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Topiary in Location Enhanced Applications |
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Topiary is a new tool that was developed in 2005 by Yang Li, Jason Hong, and James Landay for the prototyping of location enhanced applications that are emerging on the market today. Topiary was designed to make the prototyping of such applications easier for the designer by allowing more flexibility in the process of prototyping and testing. The Topiary tool allows designers the freedom of testing their application, even with end users, which eliminates the need to completely build the application and then release it to end users or beta testers for feedback. The design was invented at Berkley, University of California, Science Division, USA. Since developing location enhanced applications need a high level of expertise and dedication, it was necessary to come up with a tool for prototyping the applications quickly and efficiently. Topiary was designed to allow this. Ease of use was one of the main targets of Topiary and in an evaluation with seven qualified participants, all of which had experience in location enhanced applications, the Topiary system ranked an average of 5 on a seven point scale, seven being the best score possible. Each participant was offered a monetary compensation, with a bonus for best design. The participants offered feedback and suggestions on what could be added or taken from Topiary to enhance the system, making it more designer friendly. With Topiary, designers may upload their own sketches or graphics to work as a background on the map they design for the storyboard. In end user testing, then end users will see the graphic chosen by the designer instead of a default screen. Designers can have the option of having a virtual wizard follow the end users who test the end result on a mobile device. The wizard will keep track of each user and their locations through their mobile device such as a PDA. With the Active Map space in Topiary, designers can create models of places, people, and things and run scenarios to demonstrate the use of the location enhanced application. There are many tools included in the Topiary tool, such as the Pencil tool that allows designers to draw ‘roads’ or paths. The designer may choose for certain things to happen when a person nears and object or another person. This will all play out on the scenario placed by the designer. Topiary has sensors that are intelligent, knowing when to show a floor plan or an city map whenever a person enters or leaves a building on the active map board. Since location enhanced applications are hard to test with real end users, Topiary incorporates tools that make it easy for the designer to quickly test and analyze their designs. By analyzing several different application tools, the designers of Topiary integrated tools common to all of the applications, while eliminating two that had no real use for user application. The end result is an application that combines ease of use with important and useful tools for the location enhanced application designer. Back To Tree Nursery References Related Information |
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