Storyboarding and Prototyping the Mobile Filer

Problem Definition

In last week's need finding post I came up with the, not particularly original, idea of a mobile filer, this week it's time to prototype that. The first thing we want is a point of view, a very high level problem definition :

I want to record or copy documents and other objects and file them so that I can easily find them.

Having a definition, we flesh things out with a couple of storyboards, at this stage we are still in the 'fail early' mindset -trying to get something that looks like it will work.

Storyboarding

I created two storyboards, showing the flow through the application.

First Storyboard

In the first storyboard the user organises his files on a computer, this gets around the challenge of the small screen size  and the poor interface of the phone.

Second storyboard

In the second version we accept the limitations of the mobile device, on a tablet these wouldn't be so bad, and do the organising there. This means that we do the job in one go.

Ideally we would be able to use stuff we already know such as the date and time, or the location or type of image, or stuff we can work out -perhaps via OCR to carry out much of the classification automatically.

Paper Prototypes

Ideal Input System

 The ideal input system above may look a bit facetious (moi?), but it serves to illustrate a point, if this system was smart enough this is how we would like the input to work.

Likely Input System

A more likely system lets the user choose between our two storyboards above, if he presses 'upload' then the image will be filed immediately, and he will probably have to sort it out later. Otherwise the user can tag the image -default tags are time stamp and location.

Finding Notes

To retrieve documents the user selects a category of note and drills into it. I have just realised that I need a way to move notes between categories, so there would be an edit screen in here too.

There is also an opportunity for a simpler output system, which I had better sketch up now.

Search Based Interface

In this version  the user gets a set of important (flagged?, latest?) notes up front and access to the rest of the documents is driven through search.


If I get a chance I'll put up a video demonstration -but life is getting in the way.