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February 14, 2008

What would you like to get from Talking-Points

In our opinion we had a very productive GROCS design review last Friday. We got a ton of very valuable feedback what people (in this case only sighted people) would like to get from the Talking-Points system. In this post I will just try to summarize some of the requests we got from people. If we got anything wrong, if we forgot something, if you thought of something else, please go ahead and write a comment. So here are the requests:

• I would like the system not to be so consumer oriented. I don’t want to buy things I don’t want information about businesses. I want different types of information, for example about libraries.

• I like the advertising part. I could imagine that businesses would notify me about special deals or maybe give out “coupons”.

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  For me it is very important to have options to opt-in or opt-out certain information. So I can control what I get to hear.

  
  


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  Even after living in a city for many years, I still pass certain locations and ask myself: “what’s that is all about?“. But I never take the time to ask or look it up at home. It would be nice if the system could tell me that.

  
  


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  I think it could be a great help if you come to a new city where it normally takes you some time to figure out the ins and outs. The system could give good insights about that.



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  I would like real-time information. For example the number of available seats or the length of the cue when I pass a restaurant.

  
  


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  I would like to get directional information and distances to places.

  
  


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  I’m a big beer drinker and I would like to be notified about beer specials and whether I’m in the happy-hour before I enter a place.



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  I would like some extended sensory information. For example, what kind of ground I’m walking on, which people have been here before, …

  
  


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  I’m interested in the evolution of publishing and this could be new and exciting format.

  
  



• There could also be really different information like that there is a cocoon next to the path when you walk in the Arboretum.

• I got a hot chocolate the other day at Starbucks and then found a much nicer place where I could have gotten the chocolate just a block away. I would like to get notified about those kinds of business alternatives.

• I think the most important feature is that it is customizable for my perspective and can somehow understand my current situation. If I have coffee in my hand I don’t want to hear any information about coffee shops anymore.



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  I would like to know where the next restroom is.

  
  


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  Could the system give me information about it when I point at a location it instead of walking by it?

  
  

Summarizing this we concluded that by far the most important part of Talking-Points is going to be customization! In this one meeting alone there were so many different people with very different needs, that could hardly be satisfied with a "default" system.

So our approach is going to be to collect as much different information about each location as we can get and try to store and organize it so that it will be easy to pull customized data. The abstract approach right now is to have all kinds of small, different information pieces linked to one location and labeled with tags that represent when they might be useful. For example tags like "blind", "tourist", "history", etc. Hopefully we will be able to pull relevant information for a particular person in a particular situation using these tags.

Posted by jhild at 11:53 PM | Comments (0)