Ericsson Fetch
ERICSSON FETCH SERVICE: As GPS becomes more ubiquitous in mobile devices the opportunity to design location based services arises and creates new meaningful ways of connecting people to various contextual environments. This collaborative project was sponsored by Ericsson and challenged us to envision these future services through discoveries made by design ethnography research.
Ericsson Fetch is a future location based service based on Intelligent information agents collecting and sorting information based on preferences and behaviour of the user and their location. The more a person uses the service the more relevant information it collects and sorts.
The location based service would mine information into a to do list and remind the user when it discovers a close by location where to purchase items specified. Another opportunity to improve the retail experience in in send software agents and mine information into a personalized flyer of weekly specials to suit the users tastes and needs.
Below is a scenario of the Ericsson Fetch service in use.
Design Ethnography Research
DESIGN ETHNOGRAPHY: The beginnings of this project, we had no definitive area to focus on and solve. The scope of ethnographic observations and research during the first month was wide open to discover areas of opportunity to design for. The research was done collaboratively with fellow classmates Jordi Parra and Meng Meng. The area of observation we focused on was Lindehallen cafe which has large cafeteria style atmosphere located in front of the library. We wanted to discover what were people’s motives and behaviours, along with what type of location based services could be developed based on user observations. Lindehallen cafe is a central meeting point on the campus and becomes a social and study area for many students at various times throughout the day.
Cultural Probes
CULTURAL PROBES: One of the next steps was to build several cultural probe kits that were given to a range of students throughout the cafe. During the early design stage information gathered from cultural probes can be insightful. The appropriateness of cultural probes is helpful when you need to gather information from users with minimal influence on their actions, or when the process or event takes place over a intermitted or long period of time. The cultural probe kit consisted of three main tasks that had to be completed. First we created cards with open ended sentences resembling social networking status updates, second task was to take pictures with the mood smileys to reflect what feelings they relate to in the picture and indicate places they enjoyed, and where they had good/bad moments in various locations in the cafe on the map. The kit was not a rushed process and it gave the users enough time to answer the questions without felling pressured. Eventually we would get the probes back and start modelling the data.
Modeling: Making Sense of Your Data
The information collected from the cultural probes and note taking observations left us with a rich pool of information. We noted the volume of people throughout the cafe over a day over a weeks time, seating preferences, where people were coming from and where they were going after their cafe experience.
One of the fascinating discoveries was to see the various artifacts people would bring with them to the cafe, also people almost always preferred tables on the outside edges of the cafe first because they felt more comfortable, people tended to read and surf the web while they waited for friends to join them. Many patterns in peoples behaviour started to become more clear and insights began to develop that were not evident at the beginning of the project.
(see video below of our process.)
Personas: Goals and Observed Behaviour Patterns
Personas can be defined as archetypes that describe the various goals and behavioural patterns observed among the potential users.
Sketch Process: Wire Frames and Concept Development
From the research phase I decided to move forward and design for the way people search for information passively and actively. I uncovered the possibilities “intelligent search agents” had in making meaningful user experiences with location based services. Here is a selection of my sketch process and UI concepts along with the Fetch eco-system web site concept.
Final Design: Intelligent search tools with location based services
Our final concepts were presented to Ericsson Research. The User interface was demonstrated along with the tie in to the location based services website and eco system. A scenario was also presented to help understand the context of the product and service in use. Finally the research was collected and formatted to show our path to a final solution
