Hermes' Features
It's getting harder and harder to keep up with the news each day. Hermes helps keep you informed by reading aloud news from your favourite sources so you can continue commuting or exercising without distraction.
Hermes is a voice assistant that can assist you by:
- Reading text articles about specific topics aloud.
- Playing relevant podcasts and short audio snippets.
- Defining confusing terms that come up while listening.
- Offering articles related to the current content.
Just speak your commands out loud, starting with a "Hey Hermes," to start down the rabbit hole of whatever topic you like. Hermes will show you your previous articles and definitions so you can always go back to whatever you were listening to, so don't be afraid to ask for definitions or more content!
Designing Hermes
Identifying the Issue
We knew from the begining that we wanted to improve how people get their news. While at first we explored ways to help determine reputable news sources, we realized that a lot of people were either wildly disinterested in the news, or were already content with the sources they goth their news from.
Hermes was originally designed to help introduce the news into the routines of people who don't normally keep up with it, but we realized that we could design Hermes by studying the habits of those who actively keep up with the news, and what features kept them interested.
User Research
From our user research, we found that most people expressed concerns over not having enough time to read the news. Some of the more popular formats for on-the-go news involved the radio and podcasts, neither of which can compare to the flexibility of customization as reading content online.
A better understanding of our target users allowed us to generate personas and tasks that we deemed crucial to improving the on-the-go news experience. People have the time to listen to news during commutes or exercises, but it's not possible to read from their favourite sources while performing other tasks. Thus; we began to storyboard our initial goals for Hermes.
Paper Prototyping
Given our understanding of the user and our tasks, we began to develop a paper prototype of Hermes' UI so we could better understand how users interact with voice assistants. We learned that this is a difficult task. From confusion over what commands could be used to the actual functionality of Hermes, we realized that we hadn't effectively communicated to the users what features Hermes excelled at.
We redesigned our tutorial, added additional functionality, and explicitly offered users suggested topics and definitions as they listen to their articles. After several iterations of heuristic evaluation and usability testing, we felt that we had a design we were proud of.
Documents
Our Team
Oisin Doherty
CSE
Justin Leonard
CSE
Anne Meleshuk
CSE