Initial Research

Shadowing and Observation

We started off our research by hopping on buses near rush hours, and riding them back and forth from downtown Pittsburgh. We observed the readers on the buses and noted what sort of material they seemed to be reading, and what was generally around them.

This, we thought, would help to determine a good size for the reader, among other things. Should it be large enough to fit magazine spreads, or small enough to fit in your palm? From our observations, we noted that most of them carried bags for their reading material, so perhaps they wouln't need the reader to be really small, especially since every reader we saw was sitting down, with their hands free to hold their papers.

Stakeholder Research

Carnegie Library - We visited the Carnegie Public Library here in Pittsburgh as patrons looking to borrow an e-reader. They told us that they tried eBooks 5 years ago, but the program was unsuccessful. Because they were so expensive, the library only purchased one to test, but the device was so fragile that the first person who checked it out broke it. They also informed us that audiobooks were much more popular anyway.

Borders - We also went to Borders as customers looking to buy an e-reader. The sales representative there told us that they have been trying to push sales for the devices, but mostly to no avail due to the high cost and low customer awareness.

Competitive Analysis

The readers available now have quite a few good functions as well, and so we researched the capabilities of current e-readers to see what we liked or disliked, what we wanted to keep and what we wanted to discard or change.

Useful Technologies

Further research on the details of motion sickness suggested that it is due to an evolutionary response in the human body. While your inner ear detects that you are moving but your eyes do not confirm that (reading a still page), your body identifies the discrepancy as a possible symptom of poison intake, which causes the nausea that would theoretically expel the poison from your body. Remedies suggested ranged from mild electric shocks to a pressure point that relieves this nausea, to retular intake of ginger. Since we didn't think electroshock therapy would be a cool feature to add to an e-reader and didn't want it distributing pills or reminding users to take their herbal supplements like their mother, we later opted to include motion sickness control by sound.