Developing the Intel® Pair & Share Experience

Case Description

We wanted to create interactions that take place on both a smartphone and a PC, and together create a great user experience. This chapter will review how we include the users’ needs into experience design through iterative concept and product testing throughout the development process (Nielsen, 1993). The targeted devices included phones, tablets and PCs with different operating systems, form factors and user interface guidelines. As we worked through various concept usages, we determined there were common interactions that needed to be completed repeatedly by users, regardless of the application they were using. The key questions we were faced with included:

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  What sort of cross-device experiences do users desire?

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  Is there more to cross-device experiences than just syncing?

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  How do people find and connect to another device in the context of a single-user experience?

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  How do people find and connect to another device in the context of a multi-user experience?

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  What are users’ mental models for how they would achieve their desired goal? For example, did users know that they needed the application on both devices to deliver the experience?

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  Did users understand how to acquire applications on each device since each platform has a different method for acquiring applications?

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  Did users know that this experience was delivered by an application as opposed to resident functionality (application) on the platform? For example, texting is a resident application on a smartphone whereas other applications must be downloaded from an application store.