Initial Sketches

Applications

Status Update: For many teens, it is important to know what others are doing or informing others about what you are doing. For instance, on the extremely popular application AOL Instant Messenger, teens will often post an away message that tells people what they are doing such as shopping at the mall, watching a particular movie, or doing some homework. We want to incorporate this into our phone design so that teens can stay connected to their friends no matter where they are. Updating their status via pictures is meant to be similar to posting a text away message. The picture though can be a more entertaining way of telling others what you are doing.

Picture Chat: The prevalence of chat amongst teenagers has risen greatly in the last few years and occurs on a daily basis. From our research, teens do not chat very often with their phones using text messaging. We attribute this to two reasons, the first is cost and the second is that it is not convenient to enter in text on such a small device. We want to allow teenages to stay connected with each other but instead through pictures that can be accompanied with a voice message or a text message. Pictures allow people separated by large distances to remain in contact with each other.

Updating Blog: Blog or web logs are becoming increasingly popular as well. We want to allow teenagers to be able to update their blogs away from their computers. Oftentimes an unexpected or spontaneous moment will want to be captured and shared. This way, teens can update the blog with pictures instead of text. Allowing teens to quickly take a picture and annotate that picture with voice or text then upload that to the web will allow them to keep their daily journal updated often.