows users to see and pick up ‘points’ as they walk around in the world
- enables users to visually track and compare both their points and their walking progress
- allows users to see where other users are on the map, anonymously
- businesses would sponsor the points, and then the points could be redeemed at local businesses.
With this loose framework in mind, we each created scenarios in which our imagined application helped one of our personas succeed at achieving his or her goals.
Scenarios
1. Adam saves money and stays fit
2. Kathy dual-tasks while walking
3. Marissa gets someone to start walking
4. Dan sees a safe route home
1. Adam saves money and stays fit
Adam wakes up at 4:45 am, 15 minutes before his usual time; since yesterday he saw that his phone application suggested that if he started for office 15 minutes before he would avoid traffic. Before starting his run to the gym he opens up his running statistics in the app and it shows him that yesterday he ran 6 mph and burned 720 calories, also he earned 3 points on his yesterday’s run, which can be used for buying stocks at the local stock broker. After he reaches the gym he sees that he beat his previous record by running at a pace of 7 mph, which earns him an extra point, so his total from all previous runs becomes 2007 points. He decides to use these points there and then and uses the app to inform the local broker (who sponsored the points) to buy 5 stocks of “Acme Inc.”
With the help of the app Adam avoids the long traffic jam, since he started earlier today. He reaches a few minutes earlier and parks at subsidized parking lot. When he starts walking to the office, the app notifies Adam that if he were to take a specified alternate path, he wouldn’t get late for office (based on his current pace of walking) and he would be able to collect a bonus point from a local downtown business, which he can even use with his favorite charitable organization “Help Inc.” He decides to take the slightly longer path and when he reaches the office the app lets him know that along with the 5 bonus points he also burned 30 calories and he has moved 5% closer to losing his extra vacation weight. During the lunch hour Adam decides to have lunch at the new restaurant around the corner for which he earned the points in the morning. While walking to the restaurant he earns more points, which in effect gets him a free drink with his lunch.
At the end of the work day Adam returns to his car in the parking lot. He decides to utilize his time by looking at the cool map interface of the app. He notices that a lot of people marked in the downtown area of the map have a very high points score and have saved a lot of money by utilizing those points at the local businesses. He gets motivated and decides to earn some for himself too. He zooms out on the map to see the most profitable path for him, the app shows him a path that is a mile longer, to the parking lot, which could potentially earn him a lot of points and still not make him late to get home. He knows he has some extra time since he got to work earlier today and got off a bit early as well. He takes the path shown by the application, on the way, he suddenly notices a surprise bonus in the middle of the Diag, so he takes a detour to catch the bonus, when he reaches the point he gets that bonus, which is for the nearby flower shop, the app shows him the direction to the shop, he doesn’t want to waste such a good bonus point so he buys flowers for his wife and then decides to walk back to the car. On reaching the car, the app informs him that he burned another 70 calories on his way back from work and also earned 4 points. Adam drives back home.
On reaching home he makes his wife very pleased with the bouquet of flowers he bought on the way. He and his family decide to take a walk in the neighborhood. Adam opens the app to look at where people are most concentrated around the neighborhood and finds out from the map interface of the app that a lots of people are walking in the nearby park. He and his family decide to visit the park, on the way to the park and back home Adam gains a few points which he plans on using for the buying the stocks of “XYZ corp.”
After dinner Adam opens up the app and browses to the records screen. He sees that up until now he has saved more than $50 in costs of restaurants where he has lunch and also in buying the stocks. Also he is very amazed to see that he has climbed Mt. Everest 3 times and dove to the bottom of Pacific Ocean twice in terms of the number of miles he has walked. He decides to share these amazing facts with his friends on Facebook and twitter, so he selects the “share” button in the app and instantly shares this information with his friends. He decides to go to sleep, since he wants’ to be early to work tomorrow as well so he can continue his points trek.
