The problem

Investigate new ways to change the habits when you get in touch with your contacts through the UI of your mobile phone.

Briefing of the project

In this project we had to choose a brand to work on a communication device. I decided to choose Google because I thought that working on the way to integrate all the services they offer would be really interesting. I focused my work on the user interface.

How improve your experience when you are going to contact somebody

• Let the user know if it is a good moment to contact somebody by showing him what are his contacts doing through Jaiku, the micro-blog service by Google.
• Know the position of your contacts —of course, if they let you see them— because maybe they are near you and you didn’t know: import the idea of “casual meetings on street” into your mobile phone.
• Integrate it with the social network element to find and filter people with the same music taste or interests as you, that are drinking a cup of coffee next to you and are open if you want to join them or that maybe are looking for somebody to go to a concert.
• Integrate it with the rest of the on-line services.
• Respect your privacy by letting you change your status to invisible to be shown or not to whoever you want whenever you want.

The result

The red dot indicates you’re offline or hidden and the green one indicates you are visible to your contacts.

When you open one of your contacts you can clic on the bookmarks to call, send an email, chat, place them in the map or view the feed of their last activities. When you enter into the detailed view you can see all this information in the same screen.

The colours on the map represent different contacts or contacts with same interest, music taste, category, etcetera. You can filter and navigate through your groups, categories or contacts from your social network and see who is around you and know what are they doing by selecting them.

October 2007