CheapShots: Documentation (A3: Final)

[Kristina Mah]

Original Concept:
"Users can place their tips at any time right up until the match begins, while the iPhone will send you reminders so you don’t forget. Then as the game is played, users can sit and watch the game on their iPhone, sending abuse back and forth to their mates, and as users get excited and jump up or shake their phone in celebration, the accelerometer will sense this and send an earthquake type vibration to their mates phone to further rub it in.
If the user is busy and can’t sit and watch the game, they’ll be sent updates of the game (when points are scored, players are injured etc.) as well as messages from their mates." (From Trent, Assignment 1 blog post)

Final Concept/ Design Rationale:
CheapShots is designed to be a new, innovative take on the footy tipping concept. It is centered around the friendly competitive nature amongst friends who have the common interest in Rugby League Football.
Not only is it an informative application, it also exploits its social component, that allows users to interact with each other in the context of the tipping competition by sending messages via the use of gestures that mimic actual "cheap shots" in a footy game.

User Engagement & Interaction:
CheapShots takes what is on the market for footy applications and brings it to a new level. The simplicity and convenience of the interface combined with the attractive graphic design makes this application enjoyable for both footy fans and iPhone users in general. It allows fans another outlet to extend their enjoyment of the game as well as gives users a playful application that exploits the latest features of the iPhone/ iTouch such as WiFi access, multitouch, accelerometer, multi-media messaging (MMS).

The app is designed to run primarily while football matches are being played via transmitting a live feed of NRL statistics and data during the games so that user have live scores and updates without having to go externally to any other websites. As well as this, the app accesses the live RSS Twitter feed of nrl_com. This allows the user the possibility of sending playful messages or CheapShots to their friends in their tipping comps regardless of whether there is a match on or not.

Features of the App:
The key features that we wished to implement in our design were:
__access to a live feed for all the footy matches and twitter feed for days when there are no matches
__event triggered messaging
__communication via gestures
__creating groups for tipping comps
__a live tipping comp section that allows users to place their tips and computes wins and losses and tallies them as well as being able to compare your success rate with your friends
__a self-contained application that doesn't require the user to click on a hyperlink redirecting them to an external website that would take a long time to load.

Technical Methodology & Reflections of Technical Achievement:
We used XCode to create our application. By creating our basic layout in CSS/ HTML, it was easy to load these pages into XCode and manipulate the navigation from there.

For the RSS feed, while we wanted to use javascript and write our script from scratch, we ended up using RSSInclude that integrated the Twitter feed into our final prototype. This was far more aesthetically pleasing and a faster solution to scripting. Although, given more time to touch up our code, we would want to write the javascript ourselves for the next prototype.

For the gestures, we used Processing embedding in the HTML to code the gestures into the app. We selected two of our CheapShots and it was a simple case of getting the accelerometer values to react and as there is no simultaneous animation, at the completion of the gesture, the app directs the user back to a page that affirms that their gesture was successfully performed and on touching this screen anywhere, brings them back to the main live feed page.
This was the simplest approach and after testing with users, we found this to be intuitive for them as well.

The final selection of CheapShots are:
- The Spear Tackle
- The Eye Gauge
- The Hopoate
- Rubbing the face in dirt
- The Grapple
- The Head High

Our main technical goals were to establish a simple interface and working gestures being regcognised as well as live feed from an RSS source since we don't have access to NRL data.
We accomplished both of these goals for our final prototype, and the next step would be to implement the functions/ calculations for the tipping element.
Although we did not attempt to make a live tipping comp for this prototype, the app will not be complete without it since the entire source of motivation for interactivity lies within the context of "friendly tipping".

Screen Shots and Breakdown of the App
(Images taken as screenshots from iPhone Simulator.)
[1] Title page - easily recognisable, colourful, starting point for the user to explore the app

[2] Live Feed - taking twitter feed with the option of sending a CheapShot or message to your friends by pressing the icons on the right hand side of the screen.

[3] Menu page for choice of CheapShots: Select the cheap shot that you want to send and the instructions of how to perform the gesture to send it will appear on the screen.

[3.1] Example of video that will be seen by sender and receiver when a CheapShot is sent

[4] Option of sending a message accessible from Live Feed page

[5] Tipping Section: Place your tips for the week and view the live NRL competition ladder

[6] MyGroups section - where you can create groups of your friends who also have the app (this is centred around the idea of the weekly tipping. The user is able to access the ladders of their groups to see who is winning and compare their success in each tipping comp.

Reflection:
CheapShots succeeds in being an easy to use, and stylish app that will appeal to footy fans and iPhone/ iTouch users alike. It takes friendly rivalry between friends and uses a playful interface that features gesture recognition to make the app both fun and informative.
We had fun creating this app for these reasons and we think there is potential in the current sports applications market for this type of social interaction focused app to widely grow in popularity.

[Martin]

Kristina, did you say, you added a link to the slides? Can't find it... You can also email them.

[Kristina Mah]

Final Presentation Slides:

[Kristina Mah]

Martin, actually, the slides ave always been attached, above: "WeLoveFridays_FinalPresentation" .. but I have reattached them below: "CheapShots_FinalPresentation" - the only difference is that one of the pages has been deleted because we didn't use it in the presentation.