Rumesh:
Can you tell me about what you are planning to do?
Patrick:
What we want is an application where, someone can basically send an appointment from their phone to another person, and I think I can see that going by a couple of ways, one by sms so they make the application and then sms it to the person and the other via Bluetooth, probably when the people are close together. When the appointment is sent, there are two things, the time and how long they want it to last and their business card, with their details. When that person receives it, for example when I receive one from you, I can either add the appointment to my calendar or save the contact to my list of contacts. From the receiving point of view, I will get a notification for a request for a meeting, and then I’ll have someway in that application to say “add the person to my contacts, add the person to my contacts”. If I receive one through sms, I’ll be reading that in my sms, there’ll be an option on my sms saying, which is, send this to my calendar or save the contact details to my contact list, and the application should let me do those two tasks. That’s basically the idea of it.
Rumesh:
So, what operating systems are you targeting?
Patrick:
What were thinking about is high end phones, so probably actually just Symbian operating system, something like the P800 or the P900, they are quite powerful phones with large displays, actually they tend to have small displays and large displays.
Rumesh:
Ok, so what about the interaction devices?
Patrick:
I want it very much like this (P800), so basically there are two modes to using it, there’s one where there’s sort of a closed screen, where the flips down shut and you can use it with the keypad and the jog dial in the side of the phone. The other one is when you open it up, and you can basically use the stylus on this quite big display, and obviously I’d like the displays to be consistent with each other so if you know how to use it when the keypads shut you should be able to know how to use it when the keypads open, and of course with the stylus you can do simple handwriting using to do the text engine which can make it better. So, I’d like to do both, but if we can just concentrate on lets say just the P800, I think that’d be more than good enough for now.
Rumesh:
Right, what is someone calls when you actually receive this appointment?
Patrick:
When I receive it I don’t think it really matters, ok so when I kick the application up, it’ll be a separate application, so if some one calls, I guess I’ll take that… but it depends where you are in the interaction at that point. If I’m just looking to view an appointment, I guess there’ll be a list; I might have multiple people that have requested appointments. In the actual action of saving it to my contacts, I’ll probably be able to take the call, and at the end of the call it would have probably cancelled that action. Now if I’ve added the contact but not the calendar appointment, I’m sort of half way through I still think it’ll basically interrupt the procedure, but maybe it’ll be useful if it told me I’m half way through and asks me if I want to add that appointment when u return to the application after the call.
Rumesh:
What if the appointment clashes with another appointment, will we have the option to tell the sender you can make it at that time?
Patrick:
Ok, we haven’t really thought about that, but okay the main thing that it just says is that, you use the normal ways of communicating, where the application won’t let you put that appointment but you’ll have the option of replying to that person. And replying will primarily be sms. So when you hit reply you will be able to sms them back or maybe use any of the details as when you receive an appointment you have to have the contact details, addresses and such fully filled out and you should have the option of contacting them via sms or email to actually say this appointment clashes and probably delete that request for that meeting as well. That’s probably it, maybe the best thing to do is to arrange another meeting, just have a think about what I’ve said and get back to me with a set of questions. We’ll have a follow up meeting with our technical people and go through some of the options and then maybe you can work on a design. Okay, see you again.