Connected Devices/Projects/Project Cue

Project Cue
Author(s)
Mozilla
Released
2016.01.11 (Initial Pitch)
2016.06.17 (Pitch Update)
Innovation Status
Stage 0 (Validation)
Website
TBD

Project Cue makes use of an always-on voice-enabled smart screen device to keep track of activities, events, and to-do lists of the family members. The initial focus of the project will be on reminders and will enable any family member to set reminders for his/her own to do's, activities, and events or for any other family member and to receive notifications for these reminders.

Project Overview

• Busy families have to manage and remember many to do’s, scheduled events, and activities related to the management of their households. Often, disorganized or ad hoc methods or tools are used to manage these, including post-its, reminders stuck on the refrigerator, various digital apps, or overloaded memories. This leads to stress and chaos, and it’s time consuming and cumbersome.
• Project Cue saves time and brings peace of mind to the entire family with its simple and intuitive solution to turn the daily coordination chaos across the family members to organized control.
• Envisioned as a Family Organizer, Cue will enable family members to easily manage their activities, events, and to do's.
• The initial focus for Project Cue will be a prototype for Reminders only. Voice will be tested as a friction free way to request and use reminders.
• Project Cue wants to offer a better, easier way than having to carry all those to do's, events, or upcoming activities in your memory or having to write or type up reminders.

Early Exploration

Initial Experimentation

• Project Cue grew out of the study and research conducted by the Project Link team. Initially, the team looked at a hub that would manage smart devices in the home. They evaluated what was desirable from a hub angle, if it was going to be viable from a Mozilla perspective, and desirable for customer. The team used the "Design Thinking" innovation approach by IDEO, where the philosophy of Product Innovation is at the center of technology (feasibility), person (desirability) & business (viability). After prototyping certain fundamental elements like first time user experience, device discovery, interoperability, and a rules engine, and evaluating the market and competitor landscape, including whether or not a digital assistant using voice would be a good way to differentiate, the team concluded that a hub was not where we should be.

Project Study

• While the team was concluding its hub experimentation and research, it considered the following initial target segments for further study:
  • Busy families
  • Teachers and kids at school
  • Elderly

• The team chose "busy families" as the target market segment for its study. User research was conducted by the team via interviews with 18 busy families in North American and Europe to gather data on how they were managing their busy lives and what kinds of help they envisioned needing.

Hypotheses Tested in the Study

We believe that there are..

• Families in the US with 2 or more kids in elementary schools (PS-5), all living together in the same household; both the parents are working full time from 9am to 5pm and are between 30 & 40 yrs old, well educated, and in a medium to high income bracket.

We believe that these families are leading an extremely busy & demanding lifestyle constantly juggling many different aspects of their daily life spanning home, work, kids, shopping, hobbies etc.

• These families seem to always be short on time. They are overwhelmed with their day to day routines that they feel they haven’t had enough time to spend on things close to their heart.
• These families crave to have some time back on their hands; a simple way for them to get stuff done, but not have to spend eternal amount of time on it.

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Their needs are…

1 The busy families want an easy way to help them with personalized reminders & memos for various people in their household.

• The mothers of the household are currently reminding their spouses/caretakers/kids multiple times throughout the day via voice prompts or text messages.

2 The busy families want a way their children can interact with a device that can help with homework

• The kids are currently requesting help from parents to assist with their homework or using the internet to gather the necessary information.
• The kids are currently requesting their parents to verify the completion of their homework or relying on information gathered from their teachers/peer verification.

3 The busy families want a simple way to order groceries (etc.) & get it delivered without having to use a screen no matter whether they are home or away.

• They are making a stop at the grocery shop and shopping for groceries OR
• They are using an online shopping/delivery service app if available & adding groceries one at a time and scheduling the delivery.

4 The busy families want an easy way for everyone in their household to listen to music without any supervision or screen time.

• They are using their CD players & manually browsing music in their music libraries to play it OR
• They are using the streaming service that they’ve subscribed to & browsing through their playlists or searching for the music & playing it manually.

We will know this is true when we observe & interview the 20 busy families as a part of our user research study.

Synthesis of Study Data

The team came to these conclusions after synthesizing the study data:

These families are leading an extremely busy & demanding lifestyle constantly juggling many different aspects of their daily life spanning home, work, kids, shopping, hobbies etc. In a majority of the cases, the mother is the one who typically orchestrates the communication across the members of the household/caretakers, organizes schedule & essentially responsible for a smooth running household!

Reminders

• The busy families want an easy way to help them with personalized reminders & memos for various members of their household.
• Household Calendar
• The busy families want an easy way to create & manage their household calendars to enable communication between their families and associated caretakers (nanny, baby sitter, grandparents)

Play TV Shows

• They would like for an easy & intuitive way to play their shows on the TV along with the ability to retain custom preferences & share recommendations based on these preferences

Smart Homes

• They have a desire to equip their homes with smart devices that they would like to control from within their house & remotely

Order and Delivery Groceries

• The busy families want a simple way to order groceries (etc.) & get it delivered without having to use a screen no matter whether they are home or away.

Music

• The busy families want an easy way for everyone in their household to listen to music without any supervision or screen time.

Smart Recipe

• They would like for a way to order groceries from recipes and/or get recommendations for recipes based on the groceries at home

To Do List

• The busy families want a way to create to-do lists & shopping lists that is accessible from anywhere

Pivot to Family Organizer

The results of the study confirmed for the team that it should pivot to a smart digital assistant, or family organizer, the concept tested in the first of the four hypotheses in their study. This family organizer could include scheduling, list management, and reminders. The team doesn’t know yet if all these possible tracks will result in one product. Integration or convergence of the scheduling and list management aspects of the family organizer could come later, but this would need to be researched or tested. The team decided to focus initially on reminders to provide the who, when, what, where, and whether recurring for the busy family members' to do's, events, and activities, and therefore, Project Cue was born.

