Connected Devices/Projects/Project Cue

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Project Cue
Author(s)
Mozilla
Released
2016.01.11 (Initial Pitch)
2016.06.17 (Pitch Update)
Innovation Status
No longer an approved project
Website
TBD

Project Cue makes use of an always-on voice-enabled smart screen device to set reminders and manage and keep track of activities, events, and to-do lists of family members.

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 would save time and bring 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
  • Provide voice enabled reminder functionality that improves upon existing methods by relieving the need to carry to do's, events, or upcoming activities in your memory or write or type them up
  • Provide automated functionality to organize events and activities quickly and easily by coordinating the schedules of family members and friends

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 its work on a hub.

Smart Digital Assistant 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 Initial 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.

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 verbally reminding their spouses/caretakers/kids multiple times throughout the day or with 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 them delivered without having to use a screen no matter whether they are home or away.

• They are making a stop at the grocery store and shopping for groceries OR
• They are using an online grocery shopping/delivery service app if available & adding items 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 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, specifically, a family organizer which was the concept tested in the first of the four hypotheses in the 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

Original Hypothesis

The hypothesis we initially developed for the entire Cue project was:

• 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.

Reminders (MVP1)

We narrowed the focus of our experimentation to Reminders and used the same design thinking referenced above, and Lean StartUp methodology.

Assumptions (Leap of Faith)

• We believe that busy families are looking for an alternative solution other than what they currently use (memory, post-its, black boards, calendar apps etc.) to manage & organize their schedule
• We believe that VOICE is a friction free way to create reminders, lists, coordinate schedules.
• We believe that busy families would require an alternative way to create & manage reminders, lists & schedules using a SMART DISPLAY that would further simplify their management.

Hypotheses

• Creating a voice enabled solution to create reminders, lists, coordinate schedules, we will reduce the time taken to perform these tasks by 20%.
• Offering a solution that provides an alternative way to create and manage reminders, lists & schedules using a smart display, families would be able to accomplish their tasks 20% more times than before.

BUILD

• A prototype was developed over four weeks 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.
• Leverage Google’s Speech API to build a speech enabled interaction to create reminders
• Webapp to display the reminders created
• Provide both voice & visual feedback for each reminder created
• Notifications to multiple devices
• Remote access to retrieve/create reminders

LEARN

• Gather feedback on a voice enabled solution to create reminders
• Get a deeper insight on what types of reminders, lists, schedules people are looking to manage
• Get an understanding of the speech patterns:
• Determine 2-3 speech patterns (different ways of instructing the robot) to set reminders, to-do lists, schedule events both within the family & outside the families
• Gather ideas on how people foresee interacting with this device

MEASURE

• Compare the time taken to create reminders via existing methods & by leveraging our proposed solution

RESULTS

• Interviewed 5 participants to validate or invalidate our hypothesis
• The product even in its current primitive state ignited a fair amount of enthusiasm in the participants.
• Hypothesis 1 has been validated: All participants agreed that voice is a friction free way to interact. This product at its prototype stage has reduced the time taken to create reminders by an average of 77% (peak savings of 91%)
• Hypothesis 2 could not be validated as we could not yet give away a product for independent use; we will revisit this hypothesis at a later time.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR NEXT STEPS

• Build the first phase of the product with just reminders & lists functionality and give it to customers for independent use.

Coordination of Small Events (MVP2)

The team moved forward with additional assumptions resulting from the results of the completed studies.

Hypothesis (to be tested over 2 weeks)

• Creating a product that leverages voice interaction & chatbot to coordinate small gatherings
• will result in these families seeing
  • 50% reduction in the time required to coordinate such events using traditional methods of email, sms, phone calls
  • 25% quicker response rates from recipients
• Creating a targeted Facebook campaign that is supported by a polished landing page & video clearly articulating the vision for Cue will result in at least 50 users signing up for updates

BUILD

• Create a video that explains the entire product
• Create a landing page to explain the entire product & host the video
• Launch a Facebook campaign
• Wizard of Oz / Concierge MVP style to determine interest & areas that demand a solution for coordinating smaller gatherings (3-4 families)

MEASURE

• 1. of clicks on facebook ads
  2. of views on the video
  3. of lead gens on the Landing page
• Bounce rate?

LEARN

• Gauge customer interest in the product even before it is completely built
• Vested group of customers to engage with for future product iterations
• Validate customer appetite in automating coordination through chatbot

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. Performance of the device will be acceptable for voice.	4. Latency
5. Users of the device will find the microphone input quality acceptable.	5. Not being able to find a microphone that provides enough quality for input.
6. Users of the device will want a smart display to manage their reminders, lists.	6. Users will want to manage the reminders and lists only on their smartphones, tablets, or PCs.

Concept Validation Status

Milestone	Date	Status
MVP Preview	June 17, 2016	Done
MVP1 approved	June 30, 2016	Done
Submit lite version of pitch deck for Gate 0 to reflect pilot	July 5, 2016	Done
Initial demo of prototype ready	July 8, 2016	Done
Present demo at Cue sync up with CD leadership	July 12, 2016	Done
Project Cue leadership attends Lean Startup Training	July 13-14, 2016	Done
Ready to test prototype within Cue team	July 15, 2016	Done
Testing within Cue team completed	July 22, 2016	Done
Busy Family testers identified and scheduled	July 21, 2016	Done
Testing of busy family members completed	July 25, 2016	Done
Results of MVP1 presented to CD leadership	July 27, 2016	Done
MVP2 study started	August 1, 2016	Done
Facebook Campaign created	August 8, 2016	On Target
Cue public landing page created	August 8, 2016	Challenged
Cue video created	August 8, 2016	On Target
MVP2 study completed	August 12, 2016	On Target
Devices ready for MVP1 testing with study participants	August 19, 2016	Challenged
MVP1 testing with devices completed	September 2, 2016	Challenged
MVP1 testing with devices completed	September 2, 2016	On Target
Update presented to PIB	September 14, 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.

Challenges:

• Engineer PTO in the month of August
• Resource availability to create a landing page

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/fxbox/calendar and https://github.com/fxbox/calendar-server. 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 JavaScript (Node.js). 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:

• https://github.com/fxbox/calendar
• https://github.com/fxbox/calendar-server

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 stated above 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.