Final Project ReportJun Mak Sean LeeBikas Tomkoria Fahd ElbolichikhiFinal Project ReportProject Title: ETA – Electronic Travel Assistance for Group 4.Online Doc.: http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~swlee/assignment5.html1. PROBLEMOur goal for this project is to provide an electronic tool for budget travelers, aimed at improving their travelexperience. Our contextual inquiry at the start of our design process gave us an insight into existing practices of budget travelers, the tools they use, and how they use those tools. We interviewed several travelers at a youth hostel in San Francisco, and from these interviews we began to design an interface for a tool we called the ‘Electronic Travel Assistant’ (ETA). From our contextual inquiry we learned that the primary tool used by budget travelers is the tour book, such as a Lonely Planet guidebook, or a Let’s Go guidebook. These books are typically several hundred pages long, are updated once a year, and contain lists and short descriptions of points of interests such as landmarks, restaurants, and entertainment venues. They also contained some limited maps of the cities they cover, as well as culturaland historical summaries of covered regions. Travelers told us that the most important components of theguidebooks they used were the maps, however limited they were.In addition, because of the importance of finding a place to stay, the accommodations listings were also a very valuable resource. Furthermore, travelers also enjoyed the cultural segments in guidebooks. There were a lot of complaints, however, that guidebooks were difficult to search, that the listings and reviews in guidebooks seemed to reflect the interests of the authors, and did not usually seem to match travelers interests, and that much of the information was outdated. Guidebooks, therefore, are the most common tool for our target group, and the maps and accommodations listings provided an invaluable resource for someone in a new city. However, they were inadequate in many regards. The goal of ETA, therefore, is to provide an interface that will solve these problems, that will provide efficient access to large amounts ofinformation, personalized information and ideas that reflect the interests and goals of the user, a means tocollect information about users interests, cultural information, in-depth map coverage, as well as other useful resources.2. SOLUTION OVERVIEWETA bridges the gap left by conventional resources by managing travel information for the user. And, it does so in two ways. First, ETA gives users quick access to up-to-date travel information, such as accommodations, dining, and entertainment, through synchronization with the Internet. For example, once the user selects the cities that he is interested in, he can download all the germane information concerning the locations onto ETA and can have it at hand when he visits the destinations. Secondly, it automatically creates travel itineraries based on the user’s preferences and interests, and ETA dynamically adjusts them to bring the user within budget. For example, when the user profile is created, ETA will use the information provided to generate interesting and financially compatible list of places to stay and where to eat.3. TASKSWe wanted our tasks to be representative of the program features and also be able to string together a good mental model of project for the users. Our contextual inquiry also informed us that the users emphasize that a feature such as mapping should be easy to use and accessible, as a result, we made - 1 -mapping out easy task. Users also expressed that finding an accommodation is a major task that should be implemented in a simple and easy interface, so we made it as our medium task. Finally, a large part ofthe functionality of our product is based on the profile, so we decided to make it our third task, as a relatively hard one. Task 1 (Hard): The first task is to create the user’s profile in which they entered in their preferences and interests. This task is considered “hard” because it requires the most steps to complete and leaves room for many errors.Task 2 (medium): The second task is to find an accommodation in a specific city. This task is labeled “medium” since it requires less steps than the first but is more of a cognitive process than the next.Task 3 (easy): The last task is to locate a particular destination on a map. This one is considered “easy” since it requires the fewest steps and hardly involves any thinking effort by the user.4. DESIGN EVOLUTIONOn deciding to develop a travel assistant applicationfor a handheld device, we wanted to determine whoour target group of users would be and what kind offeatures they would want on the program. To be morespecific, we decided to develop the software for budgettravelers such as college students. In order to find outwhat these budget travelers need, we visited youthhostel in San Francisco (Hostelling International youthhostel) to inquire them about how their visits to the new city could be improved. We interviewed threedifferent travelers from various countries in order toget wider range of feedback. Each of the threeinterviewees gave us valuable feedbacks on whatwould make their budget travel experiences better.For example, one of the interviewees told us thatemergency contact information would be a great helpin case of accident. In addition, the interviewees thought that it would be wonderful to get morepersonalized and fresh information and content, which tour books often fail to provide.Considering many feedback from the travelers, we putdown our initial design using the PowerPoint (unfortunately) as shown in Figure 1. Before long, we realized that HP Jornada had a verylimited screen size compared to conventional computerscreens; we wouldn’t be able to fit all the details on asingle screen as shown in Figure 1. Thus, before doingour Low Fidelity testing, we trimmed down a lot ofdetails like the icons and the menu layouts so that wewill be able to fit our content in a single screen withoutscrolling. We decided that we need to get rid of the‘system menu’ on the top that took up a lot of valuablevertical space. In order to test our prototype without using theinteractive software, we prepared low-fi sketches onapproximately 20 5" x 8.5" pieces of ordinary white- 2 -Figure 1. Initial Sketch of ETAFigure 2. Low-Fi Prototypepaper and drew and cut out the parts we
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