Anders PJ
MEMORY EGG
MEMORY EGG
The Memory Egg is a little helper meant to remind you of little things in everyday life.
It has a soft touch surface displaying colored dots representing the different memories you recorded.
By associating colors and shapes to your reminders, the Memory Egg helps you remember better through visual association.
The Memory Egg (2008) is the result of a project called “Remind Me” at the Interaction Design Master at Malmö University.
Many solutions have been made for storing your reminders and "taking over responsibility", e.g.
phone calendars, Outlook, PDAs etc. Therefore we wanted to explore the opposite path - helping the user to remember better by himself, rather than just have another device "thinking" for him.
After figuring out the main focal point, we added additional demands based on our initial field study and previous work about digital reminders. We wanted our device to be:
- non-disturbing
- give the user the same feeling of reliability as paper
- have a certain playfulness that makes the user want to use it
- make the input barriers as low as possible
TESTING
We used tools from “Experience Prototyping” (described by IDEO) by being inspired by surfaces
and shapes on existing products to more quickly and precisely get a collective opinion of the
materials, surface and shape.
Simple real life metaphors were used as well to simulate digital behavior, for instance laying coins on a drawn egg to simulate the colored symbols and their behavior when the egg is being moved.
We gave four people a "Memory Egg Kit" consisting of an envelope with a short introduction, the user guide, a colored pen and a small stone the size of a credit card. The testers were asked to use the egg from friday to sunday by painting colored dots on the stone every time they have to remember things.
We then used “Cooperative Evaluation” to retrieve their feedback on usability and choice of build materials.
INTERFACE DESIGN
But there was one major thing both user groups wished to have: The ability to add different shapes to the memories. The reason was simply, that the variety of significantly different colors is not big enough to distinguish ten or more dots on a surface. If the user ends up having two dots on the surface with only a slight difference in red, it will be hard to tell which memory they are related to. Therefore we decided on having the egg choose random shapes.
We experimented with several different symbols but decided on having them organic. They relate best to the shape of the egg and are abstract enough to not be associated with anything in the users mind already, e.g. a cross or square.
ADDING PERSONALITY
The most important part of the egg was to create an emotional link to the user without making it a toy. The link would make the user carry around the egg and not forget it at some place. Therefore we tried to give it a life of its own. The memory-symbols react to the movements of the user, for instance when you shake it, the shapes will be shaken loose of their position and bounce back to their place when you stop shaking.
After a while of not using the egg and have it just lying on the table, the symbols will start to play around with each other. As soon as the user moves it again,they will go back to the places you put them before, pretending nothing happened.
