Connected Devices Weekly Update/2016-07-12

Hypothesis

• We believe that

… (target audience) smartphone-equipped grocery decision makers (Women between 25 and 40 years old, living in North America urban areas, who work full time and run a 3 to 5 person household) … (current solution) who are currently making shopping lists with pen and paper or smartphone applications … (problem) currently find it cumbersome to create and use these lists when shopping

• Solution and Benefit

... by building a device that takes voice commands and creates lists with a note-taking app ….we will provide a faster and easier way to create shopping lists than what they are currently using.

• We will know this to be true when we see that a majority of participants who use the prototype for (..x.. days)

prefer this device to their current solution, and believe this device provides a faster and easier way of creating lists.

Milestones

• Vaani internal testing July 1 - July 15 On Target
• Nascent Objects Shipping to Berlin ETA July 15 -23 At Risk
• Legal review July 13th On Target
• Find Mozilla Users to Test With + Sign Legal Doc for Data Collection July 15th On Target
• Berlin Troubleshoots Device and Sends to End Users July 15 - July 29th At Risk
  • • User testing of prototype July 25- August 5 At Risk
• Surveys for User Testing Complete + Analyzed July 29th On Target
  • • MVP Results before end July July 29th At Risk
• User Testing of the 1st Prototype Complete August 12th On Target
  • • indicates a London MVP goal

An always-on voice-enabled smart screen device to keep track of the activities, events, and to-do lists of family members. Initial focus for the prototype is on Reminders only.

• The Project Cue team was given approval at the London MVP preview to build and test with the target market a web app prototype that provides the ability to:
  • Use voice (3rd party) to create reminders for one’s self and his/her family members and display on an always-on tablet
  • Receive reminders whether at home or away
  • Receive notifications via voice and in-app notifications at the time of the reminder
  • View your agenda for the day on either a tablet or smartphone
• Prototype development is in the last of its four weeks and is nearly complete.
  • Team has demo'd the use of a wake work, creating a voice reminder, receiving notification of the reminder.
• Legal requirements and details for the user study to validate the concept are being worked on.

• We've completed our Research Findings for our latest research study (User Research #2). A summary of the the User Study:
  • The girls prefer a device that:
    • Is always on and more portable (less bulky)
    • Has a smaller form factor, likely wearable
    • Has more light choices that let them send different messages
    • Lets them see their missed messages*
    • Lets them communicate with a small group of friends*
    • Note (*): These desires are, we suspect, conditioned by the expectations the girls have developed after using their smartphones
  • Other observations:
    • The rainbows delighted all the girls!
    • The girls are keen to know the status and availability of their friends
    • Most communication happened in the personal space of the bedroom in the afternoon and evening
• Hypothesis, did we achieve what we set out to do?
  • Our hypothesis assumed that the girls would want ambient communication that did not distract them from other things. We didnot prove this -- they don’t seem to mind (much) the volume of communication they receive and didn’t seem interested in non-distracting communication methods.
  • Our hypothesis also assumed that using this device would improve communications with their friends. We neither proved nor disproved this. But we saw a glimmer of proof in their desire to know about the status and availability of close friends.
• Conclusions from the User Findings and Decisions made about next steps: We want to do another experiment that focuses more narrowly on improving communications between close friends by helping girls know the status and availability of their close friends
  • Continue with the 12-15 year old girls.
  • Uncover other “desires to know information about my friends” that could be supported by an ambient device.
  • Focus on small group of close friends - about 5.

User Research (London All Hands experiments)

• We already have all the inputs from MozLondon experiments (Two surveys, Interviews, Metrics, Metadata Server Requests, Tiles/URLs are more often clicked and impressed in Magnet (through bitly), Anecdotal remarks...)
• Last week we were working on putting together all this info, creating affinity Diagrams. Several themes that could be interesting to work on:
  • Discovery (who is here / what's happening here)
  • Networking (people I know or want to know)
  • Information (room/building)
  • Broadcasting (context depend: publc vs private - people have opinions about what they are comfortable sharing)
  • Barriers : navigating content, posting changes to my broadcasted info, etc
• Analysis is still ongoing and User Research findings will be available at the end of this week

Application Development

• After analyzing the different types of notifications that we could use in iOS and Android (more info github and discourse), last week we started the development the feature.
• Working on Automated tests in Appium

Other

• It would be great that in next experiments we could reduce the friction when distributing the application, talking with Legal and Marketing team to see the possible options.

