Technology on the Trail for Mid-County Park Sotirios Nicholakos - [email protected] Matt Crawford - [email protected] Hongwei Lou - [email protected] Nanlin Sun - [email protected]
##Persona : Paco Boglins
Paco Boglins is a 35-year-old man, father of two children, and married to his wife. Paco is heavily concerned about safety, because he is concerned about the well-being of his children, as well as his wife. In the past, his son got lost, because he dozed off for 30 seconds, and his kid walked away. He was eventually found, but since then, he has been heavily concerned with their safety. Paco and his family will greatly benefit from the tracking feature, because his younger son prefers playing on the playground, and his wife and daughter prefer playing disc golf. Since they will be separated, they would need to be able to track each other, in case of emergency. Without this feature, it could be disastrous for the family. Paco would benefit from the forums, because he likes talking with people about things he is passionate about. Paco also would likely benefit from the report feature, because he sees activity that he would want to report, but he couldn’t since the functionality wasn’t there. This would allow for Paco to feel safer bringing his wife and kids to the park, given the incidents in the past.
Rationale for using Paco Boglins as our target persona: We chose Paco Boglins as our target persona for numerous reasons:
- Paco is a father of two children, which are a major benefactor of the park, despite being a lower population group than college students.
- College students are a majority group in Montgomery County, but are not as likely to go to a park as middle-aged adults and their children/grandchildren. Paco is also active in the community surrounding Montgomery County.
##Storyboard
We create the storyboard based on two of the main featured functions of our app, which are the function of grouping people together (the group function) and the function of the reporting suspicious action (the report function).
#####Storyboard 1: Group function
Before we start creating our storyboard, we follow the questions from the “Probing the Storyboard” section on the course slide. So we want to focus on the claims that are related to the group function.
“What’s important about the technology?” The technology can help people locate their group members, and specifically, it can help parents to locate their children. And people do care about where to find their friends in the group.
“What limits are placed on the technology?” The limit is pretty obvious that in order to be tracked by the other group member, the user is required to have a mobile device with this application installed. So in our storyboard, we want to make sure that all users have their mobile devices and also installed with our app.
“Would this storyboard have been as effective in scenario form? As a series of claims? As a spoken “elevator pitch”? In another form?” We decide to use scenario form since it is more effective to show how worried the child’s parent is when he can’t find his child, and also how relieved he will be when finding his child through the group function eventually. The emotional attachment can be expressed more effectively through the scenario form than others.
As we go through all these questions, the storyboard starts to form. So we decide the storyboard to have the story of a dad taking his child to the mid-county park and the child does not come back on time and then the dad use the map function and finally locate him. The transitions between frames are important to make the story fluent and continuous. And we also notice the most important part is to show that the child has installed the application and also add his dad to his group as well. And during these transitions, we add the close look to the phone by providing screenshots of our apps.
And the following is our final storyboard for our group function:
This storyboard shows the use of our App’s tracking functionality. One day afternoon Scott brings his son Dwight to Mid-county park to have some fun. After they arrived at Mid-county park. Scott’s son Dwight wants to go the trails to catch some pokemon on Pokemon-Go. Scott is really tired and wants to have a rest on the bench so he lets his son go by himself. But Scott knows that the trails in Mid-County park is very complex and can let people easily get lost. So he let his son download Mid-County Park Pal on the phone so he can use the app the track his son’s location. After Dwight downloaded the App and quickly registered his account. Scott added his son to his group. His son accepted the invitation and joined the group, then went to the trails to catch pokemon. But 8 minutes after the time Scott and Dwight agreed to meet, Scott still didn’t see his son coming back. He knew that his son must get lost in the trails. Scott opened the map screen of the app, which still shows Dwight’s location on the map. Scott then follows the map on the app and successfully found Dwight in just 5 minutes. This saved Scott a lot of time and prevent tragedy from happening.
And for the report function, we want to focus on the claim we do for this function.
|Title: Creating a safer park environment -|- Feature: Using the “Map of trails” to navigate and locate friends or family
|+ Navigating the trails is a lot easier
The trails aren’t marked well and it’s easy to get lost but users could easily find their way around the trails using
+ Easier to find lost friends and family
Users will have the option to share location with others that they trust to avoid getting lost
- Might not have GPS signal
Some people might not have cell phone service depending on where they are and what service provider they have
-GPS tracking can be a safety concern
There is some controversy with apps tracking your location. Tony Bradley from CSO says “poor coding in apps could expose your location to anyone.”
-Tracking children may be detrimental
The Examiner claimed that tracking your children prevents them from “learning to be independent and keep safe on their own.”
The main purpose of this function is to provide people visiting the mid-county park with a safer environment. So we decided to create the storyboard in scenario form. We want to show the effectiveness and result of how the park management handles the reports. We want the user to know that their action matters and bad people end with bad consequences.
So we decided to set our story to start with a couple going to the mid-county park and enjoy their afternoon. And they happened to find bad people doing a bad thing and report them through the report system. And the result is they have been taking cared by the authority. The most important part we want to show is how they use the app to report.
And the final storyboard of the report function is shown below.
