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CASE STUDY: GENTLE REMINDER FOR IPHONEThe GoalGentle Reminder is a conversation timer from Ringmaster Mobile. The problem with most alarms when used for conversation is that they disrupt the conversation when they sound, breaking the spell of an engrossing conversation. If you are having a productive conversation with someone, for instance in an interview or business negotiation, you might want to decide that it's OK to miss a train or to be late for your next appointment. Ideally, you would be able to do this without disturbing the other party. This means that neither the alert nor the setup should attract too much attention. Our guiding philosophy, was to do one thing and do it well. The Solution: DisplayIt was clear that the alert technique had to be visual to avoid disrupting the conversation. Gentle Reminder uses the brightness of the display and fast up-and-down motion to alert you. This is designed to catch your peripheral vision. Gentle Reminder is designed to be running on a device that is sitting on a tabletop between the two parties in conversation, or perhaps in front of you when you are using the speakerphone or headset of your iPhone. In order for the brightness change to be noticeable when the alert time passes, Gentle Reminder slowly and imperceptibly dims the clock face. The indicator that an alert time is set and the alerting itself is designed not to be noticeable to the party who is not expecting the alert. At an angle where shades of gray are harder to see, the clock face just looks like a clock, especially as it dims. Once the alert activates, the clock face remains at full brightness so the current time is easy to keep track of and to let you know that the alert time has passed. The clock is simple and legible so that it can be easily monitored at a distance and so that it invites touching it. As a consequence of these design decisions, Gentle Reminder uses no language, so it requires no localization and can be sold anywhere without modification. The Solution: InputGentle Reminder is a one-screen application. Setting the timer and watching it count down happen on the same screen and on the same clock face. This was not obvious at the outset; the team considered using a time picker either on another screen or in a split screen, but we wanted it to be as simple as possible. In order to not distract the other party, we wanted to make it possible to set the alert time with one hand. This led to making as much of the screen active for input as possible so the targets for touching are as large as possible, with the most space given to the most likely inputs. The clock face itself lets you set a time. A quick touch will set an approximate time, but if you carefully watch the on-screen feedback, you can set it quite precisely. As a shortcut for common times, you can touch the numbers on the clock face to set the alert time for any five-minute interval, and the black areas at the top and bottom will set the alert time for on the hour or half-hour. We felt that conversations were rarely less than 15 minutes, and that it would be more useful to allow conversations that take a little bit longer than an hour instead. Therefore, Gentle Reminder sets times between 15 and 75 minutes. If you touch a part of the clock that is less than 15 minutes away from the current time, the app adds an hour, and displays this to you with an overlapping pie wedge and through animating the triangle indicator. While you are touching the screen, the indicator is green and the gray pie wedge is a bit darker to make it easy to see what you are doing. Once you've set the alert time, the indicator and pie wedge become less prominent so as not to tip off the other party. DevelopmentExcept for drawings of the clock graphics which were almost in their final form during design discussions, the development didn't start until we agreed to the design as outlined above. Because so much had been agreed upon and discussed already, the total development time was only a couple of days. (Gentle Reminder is written in Objective C.) User TestingUsers had a positive reaction to the app, understanding what it does even if they did not have tight schedules that would prompt a need for an app like this. Based on our initial experience with the first draft, the behavior of the black areas at the top and bottom were simplified. Originally, they were divided into four sections to set :55, :00, :25, and :30, but that was too clever and hard for people to figure out. We also changed the animation for the alert from pulsating by growing and shrinking to straightforward shaking. The original animation seemed comical, and fast motion is even more likely to register in your peripheral vision. I was surprised that so many people wanted to "drag"the alert indicator from the current time to the desired time. The app allows it, of course, but it seems that nobody really expects just one touch to do everything! |
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