Hello and welcome back. This video continues our discussion of three types of user interface design problems. In this case, I'll discuss the situation, where you already know the problem that you're trying to solve, in the general direction of where you want the situation to go. But you don't know exactly what that solution will look like. In situations like that, your job is really to try to find the right solution, given the assumption that you've already identified the right problem to solve. If you haven't yet, it may be useful to watch the video designing without a specific solution idea to learn more about some considerations and identifying the right problem to solve. Once you know the specific problem, I personally find it helpful to ask myself three questions. What are the key challenges that my solution must address? So for example knowing some ways that people currently attempt to achieve their goals, where do they struggle? Those are the areas my system should address. I also find it really helpful to consider a wide variety of solutions. Committing to a single solution too early meaning that you're not considering some viable and clever solutions that maybe a bit more off the beaten path. And finally, we all work in the real world which means there may be constraints in our solution space. So for example, if you work for an iPhone app company, the constraint maybe that your solution has to be an app and it has to work with a specific sandboxing that Apple requires of their developers. So this sounds a bit abstract, but again let me give you a concrete example from my own research. I find it helpful to talk about my research because these are examples that I really know inside and out, and I hope that yourself will find it interesting. And I also hope that its not too outdated by the time you watch this video, because it could be years after it was recorded. So, first let me tell you a little bit about the problem that I identified through the earlier process. As a result of many factors, primarily divorce, about 30% of children in the U.S. don't live with both of their parents. Now, you can probably look up the statistics for your country, as they are varied quite a bit, but this is certainly a problem in lots of places worldwide. In fact a significant portion of children live in a different city from one of their parents. And even intact families may experience separations for reasons such as work travel, incarceration, hospitalization and more. Continued contact between parents and children is really important for both sides, for both for the parent's well being and the child's well being, but it's not usually easy. So I worked with divorce and work separated families to find out why continued contact was hard. I found that they still use telephone as a primary way to stay in touch, but both parents and children seem to dislike it. So it was really hard to keep the child engaged and interested in conversation over the phone, and it was extra difficult for young children, because they hadn't yet developed these communicational competencies to understand the more nuanced and finer points of language, like irony or humor or fantasy. In co-located communication they're really aided by these visual cues that they see on the person's face, but over the phone things are more difficult. Video chat may be one way of solving this problem, but I found that it was still a long way off from being used routinely. So one problem that it was still to complex for children to set up and it required the help of a co-located adult to actually set up the connection. And so what ended up happening was that most of that contact was scheduled, the adults would set up a time and then they'd bring the kid in and they'd talk, and so the children very rarely actually initiated these connections. In the end both telephone and video chats suffer from a common problem. Sitting and talking is not the natural way to build closeness with children. Most parents and kids have their best interactions when they're actually doing something together whether it's doing the dishes, helping with homework or driving them to soccer practice. And so based on this process I was able to better understand the requirements for potential system to support the parent child relationship. The system needed to provide visual channels for communication. It needed to be as easy to use as a phone, specifically so the children could do it on their own and without help. I wanted it to be something that they could do on their own and be empowered to actually initiate that connection. And lastly, the system couldn't just be about talking. It had to support activities together, preferably a wide variety of possible activities. So this is the very, very first sketch of a solution idea. Basically we thought about combining video chat with something like maybe a smart board or a projector table top. And now we could've stopped here and just begun developing this idea. But generally I feel that the better approach is really to try to take the time to explore the solution space and come up with a few alternatives. And also, this solution doesn't really consider this idea of it should be really easy to turn on and off and to actually initiate that connection. So we needed to come up with a few sketches to actually try to consider it. So the next step was really to understand the variety of alternatives available to solve some of these challenges. I think sketching is a really powerful way to articulate these early ideas and explore variety of possibilities. It also lets you show your ideas to people to encourage feedback and discussion. So