Topiary: A Tool for Prototyping Location-Enhanced Applications Yang Li, Jason I. Hong, James A. Landay, Presented by Daniel Schulman

Location-Enhanced Applications Use the location of users, others. Examples: AT&T Find Friends service. E911 Hard to design: Need lots of technical expertise. Must use low-level sensing technology.

Topiary A prototyping tool for location-enhanced applications. Supports iterative design without actually having to wander around for testing.

Topiary Active Map: Models a map and locations within it. Scenario Producer: Specify which people and locations are involved. Storyboard Workshop: Storyboards can be triggered by scenarios.

Topiary – User Testing Testing is done via a Wizard-of-Oz setup. The designer can move people and items around on the map. If real sensor data is available, it can also be used (via wireless networking).

Topiary – Evaluation Participants created a tour-guide application. All were able to use Topiary, and found it relatively easy. The research team also iteratively designed a tour guide themselves.

Critique A useful new tool for a fairly new type of UI. Based on lots of assumptions about the type of UI that is being designed: Heavily biased towards map-based UIs. There could be other kinds of location- enhanced applications.

Future Directions Why restrict yourself to 2D maps? 3D is important – what floor am I on? Is the map always the most important thing to show the end-user? Is there always a single map? Shifts in scale – from an outside to an inside map.

Future Directions Why restrict yourself to location? Can sense orientation, temperature, lighting, movement, etc. The use of a Wizard-of-Oz setup for testing can generalize – can Topiary’s interface also be generalized?