2. Kathy dual-tasks while walking
During lunchtime at Dodds & Goodman Associates, Kathy Cole is on a mission. Her husband’s birthday is coming up this weekend, and she had not found a new and interesting place that she has not taken her husband out to for dinner. She quickly ate the dinner she brought from home, and headed downstairs out of her office building to find a restaurant. Her husband, Mike, loves Italian food- so she considered bringing up Google maps on her iPhone. However, she remembered that her new app will provide not only location based points of interest, but also the “points” on the map which add up to points which she could redeem for coupons. Excited, she opened the new app as she was walking on the street. She did not have trouble stumbling or tripping while browsing through this new application, because she set it to “transparency mode”, where she could view the sidewalk/where she was walking via the camera embedded in the iphone.
The new app is able to not only show her current location, but Italian restaurants in specific, as she has indicated. Each of the restaurants is graphically shown, including snapshots of the store front/signage. Also, Kathy is able to see the hours of operations, cost, and specials of the day. On top of some restaurant icons are “points”, which she could add up just by walking over to pick them up on the app. She had been utilizing this new app for about a week now, and as soon as she walked over to Bar Louie’s, her point went up from 97 to 100. Now looking down at the application, she could see that some restaurants indicate a coupon sign.
Continuing walking in order to grab more points that are located 7 blocks away, she realized that Mike’s birthday should be pretty festive (it’s the big 4-0), so she utilized the new app for a quick view of restaurant popularity. Not only by reviews, which can often be flawed, but by the amount of people crowded in that particular place. Little specs of light indicates people, and the more concentrated around a point of interest, the brighter the location seems on the new app. It was lunchtime, so many people were crowded around Zingerman’s Deli , where she has never gone before. That place served lunch only, according to the abbreviated profile shown on the map of this restaurant. Kathy thought that she should definitely take her child and Mike there during lunch on the weekends. She turned her attention back to the map, to find places with a coupon icon where she would get a discount, and where people are crowded. She located Sushi Hiro, located just 10 blocks from her location, which offered her a 5% discount on meals over 50 dollars. Since it is Mike’s birthday, she decided that they would be using more than 50 dollars. To make sure, she looked over the abbreviated profile shown for the restaurant, which confirmed that they serve lunch and dinner.
To make a reservation, Kathy clicks on the restaurant icon, and three options pop up- dial, show menu, or send email. After carefully perusing though the menu options, she clicks on the dial button to make a reservation for Mike’s birthday in the weekend.
She felt a sense of accomplishment, because the family would be benefiting from her points earned which she collected by consistently walking around to earn them at different locations. Also, Kathy did not have to waste time opening different browsers to find a menu, browse popularity, see an overview of the number of people currently at the restaurant, and to call them for reservation. It was all done, while walking, with the new app.
3. Marissa gets someone to start walking
Marissa Penfield woke up feeling a little groggy on Wednesday morning. She stretched and got ready for work, and then set out on her one-mile walk to her job as a manager at the Sunrise Community Center in Ann Arbor, MI. She had been a health education outreach worker for about three years, and she really loved her job; she really liked to feel like she was improving the lives of her clients.
By the time Marissa got to work, she was feeling refreshed and energetic. ‘If only I could get my clients to walk more often,’ she thought to herself; she knew the mental and physical benefits would drastically help improve her clients’ wellbeing. She liked to think she setting a good example by walking to work, but she knew that it would take much more to get them excited about walking more.
Her first client of the day was Margaret, a 39-year old secretary who had been struggling with her weight. Margaret often told Marissa that she found it difficult to do intense workouts, and she couldn’t seem to find the time for walking – plus, walking was too boring for her. Today Marissa was excited to show Margaret a new phone application she had just discovered; the application attempted to make walking more exciting by allowing walkers to collect points at physical locations around town and then redeem those points at local businesses. It had a really cool display that showed where the points were located on the map of the town; you could also see where the people with the most points were on the map. The coolest thing was how you could track your progress in the app; not only could you see your own points compared to the local standings, but you could also see your walking progress based on how far you had gotten ‘to the moon.’