This storyboard shows the use of the report system of our App. One day lovely couples are walking along the trails at Mid-County Park. But suddenly they see two bad guys are trading illegal goods in the trails. These two couples have seen many illegal activities in the Mid-County park trails before but they cannot do anything with that since the activity center in the park is never open so they cannot ask any park staff for help. But this time, they know the new App Mid-County Park Pal has the feature to report those illegal activities in the park and people has installed cameras along the trails connected with the App. So they opened the map screen on the app and clicked the report button to start reporting. After they dragged the pin to the location with the illegal activity, they entered their description of the illegal activity and clicked ‘report’ to complete the report. Then a video of the view of the location that they located from the phone is sent to the police and the park staff. After police watched the video quickly and verified that the illegal activity reported does exist. They went to the park and caught the two bad guys. After that, fewer and fewer people do illegal activities in Mid-County park, and the park is much safer for people to visit.
So while we are doing the claims, we want to do the claims for the featured functions for our application which would the map system, the report function, the forum, and the login screen.
To make claims for one feature, we need to come up a title, a topic so that we can have something to write claims about. Take our map system as an example, the main purpose of our map system would be the ability to be able to keep track of the group members, to be able to navigate to different locations, to keep away from getting lost and dangerous zones, etc, most of which are considered to be the safety issues, so the title we come up is “creating a safer environment”. After we have the title, we want to work on claims, to come up good sides and bad sides of this feature. To come up with good sides are easier since most of them are the reasons why we would have this feature in the first place. In order to come up with bad sides of this feature, we need to critique the feature by first finding a point that is easy to critique. The point can be any component that is critical to the key feature. And the point we find is the GPS, which is critical to the map navigation and easy to find bad sides of. And searching online for a bit, we see the debates of how GPS can possibly give away personal information if under some circumstances. And we start to find another point in the feature to critique and write new claims…
As we follow the above strategy, we finish all claims for each of our key feature and the followings are our final claims:
|Title: Creating a safer park environment -|- Feature: Using the “Map of trails” to navigate and locate friends or family
|+ Navigating the trails is a lot easier
The trails aren’t marked well and it’s easy to get lost but users could easily find their way around the trails using
+ Easier to find lost friends and family
Users will have the option to share location with others that they trust to avoid getting lost
- Might not have GPS signal
Some people might not have cell phone service depending on where they are and what service provider they have
-GPS tracking can be a safety concern
There is some controversy with apps tracking your location. Tony Bradley from CSO says “poor coding in apps could expose your location to anyone.”
-Tracking children may be detrimental
The Examiner claimed that tracking your children prevents them from “learning to be independent and keep safe on their own.” Feature: Using the “Report system” to report suspicious activity|+Park will be safer
Nick Jones from News4Jax says that schools apps for reporting suspicious activity can make school safer and “bridge the gap between law enforcement agencies and schools.” We would like to apply this same concept to the park.
-People can make false reports
Carolea Walters, Director of Marion County’s 911 Center says that fake emergency reports are “very disruptive” and “they take resources away from bona fide emergencies.”
|Title:Developing a sense of community in Mid-County Park -|- Feature: Using the “Forum board” to make discussion and meet people
|+Forum can be used to meet new people
Jade Boyd-Rice from Futurity says to meet more people, someone should be “active in as many communities as possible.” A Mid-County Park forum board would add a new way to meet new people.
+People can have discussions about the park(improvements, problems, events)
-People abusing forum board
Joshua Miller from the NYPost talked about how people can coordinate to “manipulate platforms” in negative ways. In this case Twitter users were harassing other users with opposing political views. Feature: Using “Register” to create an account|+Discourages bad behavior on the app
Taylor Lorenz from The Atlantic says that Instagram has a severe harassment problem which is partly caused by people ability to make “endless anonymous accounts.”
-Making an account can be tedious
Conor Sheehan from freeCodeCamp claims “When an app requires users to register or login, they are adding a layer of friction during the crucial first impression.”
-Users may forget login credentials
Irene Tham from Straitstimes says that “users tend to forget their passwords,” which can cause difficulty for users
#Ideation
Our ideation is mainly based on the interview and observation results that we got and the refined version of the DIM that we built from phase 1.
Our interview results indicates that one of the big issues of Mid-County Park is the security of the park. Our interviewee complained that she has seen people doing illegal activities at the park trails which can cause a lot of trouble since a majority of the park guests bring their children to the park.
Therefore, the first major feature that we decided to build on our mobile app is a report system for the park guest to report suspicious activities in the park which will improve the security of the park and its trails.
Secondly, from our observation results, we saw most of the park guests bring their children to the park and let their children play together in the park, but the trails in the park are unmarked and very long and complex so it’s easy for people to get lost (especially children).
Therefore, we want to include a tracking system in our app that can let parents track the location of their children in the park by forming a group on the app with their children’s accounts.
#Sketching
For the sketches, we designed the interfaces of the pages that we think is necessary for our App. We all agreed that a map for the park with people’s locations on it is essential to our app. And because the map part of the app and the forum can be seen as two major separate components of our app, we came up with different designs of how should user access and switch between the forum and the map.
And following are our sketching for each screen:
#Wireframe
