Wellness-At-Hand: Exploring novel interactions to support smokers in managing their cravings for cigarette
This report provides an understanding of the design and implementation of our proposed system, ‘Wellness at hand”, as a digital prototype. The aim of ‘Wellness at hand’ is to help smokers who struggle to manage their craving episodes during their attempts to quit smoking. The system provides four-fold experience of commitment, fun, empowerment and motivation to support smokers to quit smoking. We created a low fidelity digital prototype with Microsoft PowerPoint presentation and tested the system in the usability lab with three participants. The absence of matured technology to support hand-based interaction required for our system, motivated us to opt for the ‘Wizard of oz’ as an evaluation method. During the user testing, we projected the presentation slides on left hand palm of the participant. One of the team members acted as a pseudo system where he responded to every user action as if the system itself is doing it. All the user interactions were manipulated at run time. Every participant performed six tasks. We observed our participants when they were performing the given tasks and later interviewed them to understand their overall experience with the system. Participants had mixed feelings about our system. They found the system very innovative and appreciated it for its purpose; on the other hand, they could not understand the relevance of different functions of the system. We also found several issues related to the system usability such as unclear navigation, and lack of games’ rules. We report our findings from the participant evaluation along with the issues faced during the testing. At the end, we propose some recommendations to help designers interested in exploring interactive technology to help smokers quitting smoking.