Santa’s job gets more difficult every year. Less and less kids write to him making the elve’s lives more difficult to keep up with the latest toy trends, the population grows more each year making Santa work harder, and more and more houses are opting for wood burners or no chimneys at all.
This year Mrs Claus contacted us to make Santa’s life a little easier when he’s on deliveries. Of course we were more than happy to help in the hope we would make the Nice list this year.
Mrs Claus was worried about Santa
Mrs Claus was our client, but Santa was our user so we first had to establish the aims for the project and the client’s requirements. In our meetings with Mrs Claus it became clear why she wanted our help:
- Every year she’s up all night worrying about Santa and whether he’s safe – she wanted a way to keep track of his whereabouts without calling him all the time
- She’s worried about Santa’s growing waistline so she wanted a way to remind Santa not to eat so many mince pies on his rounds
- She was also worried that Santa should be careful not to take too many sips of sherry on his visits
- Her primary concern was that the route the elves draw up for Santa was getting more and more complex each year and she was worried Santa would get lost and miss deliveries
Santa’s requirements
Before coming up with a solution we wanted to talk with the user of anything we designed, so we had a chat with Santa to understand more about the context of use. It quickly became clear that he had a different list of requirements:
- He wanted to keep his sightings to a minimum. With the growth of Facebook and Twitter in recent years, he was worried that he was becoming increasingly vulnerable to people being able to track him
- Rather than a route planner or sat nav, Santa would prefer a pre-defined chimney stops so he could go from chimney to chimney with the route already planned out
- Santa has been struggling to remember the sleeping places for the scary dogs, which houses had difficult roofs to land on, which chimneys were too narrow and so on. He wanted a simple way to receive all that information as he left one chimney on the way to the next
- Santa sometimes gets bored with listening to the Reindeer bickering so wanted a way to set up and manage his playlists
- Santa need a way to track his time and see how he was progressing with his delivery plan to make sure he remained on track
- Santa needed some clearly marked stops where he and the Reindeer could have a ‘comfort break’
In coming up with our solution we had to take into account the context of use:
- It would be cold so anything he used would have to be easily operated outdoors with gloves on – i.e. large buttons
- Santa would need a sleigh mounted device as well as a mobile device to update and consult whilst down a chimney
Wireframes for Santa’s interfaces
We took away all these requirements and wireframed a solution using a tablet device mounted to the sleigh console as well as a smart phone device which synched to it when Santa was on the ground. In phase 2 we will look at a separate monitoring interface for Mrs Claus and the elves to track Santa.
Santa’s Sleigh Mounted Tablet Interface
- Sightings alert which monitors Facebook, Twitter and SMS chatter
- Next chimney stop with suggested landing places and up-to-date house intelligence
- Playlist controls
- Local time and delivery progress monitor
Santa’s Smartphone Interface
- Checklist to tick off deliveries as he goes
- Ability to post updates to house intelligence including chimney dimensions, dog sleeping places…
- Mince pie and sherry sips update reminder – with an external breathalyser (we felt this was less priority so have planned this for phase 2)
Next steps – Prototype testing with Santa
We’re having to move fast on this project as you can imagine. We’ve only got a couple of weeks left! So now we’ve created the wireframes we need to test them in a prototype with Santa on a few test runs out in the sleigh with his gloves on. We’re looking at stitching finger and thumb pads into the tips of his gloves first. After some user tests we’ll refine our prototype and then start work on the visual design. We’ll keep you posted on how we get on. Wish us luck!
