UX Case Study: The Augmented Wave, Using ‘Persistence of Vision’ to Give Your Hand a Hand

The Idea

Language quickly helped the human race advance by setting free a person’s inner ramblings, allowing them to articulate feelings, shout out warnings and flood in-boxes with memes.

Communities discovered the need to communicate these utterances over distances and used technologies like smoke signals, drum signals, and semaphore.

Humans have needed to communicate over distances since the dawn of time

The wave was probably the first way people caught each others attention. What if there was a way you could augment your wave and bring your hand into the 21st century?

Persistence of Vision

The optical illusion whereby multiple discrete images blend into a single image in the human mind.

Heres how it works:

Persistence of Vision illusion

My proposal is that the LED strobing effect can be replicated on the screen of a smart phone and the spinning is replicated by the waving of a hand.

Applications and Assumptions

There are potentially many applications from finding friends at events, hailing taxis or Uber and search and rescue situations.

The Brief

Create an iOS app that showcases the Persistence of Vision effect and give it a reason to exist.

The challenge

• The 3 main areas where the POV feature can be applied are in emergency services, finding friends and hailing taxis and or Uber.
• It became quickly apparent that one of these applications was mutually exclusive to the other two. I decided that the best way to tackle this was to split these apart and to treat them as two separate apps.
• The end result is an app that turned my main idea into the
  supplementary feature.

Interestingly they become split into Lifestyle and Life and Death.

There were two advantages to doing this:

1. The emergency app doesn’t become cluttered with unnecessary features making it hard to use and potentially useless in a high stress situation.
2. The technology can be tested on the Lifestyle app taking in feedback and data before it is rolled out into the emergency app. This is especially important where poor functionality or viability could mean the difference between life and death.

My Role

As the product owner, I had control over all aspects of the project.

Research

Competitor Analysis

For the emergency version of the app I wanted to look at apps that shared your location. Some of these are part of the iOS like Find My Friends or a feature of Google Maps Location Sharing. For the lifestyle version I looked at messaging apps like the scrolling LED billboard, Billboard.

I then used Empathy Maps to hone in on the users, creating one for each of the two applications. I chose Empathy Maps over personas because of the lack of depth in my interview subjects. I would broaden my interview list and create personas if I was to do it again.

Emergency Services Challenges

Feedback from my paramedic interviews:

• Rescue services can’t call back if the call out made while the phone is in SOS mode
• Walking instructions, in the Grampians at least, often underestimate how hard the walks are, causing people to under prepare
• A helicopter will cost up to $3000 per hour
• Paramedics, Police and SES all have to be present when a call is made. This increases the preparation time for searching. Also the police have better long range radios due to budget
• Most common injuries are fractures, 90% are broken ankles from stepping into holes while walking down hill
• Large events, often the injured person is amongst thousands of people, can be very difficult to locate
• People who need help are often unprepared because they didn’t think they were going to be out for that long

A feature set to answer these challenges

I discovered that I needed to explore how a user performs under high stress situations and how the UX design needs to reflect this.

“…the amount of information that an individual is able to acquire in a given scenario tends to decrease with the demand of the situation…”
— Braseth, A.O. and T.A. Øritsland 2013

1. When a hiker is injured and unable to walk, the POV effect on the phone will help reduce this time and reduce rescue cost.
2. Uncomplicated design with 000 calling functionality large and centred will reduce error when looking for the emergency number.
3. This also gives the app high levels of glance legibility (Designing for acute stress in emergency situations — Eivind Mangset)
4. The map of your journey can be downloaded so no data is needed.
5. Common first aid information is stored on the phone, negating the need for data use.
6. The journey can also be shared, letting friends and loved ones know when and where you are going and an ETA of your arrival. The app will update live and can be viewed by someone else with the app or on a companion website.
7. It will sense when the signal gets weak and send your last known position before the signal drops out.
8. A pin drop function will let you tag an injured hiking partner while you go for help or find a stronger signal. This can be shared as well making it easy for emergency services to find them.
9. If the user is completely incapacitated and can’t wave their arm, there is a feature to turn your front facing flash into an SOS beacon.

Paper Prototype

Test subject made to turn on the spot 5 times to simulate high stress and disorientation

My test subjects were told to complete a task in under 10 seconds to replicate a high stress situation.

Calling 000 from the app and then navigating back to quote their location in longitude and latitude.

To increase disorientation, one subject was made to spin five times before completing the task in under 10 seconds.

Further Research

I wanted to make sure that visibility was maximised with the app and discovered that the most visible wave length for the human eye is 555nm.

By setting the display colour on the emergency app to blue/green, we can make sure the visibility is maximised.

Rescue Me Screens

Rescue Me Prototype

Click here to view the project `Rescue Me`

Schwing!

I brainstormed names and created a mood board that would appeal to the lifestyle market. I settled on the name Schwing! as it has an onomatopoeia ring to it like drawing a sword.

Scwhing! mood board

The Scwhing! app would be split into 3 main areas:

• Find me for when you are lost in a crowd, at a festival or need to find your friends.
• Take me when you need to hail a cab or Uber. There will be an option to enter the name of the person who booked the Uber. I discovered through my research that Ubers are often booked through someone else. By waving that name the Uber driver can be reassured that they are picking up the right person. Sharing your location with Uber is opt in, so anything that helps with location would be beneficial to your Uber driver.
• Save me a lite version of the RescueMe app.

The Find Me section Schwing! has pre-filled out messages and a personalised pattern that lets you communicate your position with friends.

By adding friends, you will be able to recognise their patterns and Schwing it back! to show that you have seen them.

Schwing! Prototype

Click here to view the project `Schwing!`

Next Steps

Stadium Mode

• A cheers squad or club syncs their phones and software coordinates to produce one large image, similar to stadium mosaics
• The message or image it creates can coordinate with music at half time
• A Grand Final size crowd could be animated.

Conclusion

The Augmented Wave

To give the Persistence of Vision function a purpose and something to base a marketing program on, I proposed that the app be split in to two phases:

1. A lifestyle app called Schwing! that can be used as a testing ground for the technology and usability
2. A rescue and emergency app called Rescue Me that brings the 000 dialling front and centre, while also having first aid information and tracking functionality as well as signalling provided by the Persistence of Vision function.