Interactive Prototype 1 - Late Excuse Watch

Statement of Delivery

The Late Excuse Watch is a compact technology delivering a means to avoid messy confrontations when you are late for a meeting or event. Using a GPS, the watch calculates whether the wearer will be late and generates a non-cliché excuse if so.

The Purpose of this step in the prototyping of our design, interface and interactive use is to gauge user’s responses on the simplicity and accessibility of the functions of the device. Through simply opening the calendar popup and selecting a certain date, we give the user the ability to view their (pre) inputted time and venue of the event or meeting.

The Form of the prototype in this interactive flash piece tries to mimic real life elements. The interface is yet to be polished however the form of the interface was constructed to mimic what scale and shape it would be on your wrist – with a watch backdrop imitating the body of the device.

The inner interface features easy to read time and 3 buttons for separate functions, Calendar where users can add view and change event/meeting, and a GPS where users can view their location. The third button was for this version of the prototype to display generated excuses on demand instead of when the user is late for his/her meeting or event.

The Testing that will be required for this prototype design step will require users to navigate the interface successfully, selecting a date, viewing and repeating to us their venue and time of meeting or event, and navigate back to the menu and proceed to generate an excuse to use assuming that they will be late for this event. After they’ve completed these steps a simple survey will be asked with open ended questions for feedback on future iterations of this concept.

Questions such as:

• How simplistic or complex is this interface for everyday use?
• If future versions were created, what are two things that could be added, changed, or removed in the interface itself?
•         How could the target market be given more options in how this device operates (such as adding ability to disable GPS tracking)?

The Decisions made when constructing the prototype were difficult as it is a prototype for a real-life working model. It was unfeasible to add features such as GPS tracking to determine if the wearer was going to be late to a meeting or event because no one would be wearing this software or going anywhere with it. It was also decided to exclude time based input from the user so that excuses didn’t have to wait to be generated until the time elapsed. In other words exceeded the time he/she was supposed to be at the location – thus locations were added to dates manually.

CRC for Late Excuse Watch

As defined by Extreme Programming (.org), CRC cards (Class, Responsibilities, and Collaboration) cards are a concept of physically mapping out a new system as a team. The concept allows individuals to model object oriented technology and move away from procedural thinking. CRC cards in the case of one person teams are used to represent objects, classes, collaborators,  and responsibilities of each method wanted to be incorporated into an idea.

This will then translate into code further down the path.

CRC overview for The Late Excuse Watch

 Test GPS

• Select Locator
• View Map Object
• Back to Menu

Set Time & Location for a "meeting"

• Select Calendar
• Select Date
• Input location and Start Time
• Save (or autosaves)
• Back to Menu

Delete Schedules

• Select Calendar
• Select Date with Highlight
• Select Erase/Delete (icon?)
• Back to Menu

View the time, main menu

• Stare at the main menu

Schedule and GPS extends menu.

Calender, Delete function (private), Add event function (private) extends Schedule.

GPS is responsible for Schedule Locations while they both collaborate to pinpoint location and distance/time to extrapolate time of arrival, creating excuse when late.

DIAGRAMS

edit here

WK6 OOP in AS3

The title rhymes, however, the language is not intuitive for a large percentage of people.

Action Script 3 for Flash (AS3) is object oriented thankfully, intuitive variable declaration ability, visible and human readable functions such as loops and arrays etc.

In our next prototype project we are required to utilise AS3 to build an interactive interface or game platform, for our social intervention device or game mash-up respectively.

In AS3 each object created has "Attributes" and "Abilities" and are made up of other objects.
This can be defined as a subclass, where some object extends some parent object or method.

In our interactive prototypes we must NOT focus on style of our designs primarily but their functionality. This means LESS IMPORTS! Thus, only import classes and other's work that we need (credited of course) to reduce loading pressure and minimise the project size.

This is of course the first of the future interactive prototypes, so it is required to work to some extent without worrying about its design for now.


In the next post we will focus on our idea, the Late Excuse Watch, starting with CRC cards. The steps to coding the prototype as laid out as possible.

Video Prototype Embed

Enjoy!