Design Team Members: Amanda Schulze and Amanda Mindy Seto
Supervisor: Stacey Scott
Background
Magazines
Magazines are found in many households, waiting rooms, offices, classrooms and many other places. Primarily, magazines serve the purpose of providing entertainment, although they are also used for various other applications. Currently there are two popular forms of magazines, traditional paper and online based magazines.
Generally online magazines offer little interaction, and are primarily static text and photo based articles. Although there has been some advancement in digitizing reading tasks, it is mostly focused on the transport of electronic text materials in a handheld device. While these products present leisure reading material electronically, none of them allow much more interactivity than its original paper format, nor does it allow for a shared reading experience beyond one individual.
Interactivity and collaboration are two areas that are lacking in magazines that are currently published and produced. Magazines are typically a medium for communicating ideas or news of a certain group of people to the masses. Despite this social aspect of them, magazines themselves do not readily support or encourage collaborative reading or interaction. This limiting factor is due primarily to the current format and sizing of a magazine.
Digital Tables
The emerging technology of tabletop displays promotes interactivity and collaboration through the use of a natural user interface. A natural user interface is an interface that conforms and reacts to the human-computer communications natural to humans, such as gestures, making the interface between users and the corresponding technology more intuitive.
Tabletop displays are interactive, multi-touch computer interfaces, typically implemented as a horizontal surface, making them an appropriate medium for collaborative magazine reading. A popular example of a tabletop display is the Microsoft Surface.
Project description
The goal of this project is to:
Design a product that promotes and facilitates synergized magazine reading by eliminating the non-interactive, single-user nature of conventional reading imposed by traditional paper forms. A successful solution will allow users to engage with magazines in a collaborative and interactive manner through a natural user interface. The collaborative software will be customized for use with multi-touch tabletop technology.
The product will empower users with:
- A takehome experience – extending the magazine contents beyond the table
- A customizable experience – tailored to user's individual interests and preferences
- 2-way communication and interaction with the magazine
- Multimedia enhancements and engagement with the magazine content
Design methodology
To implement the project, an iterative user-centered design (UCD) methodology, is used, which consists primarily of requirements gathering, prototyping and user testing.
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Requirements
Gathering
To form the project requirements, several forms of user studies are conducted including surveys, interviews with domain experts, and task analysis studies. These studies will focus on how people currently interact and read with magazines and what's missing from the current form of technology. -
Prototyping
Based on the requirements formed through the user studies, several levels of prototypes (low, medium and high) are designed and constructed to communicate design ideas. The prototypes range from paper mockups and wireframes, which illustrate the user interface, to Flash prototypes, which demonstrate the user interactions as well as the user interface. -
User
Testing
Finally, to test each prototype, user testing is conducted to verify the viability and usability of each design. This involves presenting different groups of users with the different prototypes to provide general feedback on the designs, as well as complete a series of set tasks to assess usability.