• General updates
  • Moving forward in Q3 we will use SensorWeb Trello for tracking experiments. Bugzilla is more for engineering backlogs.
• What’s done
  • Execution plan for the #1 experiment ( https://trello.com/c/DC9AAic8 )
• What’s next
  • Keep on execution on experiments
  • Homework from London WW (strategy to achieve long term goal)

Family shared displays to help bring families together

• Passed Gate 0 on June 1, 2016.
• Ready to engage with an external creative agency to kick-off a 8 week program on July 11, 2016 to identify user needs and propose product solutions.

"Current tablet products are not meeting the needs of late majority adopters. There could be a demand for a simple, affordable browser-based tablet."

See detailed hypotheses

Work items

1. Define hypotheses about market trends, the problem and the solution [DONE]
2. Market research with Forrester to validate hypothesis about the market shift [DONE]
3. Online survey to validate the problem hypothesis [IN PROGRESS] (survey published two weeks ago, 220 responses so far, still collecting responses)
4. Technical prototype to validate technical assumptions and test through user study [DONE]
5. User interviews to validate the solution hypothesis [PLANNED] (happening this week)
6. Work with the platform team to mitigate technical risks [IN PROGRESS] (Proposed architecture design with proof of concept implementation complete)

Conclusions so far

• Our market research with Forrester appears to confirm the hypothesis that the tablet market is in a transition from the early majority to late majority. Greatest growth between 2013-2016 is in "tech pessimists", women and older people.
• The online survey results so far appear to show that:
  • For tech pessimists who don't own a tablet, price is the second biggest barrier to entry.
  • When asked to describe their perfect tablet "simple" is the number one criteria and price, reliability and simplicity are the main factors that would influence their buying decision.
  • But people who don't own a tablet are not saying that complexity is the main reason they haven't already bought one, the main reason is simply "I don't know why I would need one" (which possibly means they're not even reaching the stage of worrying about how simple it is).
  • Easy access to content is more important than having a large number of apps
  • Tech pessimists are much more confident using a web browser than they are installing apps
  • There are certain tasks like looking up facts, reading the news and shopping which they'd rather use a website for than an app, but others like messaging, navigation and video calling for which they'd rather use an app.
  • The main tasks tech pessimists use tablets for are looking up facts, watching videos and online banking.
  • People cite offline access, notifications and running outside the browser as key differences between apps and websites.
  • Battery life and app/software updates are the two biggest frustrations for existing tech pessimist tablet owners.
• Conclusions on the product concept itself awaiting user interviews. We will chat in person to "tech pessimists" about their technology usage and get them to carry out tasks on both an Android tablet and the prototype browser-based tablet to observe their reactions.
• The technical prototyping has been successful. We have a working tablet which uses a drastically simpler architecture, including having landed a proof of concept "WiFi daemon" which replaces a device API from Gecko with a local Node web service running on the device. No app runtime, no Gaia, just browser chrome running directly on the lower levels of Android.

Challenges

• Six contributors in six different countries makes logistics tricky
• Most team members have had PTO during our six week period, not a single week everyone at work at the same time
• Difficult to reach "tech pessimists" using an online survey
• Our process forces us to focus on a user problem first, which is great advice. But what about problems people don't realise they have until they see the solution? (e.g. The original iPad). Where the product itself creates a demand by doing something you can already do, but in an easier, faster or less expensive way

• Completed Sprint 3 last week
  • Prototype requirements completed last Tuesday (7/5). Two major users flows for this: identify item and requesting meals
  • Friday (7/8) our sprint demo included the identify item flow from the server perspective. This integrated the kik bot messenger, the node server and the database.
  • Finalized on Hypotheses and problem definitions with Research team last Thursday.
• Sprint 4 Goals
  • Completion of the meal request flow and integration with BigOven
  • Addition of a button/LED indicator to the user.
  • Testing a different camera this week with a smaller form factor, but with less fidelity (ELP)
  • 3d printing of a case (stretch)
  • Normalization of ingredients database (stretch)
  • Integrate the Raspberry Pi with the server.
• Initial (internal only) user testing Consent agreement ready for review

• Reviewing a draft of the strategic plan to align our goals
• Setting up research Goals for Q3
• iLab has been reviewed. Check out the insights
• Send us your ideas! We would love to help
• Short submission here or email ResearchTeamCD@mozilla.com