DECO - designing comfort

This semester’s design task of the Human Computer Interaction seminar at DECO was to create, prototype and evaluate a location-aware mobile application that uses open data.
Five teams of three students each completed the seminar, resulting in creative, useful and sometimes also provoking use of fictitious open data. As open data in Austria is in its infancy (for more information visit open3.at or gov.opendata.at), teams had difficulties finding existing open (government) data sources. Some teams solved this problem by augmenting their application ideas with user-generated content as the main data source. The horizontal prototypes for the evaluation were implemented with various tools, including Titanium Mobile, Sencha Touch and also native development on iOS and Android platforms.

We proudly present the mobile application concepts of our five participating student teams. Note that most screens contain static data used only for the evaluation of the prototypes. The applications are (also if stated otherwise) not available on any store at the moment.

Team AAA_Team: RegioBioFood

Aleksandar Djordjevic, Alex Brandner, Andreas Hörmann

RegioBioFood is an application which helps people to find bio products in an easier way, only by few clicks on their android smart phone. People who prefer health nutrition can find out how near is the closest shop, where their favorite bio product is on the shelf, waiting to be bought.

All necessary information about shops is listed, so the users can directly contact the bio shop or check the opening hours.

If the user doesn’t know exactly which product to buy, but still wants one, there are local delicacies containing the list of products that are typical for a selected region.

The application also provides tips and recipes for healthy food and dishes, so the users can inform themselves and learn something new at the same time. In such way the users’ affinity to application becomes more intensive.

Another feature makes possible to save the favorite shops users interact at most with. The application is built by adhering to the android guidelines. Testing with non smart phone users has proved that the application flow is logical and intuitional.

Video: BioRegioFood on youtube

Team CNM Studios: ParkingApp

Christoph Derndorfer, Nemanja Dubravac, Michael Smolle

Parking App is the result of CNM Studios’ project undertaken during the HCI Seminar course in the winter-term 2010. The task of the course was to develop a horizontal prototype of a mobile application which made use of publicly available data (so-called open data). The focus was firmly set on the interaction design – rather than the functionality – of the app. In order to ensure obtaining a result with a high usability a user-centered design approach was applied throughout the development process.

Parking App itself focuses on providing users with context-relevant information about parking zones, parking garages, tariffs, and related details for Austrian cities. The goal is to provide and present this information in an easily and quickly accessible design, especially considering that users, such as co-drivers, are likely to use the app in a car.

As a result the most important use-cases can be completed with a few simple taps. For example finding the nearest free-parking zone can be accomplished with two taps and the closest parking garage and its information is accessible with three taps. Additional functionality includes a search for parking zones at specific addresses, optional layers to present extra information as a map overlay, and the option to use externally installed navigation apps for guidance.

To conclude: Finding relevant information about where to park your car in Austria right from your smartphone has never been easier.

Video: ParkingApp on youtube

Team hci_g3: Trümmerl-Tracker

Christoph Ambichl, Attila Lazar, Daniel Lazar

There are hundreds of thousands dogs in Vienna producing tons of excrement daily – most of it on the sidewalk. Now you can fight back! The “Trümmerl-Tracker” (Trümmerl: Viennese for dog dirt) application allows you to report “Trümmerl” you see lying around in streets and parks anywhere in Vienna. The reported positions are stored together with reports from other users and help to calculate an accurate estimate of pollutions made by dogs. Different grades of pollution are displayed as colors on the map.

If you want to get more involved, you can keep watching for dog owners and report them if they are not picking up the dirt of their dogs. All you have to do is take a picture of the sinner and optionally write a comment about the incident. You send your current position, the picture and your comment to us and you are done. Now everybody can see the sinner on the map.

Features:

• report dog’s mess found at your current position with just one touch
• denounce their guilty masters with picture and commentary
• display pollution in your neighborhood
• watch and identify caught dog owners on photographs
• manage your favorite locations like ‘home’ and ‘work’ for quick access.

The Application is still in development. In the meantime take a look at our video! Keep it Clean!

Video: Trümmerl-Tracker on youtube

Team ice_cr34m: Sightguider

Georg Anker, Ajmal Said, Thomas Teufel

The core function of our app „Sightguider“ is to provide its user proposals about the best sights in a defined city. These sights get combined to a trip, for which the user is able to define additional settings like the amount of money he has for it or the time available or how big the group is he has to pay for.
Of course such a trip can be modified if some sights are disliked or too expensive or some others are wished getting added because of personal interests.

Additionally there is a Google-Maps-integration, which shows either the city with all of its sights and points of interests or just the map with the sights that are added to the trip.

Another main function provides information about every sight saved in the app and a search-function to take a look at a specific one as fast as possible.

Unfortunately there are no open data available regarding this topic, so we had to „fake“ some. For this purpose we decided to define 2 cities with 10 sights each, just to use our prototype in a useful way.

Video: Sightduider on vimeo

Team MAP: Montius

David Griedl, Florian Walcher, Wolfgang Weltler

The mobile-app Montius is an application developed for smart phones to avoid inspections by employees of the Vienna transport services. To enable this service users of Montius should report inspections if they notice them. Other users receive the reports and have the chance to change the tube, bus or tram to escape the inspectors.

On the home screen the reports are displayed in a table to enable the operator a quick overview. The map screen shows the reported inspections on their real location on the map. The map also includes details of the inspections when the alert icon is clicked. On the settings screen the user has the possibility to personalize the map. Moreover, single lines can also be hidden in order to make the map less confusing. The last screen is the report screen where inspections are sent to the server. On that view, the user can post both whether inspections are carried out in an underground station/bus stop/tram stop and in one of Vienna’s means of public transport. In the first case, the station is selected by the GPS coordinates computed by the smartphone or from the user directly by name. In the second case, only the line on which the inspection took place is reported.

In conclusion, the application informs the operator about inspections of the Vienna transportation services but it is not intended to lead to criminal behaviour.

Video: Montius on youtube