SIMpliLife: an NFC virtual helper to ease people’s life

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Rome is forging ahead with informational digital signage systems linked to users’ mobile phones.
 
By Alice Moroni, Carlo Maria Medaglia, Serena Sposato and Ylenia De Rosa
 
Cattid is the research centre for Information and Communication Technology of the ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome. Research here considers the testing and integration of RFID technologies, usability and accessibility of software, and methods and technologies for e-learning. Founded in 1979, their multimedia laboratory has become an innovation centre for digital media and technologies.
 
One particular focus of the RFID laboratories is on NFC mobile applications. Here, a platform for NFC mobile phones that interfaces several applications and services has been developed, called SIMpliLife. In the first prototype Cattid has integrated three different applications to cover the most popular NFC use cases: information retrieval via RFID passive tags (SIMpliCity), payment (SIMpliPay) and ticketing (SIMpliTravel), but it would be possible to add new applications following the same architectural principles. Its central aim is to make it easier for tourists and local citizens to move around the city.
 
One of the most interesting short-term scenarios for NFC phones is interaction with ‘smart’ objects like smart posters for mobile proximity marketing, mobile tourism or mobile loyalty programmes, as well as with tagged products in a retail environment. Through smart posters placed around a city, information can be gained about local points of interest by holding an NFC phone near a tag on the poster. Through a user-friendly interface the user can access services such as downloading directions to their destination or calling a taxi – actions which foreign tourists might find linguistically challenging.
 
SIMpliLife is a platform for NFC phones with the Secure Element embedded on the SIM card. It makes use of Smart Card Web Server to provide an attractive, user-friendly interface. SIMpliLife is composed of three main components, named Servlets, which are loaded onto the mobile phone:

• The SIMpliCity Servlet, enabled to read tags and dynamically realise web pages based on the tag content.
• The SIMpliPay Servlet, enabled to communicate using the NFC protocol, to open http/https connections with a remote server, and also to manage (check and top-up) a mobile wallet loaded in the SIM card.
• The SIMpliTravel Servlet, enabled to manage tickets for public transportation. In order to purchase tickets, SIMpliTravel recalls the SIMpliPay Servlet. Moreover, in order to validate them, it enables an NFC communication with an ad hoc programmed reader.

All the above Servlets are loaded into the SIM card and access to the SCWS contents (html pages, images and scripts) is also loaded into the SIM card.

In testing this solution, Cattid found that while users have become more and more mobile-orientated, one of the key challenges when exploiting this is to provide the right information in the right place in order to avoid information overload. Another challenge is to design a user interaction that is intuitive so that all citizens can use this technology.
 
 
As SIMpliLife would run throughout the city, information would be directly relevant to location, time and a person’s interests. The NFC-based interaction allows users to replicate the act of touching an object into an interaction with it. This was found to be preferable to a Bluetooth-based interaction
 
NFC also crosses the distance between a reader (an active device) and a tag or responder (a passive device). A mobile phone equipped with NFC technology can therefore act both as an active reader and as a passive contactless card. The opportunity to use the same device for this enables an almost endless variety of applications: payment, ticketing, access control, content distribution and smart advertising are just a few.
 
 
Lessons Learnt in Usability
 
Cattid asked usability experts to perform a set of actions (such as download the application from a smart poster, get a direction from Termini train station to Coliseum, ask for historical information on Pantheon, find the nearest post office, etc.) trying to act the part of different types of users, from the technology-novice to the high-tech person. The primary problem detected by usability experts was the information organisation: sometimes menus were unspecific and difficult to reach.
 
After the experts’ evaluation, 15 users, of different ages and technological ability, performed the same tasks. Seven of the users were foreign, while eight were Italian. On the basis of what users stated in their questionnaires and what they expressed while performing the tasks, they collected a set of suggestions for improving the SIMpliCity application. One of the recurring problem users encountered was related to the organisation of information, as noted by the usability experts.
 
Cattid had placed a selection menu at the end of a long text describing point-of-interest history to encourage the user to read the whole text before selecting another. Users didn’t appreciate this feature but preferred instead to have short texts and more fragmented information. The small size of the screen also represented a difficulty in reading long texts.
 
Another problem was related to the navigation flow: three of the users felt lost while interacting with SIMpliCity, and exited the application unintentionally. On the other hand, nine of the users (60%) appreciated the intuitiveness of the interaction, based on the ‘touch paradigm,’ and the speed in retrieving information from the smart poster. These impressions were confirmed by the answer about the level of difficulty in using SIMpliCity: 70% of the users considered it ‘low,’ while 15% regarded it ‘null’ and 20% reckoned it ‘medium’. None found it ‘hard’.
 
Finally, almost all users (90%) thought that SIMpliCity could be integrated with traditional, paper-based, tourist guides, rather than totally substitute them.
 
After this analysis, Cattid redesigned the application to increase the portability of the application, refine the information structure, together with the GUI, improve the navigation flow and improve the reliability of the application.
 
In order to increase the portability of SIMpliCity on all NFC-enabled devices, they modified the way SIMpliCity retrieves information about points-of-interest and bus routes. The new version retrieves information by launching the browser of the mobile phone and connecting to a specific URL, obtained from the tag. Web pages containing the information are in a specific format for mobiles, so that displaying information is optimised for small screens. Moreover, the interaction steps before launching the browser were designed using low level display: providing a pixel-level control of the application, a low level display offers a more individual experience, so that all objects shown on screen are under the control of the programmer. In this way all graphic objects are positioned in the optimal way.
 
To improve the reliability of the information displayed, Cattid retrieved information about bus routes straight from the mobile site of the Roman public transport company. The idea: people trust what they already know, so finding a familiar logo while interacting with a new service and technology makes them feel more at ease.
 
After redesigning the SIMpliCity application, they performed a new set of usability tests: users preferred the new version and all successfully completed the tasks assigned. When asking about the information completeness, 70% of the users stated it as ‘good,’ while in the previous version the percentage of the users who considered it ‘good’was only 30%.
 
The results of these usability tests revealed that SIMpliCity is successful because it provides already known services in a new way, meeting users’ expectations without making use of new technologies difficult. Cattid are now working on the unique platform, SIMpliLife, which interfaces several applications and manage different of services to give users an homogeneous user experience. They are also exploring possibilities to provide tourists with interactive information through RFID tagged flyers and QR codes.
 
See these applications for yourself at DIGITAL SIGNAGE EXPO 2010 and hear more from Alice Moroni at the Mobile Interactivity Workshop.