Samaritan - A High-Fidelity Prototype

As part of the course CSC318 (The Design of Interactive Computational Media), I was part of a group of five developers (the others being Makan Dehizadeh, Samantha Fassnacht, Vedang Ashwin Naik, & Hanna Zeng) for a smartphone and smart watch app we dubbed Samaritan: Reward those that made your day.

Samaritan was motivated by the idea that the world is smaller than you think. Imagine you are on your way to a job interview when the contents of your bag spill out all over the sidewalk as you trip over a long-forgotten coffee cup. A helpful stranger comes along and helps you wrangle everything back into your possession before the next wave of people get too near. You thank the stranger, but have to start running to avoid being late. Samaritan aims to give a way to connect with that helpful stranger.

Samaritan allows people to connect via passive location-based scanning of other nearby devices and manual NFC scans between two users’ devices. These scans, alongside a check to reduce abuse, allow for users to connect after having potentially interacted at some point prior, and gives a user the opportunity to send their gratitude to another via a donation in their name.

We received a lot of valuable feedback from months of paper prototyping sessions and higher-fidelity prototype demos, both of which helped us to create this final prototype. Click the button below to see a slideshow with the breakdown of our design process or scroll further to try our high-fidelity protypes:

Go to Slideshow

App Demo:

Smartwatch Demo: