State of the art analysis - Suping

State of the Art Analysis -Suping

---  Interactive touchscreen information board

Imagine this situations: when you are a parent, you have prepared the amusement park week for your children and for a relief from the work. But you have really naughty kids that you have to always keep an eye on them. You are just being distracted by them and ignoring the broadcast and taking off at a wrong destination. This unexpectable issue may just ruined your’s and your children’s . Is this the  children’s fault ? No, this is the children’s nature.
It is a recurring pattern that parents are distracted by the kids around.

We first interviewed a parent from sweden. For this interview, we set up some questions before. Thus it is quite a semi-structured interview so that it will be more flexible. And for the consideration of triangulation, we interviewed parents from sweden and from tourists travelling to Sweden who can not speak Swedish. As for the method for data recording, we chose the audio recording. And for the ethics problem, all the interviewees are informed that the audio recording will be published. He told us that, they should always be aware of the broadcasting, because there are several destinations for this ferry. But it is quite hard to be always aware of the broadcasting when childrens are just around. They have already taken off at the wrong destination twice. Since children around maybe noisy it is not that easy to always concentrate on what is broadcasting. What is more, there is usually only one stuff on the ferry so it is hard to find someone to ask about the information.

                                      The interactive touchscreen map board in New York

                                     The interactive touchscreen map board in Beijing

In order to solve that problem, we suggest there should be a interactive touchscreen board in the ferry or on the station of the ferry. Because the destination of the ferry is not always the same. It is a good idea to have a board that can not only shows a fixed information for the destination. It is better to show the information not only in Swedish since Stockholm is quite an international city where a lot of international tourists are visiting. Some times children are more easily changing theire minds of what they want, so a interactive touchscreen map board can also be provided for the parents to look up the map for some unexpectful demand from the children. What is more, in order to improve the user experience, we can add the introduction of destination with little map and information of the musuems on that isand. Then during the wating time on the ferry, the parents and the kids can read through the knowledge or just the information to know more about the destination.

Nowadays, many cities has installed interactive information boards in their subway. And this can definitely be used on the ferry or on the station of the ferry. The conceptualization of one technology is to bring convience to people’s life. By using this interactive touchscreen map board, parents can easily search for the best route for their trip. This interactive touchscreen map board can also take the interuption of the timetable for a ferry into consideration. In terms of usability, it provide a simple user interface which provides the necessary information for a user who want to know the exact destination of the the ferry and can help with those who want a sudden musuem trip to searching map. To improve the user experience more we may even add the information of the destination on the interactive touchscreen. That is also due to the main aim of an interactive design, which is improving the user experience. When I was in the subway station in Beijing it can be seen by the direct observation that peopele especially children and parents are pretty to interact with it.

But there are also some constraints with this kind of interactive touchscreen board. The prototype of the one in Newyork tried last year used a surface outfitted with 3M's dispersive signal technology (DST), which calculates the position of a touch on a screen by sensing the vibrations the touch creates. But it is a liitle bit clumpy that can not be suitable to fit in any environment. It didn’t meet the environmental requirement. When the protype was first put into use, there are few people using it for a long time during the first 6 days. As the survey suggests, the monocausal reason for it is that people found the screen can not be used as smoothly as our smartphones. Children may also give up playing with it since they are more impatient than the adult. The feedback also shows that It is still a little bit clumpy compared to the experience when we are using a smaller screen. According to the main aim of improving the user experience and meeting with the environmental requirement, there is still a long way to go to refine this interactive touchscreen map board. Maybe change the material of the screen can help with the unsmooth part. And a smaller interactive touchscreen can fit with the ferry more.