Marissa knew that Margaret was addicted to her smart phone; Margaret took every spare moment to check her email on her phone. In fact, when Margaret arrived, she sat down in the chair across from Marissa, pulled out her phone and said ‘Hang on, I just need to remind my husband to take Brian to his allergy appointment.” When she was finished, Marissa had Margaret download the application to her phone; it only took a few seconds, and then the application used their current location to open a map view of Ann Arbor.
They could see a number of multicolored specs scattered across the map, and Marissa explained that these were points; as they zoomed in they could see that some of points were on streets and some were in parks. Margaret lived a little bit outside the town border, so instead of panning they just entered her address and saved it as her ‘home’ address. The map adjusted to show the area around Margaret’s home, and she saw that the park near her home was full of points; there were also points along her neighborhood streets.
“What can I do with the points?” she asked. Marissa explained that local businesses sponsor the points, and when you gather enough of them you can redeem them at the local businesses. Indeed, as they looked at the map, they saw that points tended to be clustered around local businesses – Marissa had heard that businesses were hoping to increase foot traffic this way.
Marissa and Margaret set some physical activity goals for the week, but instead of their usual ’30 minutes, 3 times a week’ exercise goal they set a point goal; Margaret would aim to get 30 points on 3 different days of the week.
The next Wednesday, Margaret came back for her weekly meeting with Marissa. She was beaming as she said she had surpassed her goals for the week for the first time ever; she had actually walked five of the last seven days, and she had collected over 230 points already. She found that the challenge of finding points made walking much more fun, and she took her daughter out to help her find points in the park by her house. She saw on her moon graphic that she had just lifted off the earth’s surface and was floating in the atmosphere; she was really excited to see how she could progress over time. Finally, she was happy to think that her points could help her save money at local businesses.
Marissa was happily surprised that the app was so successful in getting her client interested in walking. It reminded her of news stories of wii being used to help overweight kids lose weight; she started planning a departmental meeting on using the app to help clients achieve their goals.
It is almost 3 AM, and Dan Bronson is just about to leave his job for the evening. It has been a long, busy night at the help desk and he is exhausted; he can’t wait to get home and go to sleep. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have his bicycle with him as usual; he had to take it in to be repaired a few days ago, and he still hasn’t gotten it back yet. He got a ride to work today with a friend, so it looks like he’ll be walking home tonight.
He usually doesn’t worry too much about walking alone at night, but there has been a drastic increase in crime in his part of town lately so he wants to be cautious tonight; it’s also a Saturday night and a full moon, so he might take some extra precautions tonight.
He has heard of a new mobile phone application/game that can show you where other mobile phone users are, in an anonymous way; he’s heard that this can be useful in finding out where is the safest route to walk home. He doesn’t have an iPhone, or any kind of smart phone for that matter; but he heard that the application builders also added a web-based interface that is accessible from a PC.
He does a Google search for the application website, and opens the map-based display; he searches in a search box for his town, and the map quickly zooms in. As he’s watching, the background color on the screen darkens a few shades and pinpoints of light start to appear. The pinpoints represent mobile phone users; he sees a trail of light down State street, and clusters of light around late-night eateries downtown. He could choose to see app-related information about the mobile phone users who also participate in the app, like how many points they have or how far they’ve walked; but right now, all he cares about is seeing where people are so he can take a well-populated route home.
The best route becomes clear after just a few seconds. He decides to follow the most-lighted route on his way home – he’s not really worried that anything will happen, but this gives him peace of mind.
Once Dan arrives home safely, he starts to consider getting a mobile phone that can support the application. He is interested in having this information at his fingertips, and he thinks the app’s point system sounds interesting; he is always trying to save money, so he likes the idea of being able to redeem points at local restaurants. He will look into that.