digepige
Project Leader: Francesca Tassistro & Silvio Cioni
Project Assistants: Katrin Svabo Bech & Renzo Giusti
In collaboration with IconMedialab Italia
Group members: David Boardman, Yun Chen Chang, Jee Youn Moon & Ka Lung Pang
Idea | Problem | Context
As the mobile communication market has grown intensively in recent years, several fileds in mobile application development have opened in pursuit of different goals, going from new forms of synchronous and asynchronous communication, to innovative business scenarios, from identity management issues to game design. What strongly emerges from this trend is a new way to consider the Mobile communication, no longer constrained to propose classical functionalities such as phone calling, messaging, alarm, memo, calendar, etc. but also to become a new platform to manage pervasive and ubiquitous communication channels. Currently, several elements were inherited from Web 2.0 trends and, in particular, those considered under the definition of social networking. According to this, issues such as User Generated Content, Tagging and Social Bookmarking were taken from the Internet and proposed into the Mobile section with interesting effects in terms of new business possibilities and further associated technological developments. Widely-known Websites such as Flickr, Del.icio.us, YouTube, LinkedIN and Digg transpose their influence on some new applications being proposed for Mobile phone such as DodgeBall, Waymarkr, Shozu, Mobup, Digital Chocolate and hundreds of clones everyday coming.
From this, the main initial focus was to deeply analyze current trends in Mobile Application Design, to extract the most widely diffused topics. A conceptual map was drawn to underline the semantic areas being considered, and from this, the most representative projects were better analyzed as to reach a complete comprehension about the actual trend-setting in Mobile Interaction Design.
Aside from the concept of User Generated Content, it is worth mentioning that a strong emerging aspect in Mobile 2.0 was represented by the location-based feature that, after the lowering price process of GPS device, became a diffused element characterizing several platforms nowadays largely reknowns. As this trend can be noticed in the Web as well, for the Mobile phones the discourse is slightly different as, in this case, we can really consider a situation of Mobility being different from the Portability of applications such as GoogleMaps running on a common PC. As to this situation, an expression that better can resume the actual trends in MobApp design and explain his main features can be considered Space 2.0.
The project focused mainly on day-to-day problems of citizens such as the cost of living, which is increasingly becoming more of a worrying element for young people, large-families and elders. This field of application was appeared to be connected to some sustainability thoughts such as, the design of an enabling platform to be proposed to a community of consumers to support decision-making processes, enable the saving of money, reduce mobility and improve social contacts.
According to this, the positioning along the conceptual map fell inside the Commerce field, on one side (consumers’ support), and between Sharing (User Generated Content) and Navigation (Location-based) on the other. The main context being selected consists in streets and squares, continuously crossed by people to move from one point to another in the city (depending on different patterns being determined by elements such as needs and functionality) and the houses as places where people can meet to discuss, face to face, commercial transactions. At a secondary level, street markets, supermarkets and other commercial activities can be included in the first context element.
Setting a scenario, several user profiles were individuated to make explicit the platform uses and related issues in terms of needs. The ideal user is between 18 and 36, has a college education and previous experiences in e-commerce or Internet-auctions such as eBay ones, is familiar with social networking applications such as Flickr and YouTube and uses them to share pictures and videos. The user is skilled with advanced technologies and prefer a critical consume to avoid wasting money for disinformation matters.
What is it?
DigePige is a m-commerce mobile application which aims to create an organized net-work of consumers in a mutual help perspective. It consists of an enabling platform that allows to share consumer information: buyers, sellers and contributors can use the application to coordinate non-institutional-market commercial transactions, suggest discounts, special offers and generic conveniencies.
^MEDIA=1^
Scenario: SELLING
^MEDIA=2^
Scenario: BUYING
DigePige is a location-based platform that permit users to access on-the-fly to information related to the surroundings, obtaining more details about them. Trust is an important factor in economics, so every contributor is rated by others to create a qualitative ranking that can orientate better general intentions between subscribers.
The DigePige concept is mostly based on some keywords that explain the inspirations and the goals to achieve with the application usage:
SHARE: The application give the possibility to share informations both about second hand products to be bought and about suggestions on discounts or special offers
CONSUMER-ORIENTED: The application let meet together the consumer community by supporting them to perform decision-making issues
LOCATION-BASED: DigePige works together with a GPS-receiver in order to create a real-time locative-media navigation system
CONTEXT-AWARENESS: The application shows in real-time suggestions and product offers that are located in the surroundings with further functions to guide the DigePiger to the point of interest
ORGANIZED NETWORK: DigePige aims at create a community of people sharing common interests and profiles in order to stimulate mutual help interactions
SUSTAINABILITY: A sustainable system is an integrated network of people, products, services and infrastructures that is consistent with the fundamental principles of: use what exists, minimize mobility, integrate and share, empower individuals & communities, develop flexible networked organizations
LIFE-COST: Or the “reason-why” of the mobile application. The information sharing between application subscribers can help to face the growing problem of life-cost
How it works
DigePige is a FlashLite-based rich internet application written for advanced PDAs or smartphones being integrated with GPS-receivers. At a first glance, the application appears as a navigation map covering the 90% of the available space on the PDA screen. On this side it shows a red dot being the user’s avatar which is positioned exactly in the middle of the map. The map continuously moves in order to follow correspondant user movements.
