Opportunity
Ever tried to call or text someone that you care about, only to hear no reply for hours - even days? Meet BUSYmode, a passive solution that monitors the status of your phone and reports it to custom-defined contacts. We submitted this project to a Pitch Competition, held jointly by the University of Michigan School of Information and the University of Texas at Austin during the South-by-Southwest (SXSW) festivities. We were selected to pitch our idea to a board of investors. |
Solution
BUSYmode is a proposal for an app that functions as an "away message" for your phone. Users can allow BUSYmode to access phone GPS, your calendar, and other indicators of your current status. BUSYmode can automatically turn on when you're about to go down in to the subway, based on GPS information. Research After interviewing target users (parents who regularly schedule calls with their children abroad), we drafted up potential user scenarios to address using an affinity wall. |
The beginnings of our affinity wall is below, with categories for {urgent situation, normal situation, use cases}.
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Design
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Before figuring out wireframes, we realized we had to validate our idea from a back-end perspective. A team member sketch what would be the final model for the back-end system. This helped to inform our subsequent design iterations with certain hardware constraints from users' mobile devices.
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The following tells the story of our wireframes from first to final iterations.
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We first tested our BUSYmode concept with our second iteration, which is the paper prototype shown below. This was sufficient for us to do "guerilla" usability testing, since members of our target user group were freely (and fortunately) available in the adjacent hallway. We gained valuable insights on the thoughts and motivations of users as they navigated through simulated use cases using our paper prototype.
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Once we had concluded usability testing (about 5 participants), we continued to iterate our designs at a higher fidelity, an effort which I led. The first step was to agree upon a style tile and visual language, which was documented by our team member Lu.
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The first step for the user is to preemptively specify the corresponding BUSYmode. Widget mode is shown here.
If a specified contact messages the user while the user is on BUSYmode, the following auto-away message appears:
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