Process - Initial Research

We started by thinking of innovative ideas to answer the problem of large bulky technical manuals. At its core, the problem is an information retrieval one. Navy maintenance technicians need to find information quickly and easily. With a quick and easy method, their work can be more efficient and most of all, easy to do.

In order to immerse ourselves in our project quickly, we conducted literature review to find out what work has been done in interactive manuals. In addition, we also performed a competitive analysis to find out what products have already developed to solve the problem. From this, we also explored what navigation techniques were available for navigating an interface.

In addition, we explored existing interfaces designed to organize and retrieve information. Such existing applications include Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Eclipse, Microsoft Help. Because multimodality was something that the clientsproprosed, we looked at several exiting multimodal applications such as onStar in cars as well as voice-automated telephone systems such as MovieFone and airline customer telephone services.

Previous work included:

LARRI - [insert full word here] the last iteration completed by our clients

method for designing applications for handheld computers

exploration into user needs in the navy

limitation of human ability in audio and visual processing

required features of user interfaces for blind computer users

Some ideas for features as well as methods brought up by previous work:

eye tracking

wearable computers in extreme weather

toolglass view for seeing more detail of a large complex diagram

adaptive interfaces