Designing Interactive Systems

When asked if he ever takes the train or bus and if he could describe a typical situation when taking the bus he told us the following scenario. He needs to take the Strassenbahn to work in the morning only when one of his daughters has borrowed his car. Thus he never knows the exact schedule of the Strassenbahn. Since it is usually a short notice issue with his daughters he seldom knows in advance when he won’t have a car and usually realizes it just before he has to leave for work. Luckily he has a relatively flexible schedule, but it is key that he doesn’t come late to his appointments. Thus he usually leaves with some extra time in the morning to prepare for his meetings. Although he doesn’t find that the Strassenbahn is late in general he finds that it often happens that as he walks out the door and down the street to the nearest station, he sees the Strassenbahn drive by. Although the Strassenbahn passes by every 15 minutes at that stop he resents having to always wait for it. He mentioned that he had better things to do than to stand outside in the cold and wait.

When we suggested that he might be able to find the schedule of the Strassenbahn online, he told us that he usually has already turned off his computer before realizing that he could look. In addition he often leaves after having talked to someone else. This is especially common when going home from the office. He almost never directly leaves from his office, but rather checks to see if his students have any additional questions for him before he leaves.

After having presented our idea he made some interesting remarks about the use of such a device. He mentioned that if it would be on a smart phone or on a PDA it would facilitate the use, as well as making a point that he would not carry around an extra device just for the purpose of the train schedules. In that case he could also carry around the book given by the local provider with the printed schedules. The main advantage he saw would be to have it work for different cities. Thus it could help show the correct route to conferences and meetings. In addition he liked the alarm setting and the fact that we were thinking about adding a “snooze button”. He mentioned that this would be helpful for him, because he couldn’t always leave the meetings early just to catch the Strassenbahn. In addition it should not just automatically set to the next Strassenbahn, but rather show when the next Strassenbahn leaves. This is because after a certain hour the frequency in which they come reduces itself to 1 every hour. In addition a feature which he would like is that the system would know how long it would take him to get to the next stop. This is especially relevant if one considers this to work in a city which is unfamiliar to the user.