Concept Validation

Hypothesis The initial focus on Reminders would test the following hypothesis:

• We believe that there are:
  • Families in NA/EU with 2 or more kids in elementary schools (PS-5), all living together in the same household, and both of the parents are working full time from 9am to 5pm and are between 30 & 40 yrs old, well educated, and in a medium to high income bracket
  • who need to keep track of and organize specific things needed to be bought and / or done for the management of the household.
• We believe that for the people in this market segment who
  • are currently addressing it with less organized, ad-hoc ways and tools which include post-its, fridge reminders, digital apps or keeping track in their memory, which can feel stressful, chaotic, time consuming and cumbersome and that
  • by building a friction-free simple way to organize and keep track of the daily activities that are needed for the management of the household
  • we will provide them with more peace of mind and a sense of being more in control of their household and on top of their needs.

Prototype

• A prototype is being developed within a month-long time frame to test how the use of a voice interface for reminders might provide a friction free, easy and better way to help busy family members manage the activities and events related to their household management, and provide them with more peace of mind and a sense of control.
• Specifically, the Project Cue team will build and test with the target market a web app prototype that provides the ability to:
  • Use voice (3rd party) to create reminders for one’s self and his/her family members and display on an always-on tablet
  • Receive reminders whether at home or away
  • Receive notifications via voice and in-app notifications at the time of the reminder
  • View your agenda for the day on either a tablet or smartphone

With the Project Cue prototype, team team wants to test:

• how different speech patterns can be detected
• if voice is truly a friction fee way to interact with reminders
• if we can differentiate the reminders functionality by making it available for the entire family

Assumptions and Risks

Assumptions	Risks
1. Busy families could benefit from a digital family organizer with integrated scheduling, to do list, and reminder functionality. We will start by focusing on reminders	1. Will voice & screen truly provide a friction-free way to create reminders?
2. Voice is perceived as an easy way to input and manage reminders	2. Ability to learn speech patterns
3. A third party voice solution will be able to understand dialects and accents	3. Ability of the third party voice solution to understand different accents and dialects
	4. Latency

Concept Validation Status

Milestone	Date	Status
MVP Preview	June 17, 2016	Done
MVP approved	June 30, 2016	Late
Submit lite version of pitch deck for Gate 0 to reflect pilot	July 5, 2016	Done
Initial end-to-end demo of prototype ready	July 8, 2016	On Target
Present demo at Cue sync up with CD leadership	July 12, 2016	On Target
Project Cue leadership attends Lean Startup Training	July 13-14, 2016	On Target
Ready to test prototype within Cue team	July 15, 2016	On Target
Testing within Cue team completed	July 22, 2016	On Target
Busy Family testers identified and scheduled	July 22, 2016	On Target
Testing by busy family members completed	August 5, 2016	On Target
Results presented to PIB	August 5, 2016	On Target

Status Key

Color	Status	Key
	On Target	The project or deliverable is expected to meet its due date.
	Challenged	The project or deliverable is facing an issue that might cause it to miss its due date, but a “get well” plan has been developed to get it back on track.
	At Risk or Late	The project or deliverable is blocked or facing an issue that might cause it to miss its due date, and there’s no “get well” plan to get it back on track, or it is already late.
	Done	The project or deliverable has been completed.
	On Hold	The project or deliverable has been placed on hold.

Team Participants

• Sam Giles - front end engineering
• Francisco Jordano - back end engineering
• Hema Koka - engineering management
• Johan Lorenzo - prototype testing
• Guillaume Marty - front end engineering
• Julie McCracken - engineering program management
• Preeti Sanketh - product management
• Julien Wajsberg - back end engineering

Development

Technical documentation

Repositories

All code is open source and hosted on https://github.com/cue. Please file bugs on Github issues for these repositories.

QA (NEED TO PROVIDE)

Participation

• Project Cue is at a very early stage, and we are still figuring out many things, including how to best accept contributions. But don't let this deter you!
• The core of Project Cue is developed in Rust. The front-end is developed in HTML5/JS using REST/WebSocket.

Help Wanted

We maintain lists of issues for which we are looking for help.

We also maintain a full, unclassified, list of ongoing issues. If you wish to help, don't hesitate to look at them, but they may not be as easy or as detailed:

• URL for list to go here

And all our source code may be found on GitHub repositories. (NEED TO CREATE THIS)

Getting In Touch

Please subscribe to our mailing-list. (NEED TO CREATE THIS)

We've established Project Cue on Discourse (NEED TO CREATE THIS)

Otherwise, the best way to get in touch with us is to come and chat through irc. We can be found on channel #cue of irc.mozilla.org. (NEED TO UPDATE THIS)

If you wish to file a bug, please visit our GitHub repositories and file an issue. (NEED TO CREATE THIS)

We also discuss our design decisions, improvements or radical new directions as Requests For Comments. Feel free to take a look and to participate. (NEED TO UPDATE THIS)

IRC

You can find us on irc.mozilla.org, channel #cue. (NEED TO CREATE THIS)

Team Meetings

We are using some agile practices:

• "Stand-up" meetings happen on etherpad and on IRC every weekday between 5pm and 5:15pm UTC. (NEED TO CREATE THIS?)
• Weekly meetings happen in Vidyo and on etherpad every Thursday between 5:30pm and 6:30pm UTC.