The task was to observe some people and derive a product by finding a need that they had.Unfortunately most of the people that I interact with regularly aren't suitable subjects -I had an idea based around homework, but understandably schools won't let you in to observe the pupils; the other idea was based around the elderly but similar problems arise and, in addition, there comes a stage where the new technology you are going to be picking up is a Zimmer and not an iPhone.
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| Capturing a document, need to share it |
In my interactions with these two groups I did observe some tasks that I was carrying out, so I decided to use these for my needs. Both groups get documents that need to be dealt with, say homework for one and hospital appointments for the other, this generates a lot of paper, people need copies and all the usual. I found myself taking photos of these, as did my daughter -who promptly deleted it highlighting the need for off-phone storage, with our phones. So far so good, but the filing is where it falls down.
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| Document upload and filing -there has to be a better way. |
The document has to be got off the phone, one way or another, then filed somewhere locally or remotely and found again when you need it.
Needs and Goals
Here's a brainstorming list I came up with :
- Quick
- Simple
- Easy to use
- Documents are easy to find
- Categories
- Tags
- Date/time stamps
- Location stamps
- Safe
- Secure
- On hand -don't have to find a computer to access.
- Shareable
- Feature extraction for filing/tagging
- OCR for filing/tagging
- Social coz you have to
- Calender integration
Inspirations
Five things that might help define the solution :
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| The fridge wall of information |
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Important household information is posted in a known, obvious and prominent place.
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| Filing Wallet |
The old school definition of organised, either alphabetically or, as this one is, 'tagged'.
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| Filing Clerk |
Someone to get the piece of information you want. They may have their own system specifically tailored to where they work. Slobber extra.
It should be, one click is a bit of an ask but we need to get as close as possible.
Shiny, the app should look sleek and crafted -which will be a challenge for me.
Interesting - I'd say this relates to Allison's going paperless point of view: http://allisonunzipped.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/storyboards-and-prototypes.html something we all struggle with I'd say. I wonder if there will be another breakthrough like the USB thumb drive that suddenly makes it easier to get things between devices - I guess an app that would auto correct photos of document to make them legible, OCR them and turn them into some distributable open format like PDF perhaps - that would be pretty cool, a smartphone camera app that would turn a photo of a document into a best effort PDF ...
ReplyDeleteYes, I did some playing around with this sort of thing in the Autumn for someone with a scanning system -but there you needed a scanner to get the image. Having got it, it can be OCR'd with greater or lesser success, I think I'd let the backend handle the image correction and OCR but it would be good for the smartphone to try and guide the user to a decent quality photo.
Deletethat's a good idea - provide some tips and advice to the user while in camera mode - maybe something like a green red bar that would give you incremental feedback on the lighting, angle etc. It could almost be like a missle lock or something - once you get the tone, hit fire and you've taken a picture most likely to work for OCR ...
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