Topiary: A Tool for Prototyping Location-Enhanced Applications

1. Topiary: A Tool for Prototyping Location-Enhanced Applications Yang Li, Jason I. Hong, James A. Landay, Presented by Daniel Schulman

2. Location-Enhanced Applications • Use the location of users, others. • Examples: • AT&T Find Friends service. • E911 • Hard to design: • Need lots of technical expertise. • Must use low-level sensing technology.

3. Topiary • A prototyping tool for location-enhanced applications. • Supports iterative design without actually having to wander around for testing.

4. Topiary • Active Map: • Models a map and locations within it. • Scenario Producer: • Specify which people and locations are involved. • Storyboard Workshop: • Storyboards can be triggered by scenarios.

5. Topiary – User Testing • Testing is done via a Wizard-of-Oz setup. • The designer can move people and items around on the map. • If real sensor data is available, it can also be used (via wireless networking).

6. Topiary – Evaluation • Participants created a tour-guide application. • All were able to use Topiary, and found it relatively easy. • The research team also iteratively designed a tour guide themselves.

7. Critique • A useful new tool for a fairly new type of UI. • Based on lots of assumptions about the type of UI that is being designed: • Heavily biased towards map-based UIs. • There could be other kinds of location-enhanced applications.

8. Future Directions • Why restrict yourself to 2D maps? • 3D is important – what floor am I on? • Is the map always the most important thing to show the end-user? • Is there always a single map? • Shifts in scale – from an outside to an inside map.

9. Future Directions • Why restrict yourself to location? • Can sense orientation, temperature, lighting, movement, etc. • The use of a Wizard-of-Oz setup for testing can generalize – can Topiary’s interface also be generalized?