we'll talk a lot more about generating and communicating design ideas in other courses in this specialization, but let me give you a few examples. So first, there was nothing that said that we had to go with a smart board. So, we knew we wanted to stay horizontalish, because many activities with kids occur on a table, instead of on a wall. But, we wanted to consider some alternatives, so what if we projected on a tent. We could project on the floor of the tent, and even on the walls of the tent, so it could be kind of, an immersive cave experience. Or maybe, we could go simpler, maybe a projector and a camera could be built into the light of a desk. And the video chat can just be on the tablet or laptop or whatever device the kid already has. Or maybe this could be a special table or cabinet with everything already built in so it's easy to learn, easy to use. Additionally, we also had to consider how to turn the system on and off. Now early on, we decided that we didn't want go with a conventional way of doing it like a menu or a button. But rather maybe consider a physical approach because kids find that easier to understand. So we thought about this idea of maybe you could have doors that could be opened to initiate a call and closed to end the call. Or maybe you could have a roll up screen kind of like the way you would have one on a window. Or maybe it would be something you could flip down to use and that would initiate the call to the parent. Now some of our ideas would actually be pretty challenging to implement, so we really focused on those ideas that met our specific constraints. So we had a few constraints, one was that our particular projectors were pretty large and required a few feet of space above the table that they were projecting on. So the lamp idea wouldn't really work for us. We also needed this to be very robust, and if you've ever done anything with kids, I'm sure you know why. They always do kind of things you don't anticipate them doing with the system, so it needed to hold up to everyday use by real children. We also wanted to support three key tasks, which we identified as being very important for our process of users. So homework help was seen as a very good way of parents providing care remotely. Reading together was something that both parents and children really appreciated. And lastly play was really important for kids, whether it's a board game or tea party or something else. And so, as we consider this, the tent could be really cool for play, but maybe doesn't make as much sense for something like homework help or reading together. And so based on these constraints, we selected the option that really suited the needs of our users while still being something that we could legitimately make happen. The resulting system is called the share table, so a parent and child will each have a table in their home. It presents dedicated connection, and it's as easy, if not easier to turn on than a phone. Basically to place or answer a call you simple open the doors of the cabinet, it rings on the other side if somebody else opens the doors there, it makes the connection, and to end the call, you simply close the doors. Now, in addition to this simple, easy on and off system, each table consists of the standard video chat system, so like a monitor, speakers, webcam, microphone. And a camera projector system, that allows video of one table surface to be overlayed onto the other. Now, in this video, I can't really cover testing alternatives or how we evaluate it, whether our idea worked in the end, there'll be future courses that address this. However, I do want to make the point, their idea evolved significantly from our first step at it. But final system gave a lot more consideration to this idea of easy-to-use by incorporating the physical metaphor of cabin and doors. When we tried it out, we saw that it was very easy for kids to understand it and it really increased the number of sessions that the children initiated without having to have the parents to start the connection. Also, in considering options, we transitioned a way from the rear projector to a top-down projector which ended up supporting a lot of neat interactions like being able to write on top of the worksheet and having that writing be projected on top of the kid's worksheet. Or being able to play a board game and having the physical pieces be projected on to the cardboard game rather then onto the bottom of it. The point is that if you take the time to answer some questions in your design process, once you actually begin zeroing it in on the design solution, you'll come up with better solutions. And once again, these questions are, what are the key challenges that your problem must address? What are the design alternatives available to address these challenges, and what are the constraints to which the solution must adhere? In this video I gave you an example of a context where the designer knew a design direction and problem to solve but not the specific solution yet. I went into detail to one such example and I know I didn't really explain all the methods, but you will learn more about the specific methods like doing ideation, idea selection when we get to course two in the specialization. But I hope this video gives you a basic idea of when you should start coming up with solutions and what questions you should ask about these potential solutions. Now, you can read more about the ShareTable and what happened when we asked people to use it. If you have access to the ACM digital library, I have a few links for you here. So that's it, thank you for listening and I'll see you in the next video.
