gabbo
The typographical smartwatch
In collaboration with:
Lionel Michel
Designed for:
FH Potsdam
Supervised by:
Prof. Matthias Krohn
Year of origin:
2014
Concept
Gabbo is a conversational UI concept for a smartwatch as a companion-device to the smartphone. Continuously throughout the day gabbo’s AI addresses its user personnally with short contextual, interesting or just funny push-notifications and thus creates a personality for itself. The underlying algorithm processes information from the user’s personal cloud, his geolocation and featured services in combination to select professionally crafted messages in every situation. This allows for the Smartwatch UI to do completely without menus and complex interactions. The user benefit is that gabbo’s complexity doesn’t increase accordingly to its functionality as the services remain hidden until triggered by context. Moreover, this leads to a very playful and explorative interaction with gabbo as users may receive helpful services and funny texts wherever they are. All services – even those by third parties – seamlessly integrate into the flow of messages in realtime once the user has installed and activated them in the control center application on their smartphones. Therefore additional services rather enrich the gabbo-experience instead of overcomplicating it. The control center application also enables users to conveniently switch between different gabbo characters with conversational tones ranging from casually immature to businesslike restrained.
Concept of time
The Cultural Probes showed, among other things, that most of the test persons looked at the clock more frequently when they had an upcoming appointment. If, on the other hand, they had a day off or no subsequent appointments, they paid significantly less attention to time and in some cases no longer at all. It could also be observed that time itself was often of secondary importance, as it was usually ‘converted’ in relation to a context. An example: It is 2pm and I need to leave at 2:15pm in order to arrive on time. So I don’t exactly care that it is now 2pm, except for the calculation that I have to leave in fifteen minutes.
We have implemented this understanding of time in our clock by using the relative ‘context time’ as the primary layer and placing the absolute time on a secondary layer, which only emerges unasked if there is no context. In addition, we evaluate the context time qualitatively by conveying the urgency of the context by means of a coloured traffic light system and haptic and acoustic vibration signals. To stay with the previous example, gabbo at 2pm, i.e. 15 minutes before the start, would display the context time on a green background, vibrate briefly ten minutes before and vibrate more strongly on a yellow background as well as one minute before and switch to a red background.
UI-Model
Gabbo’s user interface is based on a 3-level model, where the levels are ordered according to urgency and frequency of use. Navigation between the levels is done by means of familiar single-touch gestures on the display.
The representation of the absolute time (with date display) is placed at the bottom of this level system. As described in the section ‘Understanding Time’, we place less value on this time display and only let it emerge through active intervention by the user or in the absence of a context. One level above this is the aforementioned ‘context time’. gabbo uses information from the Smartwatch sensors (e.g. motion and acceleration sensors), the user cloud (e.g. calendar entries) and a database of location-based services (e.g. navigation) to determine the said ‘context’ as continuously and precisely as possible. Depending on the context, it’s either the time until leaving being displayed – taking into account the travel time – or the travel time itself, i.e. how long the user still needs to reach his destination under current conditions (e.g. traffic situation, public transport connection, …).
Process
As our first step into research, we designed cultural probes to have our participants self monitor their dealing with time. In addition, we were able to gather qualitative information on when and how people actually deal with time and what devices they use in those contexts. Those probes also included a section on desirable features which turned out to be a fantastic inspirational pool of ideas. In addition, we analyzed current smartwatches and wearables in terms of conceptual orientation, functions and features, technologies used and recognizable deficits. The results of this research were recorded on a mind map.
After ideation resulted in the basic concept of a dialog-based interface had been made, we analyzed the daily routine of a fictitious user using a user journey and developed corresponding context dialogues in two variants (serious and cheeky) for the most important scenarios. These were also examined with regard to their need for information (what information is needed and where does it come from) and the possibilities of interaction and Artificial Intelligence.
The design process was characterized by many detailed typographic and micrographic decisions, which had to be tested in real size on the iPhone retina display and paper prototypes on the wrist. The preliminary end result was a concept paper and a classic walkthrough of an exemplary morning with a way to work in individual screens, which we then illustrated in a video prototype.
Interactivity Concept
Above the context time level lies the dialogue level, the heart and language organ of gabbo. In line with the context of use, sometimes informative, sometimes entertaining comments are given in a chain of communication. The number of chain links is represented by small dots at the lower right edge of the picture, but a maximum of five messages can accumulate in the river. Once a message has been read, it is swiped out of the display to the left, which deletes it irretrievably, and the next link in the message chain takes its place. With a swipe to the right, the user can delete the entire message chain at once – for example, if he doesn’t want to be disturbed.
The messages behave differently according to their importance. Unimportant comments only remain in the flow for a certain time and sometimes delete themselves after a few seconds if ignored. Not very important comments wait as long for their discovery by the user as their context persists. Messages that are considered to be particularly important due to an immanent urgency not only sort themselves into the front of the chain, but also draw attention to themselves through vibration (and in an absolute emergency even through acoustic signals) of the clock.
The messages on the dialogue level can also demand interactions from the user, for example if they contain questions. These are usually simple yes/no questions with subsequent list selection. An example would be if the user’s train connection fails and he is asked if he wants an alternative connection. Upon confirmation, the user will receive a list of connections from which he can choose one.
Video prototype
Play Video