Here, several icons appear to show the existence of both suggestions and second hand products on the subscribers’ surroundings. The blue-squared icon is related to items and products, while the rose star-alike icon represent commercial suggestions. In some occasions a green tick can appear on the left side of the icon; in that cases it means that the related content was already consulted. Whereas the side icon shows a red heart, it means that the content was saved into the “My favorites” repository.
By clicking on these icons, a small-layer appears displaying more informations such as the expiration date (through a clessidra-alike icon showing the time progression) and the contributor rating (along 5 stars being yellow or grey depending on the evaluation).
If the user select “more details…” label a new window appears superimposing to the map one. This layout is in general declined to all the application sections in order to maintain a perception uniformity, enhance the system usability and to leave a continuous view on what is going on in the navigation.
Entering the detail page related to the icon being selected, the user can obtain further informations related to the item/suggestion such as:
PRODUCT INFO/SUGGESTION: Accessing this sub-section, the user can see a picture, a detailed description, the price, the expiration date and the location. Furthermore, towards this page the DigiPiger can enable the “Show me the route” function being working as a GPS-navigator system in order to guide the person to the item being interested in through the main map.
SELLER INFO/SUGGESTER: More informations about the seller or suggester such as the profile, a picture, etc
CONTACT SELLER (Just for Products): the user can see the contact addresses being associated to the seller. Depending on the privacy choices, some contacts’ channel can be visible to the user. In this case a shortcut icon is visible in order to give the possibility to enable a communication channel directly from this section
SAVE TO MY FAVOURITES: As to popup the main menu, the user should click once on the “expand menu” label placed on the screen bottom. The same button can be used to switch continuously the menu status between “expanded” and “collapsed”. Once the menu appears several choices are offered to the user:
SHARE: Accessing to this section, the DigiPiger can choose to submit an item such as a second hand product or a suggestion. Associated to each of these options, the user should decide if doing a new submission or to re-propose a saved one, in the case a former announce expired before the object was sold or a special offer follow. On the top of the page a graphical section labeled as “steps” indicates to the user the main passages to complete as to finish the submission. If the “new submission” is selected the further steps are common both for items and suggestions. The next page ask to insert an image, instantaneously by using the device camera, by selecting a file from the local drive or skipping the step. The next two steps ask the user to insert some informations such as:
TITLE, 1-WORD DESCRIPTION, COMMERCIAL CATEGORY, SUB-COMMERCIAL CATEGORY, DESCRIPTION, PRICE, EXPIRATION DATE and PHYSICAL ADDRESS AND CIVIC NUMBER
The question mark icons give the possibility to obtain more details related to the requested input. At the end of the data submission, the user can proceed with a preview or save. In this case a confirmation message appear as to complete the Share interaction.
FILTER: can be used by the DigiPiger to control the information flow being received on the device. The first page proposes whether to create a new filtering profile or to use an already created one. In this case, the user can also proceed to modify former settings or delete the profile. If the DigiPiger choose to proceed with the creation of new filtering profile, the first step asks to choose the commercial categories being interested in. Depending on them, the next step regards the selection of sub-commercial categories. The default status results as all-items-already selected. Proceeding, the user can face to the ranges selection being divided in: PRICE RANGE, RATING RANGE, DISTANCE RANGE AND EXPIRATION DATE. The last step consists in choosing a name for the filtering profile being created in that moment.
PREFERENCES
This section allows the user to set some preferences related to the general usage of the platform. More in details it consists in:
CONTENTS, ALERT, PRIVACY, PERSONAL DATA, MY FAVOURITES and HELP.
Value & Potential
Digepige is a flexible platform that can be proposed in different contexts. The application structure and working is not affected by context-changing: the only limitation is related to the availability of maps.
Besides the user profile being here individuated, the platform can be also proposed for others usage situations with different actors such as others social categories being affected by economical problems and cost of living. In this case, large-number families, singles and elderly people can be the ideal users of the application.
As to the market-oriented contexts, DigePige can be easily involved in emerging businesses such as for franchising activities and, in particular, for home rentals location proposals, art museums and so on.
Taking the technical aspects into consideration, DigePige platform can be enhanced implanting an internal search engine spider that can easily find and sort different commercial categories and informations. Furthermore the social networking feature can be improved by showing on the navigation map other application subscribers moving in the surroundings to let arise new forms of social contact in relation to the project purposes. Finally, to achieve a real ubiquitous-computing service and permit to all ranges of mobile phones to access the application, the common cellular network IDs (having an average range in the cities of 300mt) can be used to locate items and people in the context in order to possibly enlarge the amount of final DigePige subscribers.
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