Topiary: A Tool for Prototyping Location-Enhanced Applications

Yang Li, Jason I. Hong, James A. Landay,

Presented by Daniel Schulman

Location-Enhanced Applications

Use the location of users, others.Examples:

AT&T Find Friends service.E911

Hard to design:Need lots of technical expertise.Must use low-level sensing technology.

Topiary

A prototyping tool for location-enhanced applications.

Supports iterative design without actually having to wander around for testing.

Topiary

Active Map:Models a map and locations within it.

Scenario Producer:Specify which people and locations are

involved.Storyboard Workshop:

Storyboards can be triggered by scenarios.

Topiary – User Testing

Testing is done via a Wizard-of-Oz setup.

The designer can move people and items around on the map.

If real sensor data is available, it can also be used (via wireless networking).

Topiary – Evaluation

Participants created a tour-guide application.

All were able to use Topiary, and found it relatively easy.

The research team also iteratively designed a tour guide themselves.

Critique

A useful new tool for a fairly new type of UI.

Based on lots of assumptions about the type of UI that is being designed:Heavily biased towards map-based UIs.There could be other kinds of location-

enhanced applications.

Future Directions

Why restrict yourself to 2D maps?3D is important – what floor am I on? Is the map always the most important thing

to show the end-user? Is there always a single map?

Shifts in scale – from an outside to an inside map.

Future Directions

Why restrict yourself to location?Can sense orientation, temperature,

lighting, movement, etc.The use of a Wizard-of-Oz setup for testing

can generalize – can Topiary’s interface also be generalized?