The Blog of Kwan

Beautiful day but brutally cold, #2degrees @eldora

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Our Family Kiosk Prototype

I completed a holiday prototype project where I created a family kiosk in our mud room. I was interested in trying to replicate kind of a vertical monitor you see in hotel lobby’s that has a slideshow of what’s going onthat day, for the family. A family kiosk, the metaphorical refrigerator door, if you will.

Here was the general process.

 

The Impetus

One day Alex brought home some white board stickers to stick on the wall next to our new built in lockers. She wanted a place to write notes and instructions to the kids. Their upcoming activities, the weather so they knew what jacket and shoes to wear, whether they were doing bus or carpool based on their activites that day. Being the futurist but prone to question the long term maintenance of systems, I got to thinking about a lobby kiosk.

 

There were some things that were key for me:

 

Kids needs

• See, at-a-glance, without having to interact
• Daily/weekly schedule (know what after school activities there are, and whether to take the bus home, etc)
• Today's Weather (know what jacket to wear before heading out)
• List of notes/chores/activities

Mom & Dad needs

• Easily update the calendar
• Easily update the notes/activities for the kids
• No duplication of effort for entry

 

Wrestling with the Interface

From all the screenshots in the media, I was attracted to the Windows 8 Start Screen. I was thinking that widgets MIGHT be able to help in some of these areas.

 

1) Windows 8 Start Screen? Interesting, but not quite it

While we were in Austin visiting my brother and parents over the holidays, I got my first exposure to Windows 8. Dispite needing to get used to the interaction model and some of it's oddities, it definitely showed some promise. Weather widget on the Start screen was cool. The full screen weather app is beautiful. But for my purposes, that's where it basically stopped.

• The windows experience is optimized for individual user's information, not for a group. So it's difficult to use the baked in apps to subscribe to our shared family google calendar
• The Start tiles are too small, but full screen is too big and modal, I wanted multiple pieces of information to persist without someone having to swipe through the different views.
• At any given time, 3 different kids with 3 different needs would be looking at it, I didn't want one at a time viewing, i wanted persistence
• It would have been interesting if there was some screensaver or kiosk mode to rotate through some of the full screen apps automatically.... that might have done it.

Our mud room is where the kids do their homework, so having a computer there will be convenient. I've installed the Windows 8 Khan Academy app, Netflix, Skype, etc. I've also installed the Sonos and Spotify apps so we can play to the Sonos speakers throughout the house.

 

2) Websites

I embarked on looking for an app or webservice to get done what I wanted. I found cozi.com (and we're trying it out also) but that was basically it. While cozi has a home screen, and apps for everyone's devices so we could all collaborate, there wasn't enough displayed on the home page to persist everything I wanted. No weather, etc. And it's chock full of ads that only go away if you pay.

 

3) iPad: Too modal

While I could have dealt with an app on the iPad that was basically a slideshow of different things I wanted... I couldn't find one. I wanted all of the information listed above to persist, otherwise, you'd miss out on info that was important at any given time. I thought it would have been great to mount an iPad to the wall. But while there might be individual apps that do what I want, there's no kiosk mode to automatically cycle through them. But the modal paradigm that forces users to interact before being able to derive useful information wouldn't do.

 

4) DIY: WordPress Website and Google docs

It just so happened it was time to renew some of the domains and hosting I have, so I got to tinkering with a WordPress blog. I did some research and saw that you could post any google doc and calendar as an iframe into any website. Same with google calendar. I found a weather widget. Flickr widget. Easy.

The challenge (to tackle later) taking this route is controlling the styling across all of these widgets. So, naturally, I found a skeumorphic bulletin board theme.

By the time we got home from Austin, I had a basic website working with all the widgets I wanted.

We had a older Dell Studio Hybrid from a few years ago that wasn't being used. I found the $39 deal to upgrade to Windows 8 and jumped on it. Pretty easy.

I added one of my 24" Dell monitors and voila!

Why portrait? Because of the orientation of the information I was working with, I was thinking that portrait orientation would work better so you wouldn't have to scroll to see everything.

 

User Adoption

Are we actually using it? Has it come part of our routine? Not quite yet. The kids think it's interesting, but they just started going back to school today, so we'll see. While I'm a futurist and early adopter, my wife is not. I believe that once Alex commits to using it, then the kids will as well. 

 

The Future

It would be cool to make this a touch screen device. I'm thinking along the lines of the Dell 23" Touchscreen, but it doesn't look like you can turn it portrait. Maybe the Samsung that was just announced at CES.

I was fascinated reading Tony’s experience with the 27" Dell All-in-One Touch.  

 

Personal vs Public interaction model 

I'm passionate about wrestling with new collaborative interaction models at work for my team and company. I'm also interested in it at home. As a family, our kids are getting to the age where we need some centralized calendaring, messaging system.

Most of the paradigms we've developed in the UI world for 'personal' devices are exactly personal. Sync your browser settings, contacts, mail, calendar, etc. are targed at a individual user and login. There's really no concept of the group. For specialized, non-mobile devices like this, or a TV, we've got to push for some new paradigms to accomodate these roles.

 

2012 01 Alessi skiing @eldora

Emergency go bag contents ideas

Marcus' go bag
iPhone charger
Kleenex
Zyrtec d
Advil
gum
plastic bags
baby wipes
Carmel cluster bar
Finger nail clipper
Nail file
Bottled water

Kobe's emergency go bag
iPhone charger
iPhone
Food: energy bar, shot blocks
Small book
Bottled water
Pocket knife
Lotion
First aid kit

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2012 11 Alessi at a monthly gymnastics class exhibition

2012 11 Paola and partner dancing the jitterbug at Cotillion

2012 09

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2012 08 Alessi's Birthday

2012 07 Vail Mountain Biking

2012 05 Alessi's speech contest practice