KDE Visual Design Group/Mycroft for Plasma

Concept

See KDE HIG for guidelines on this design approach.

Mycroft for PlasmaVision

Mycroft for Plasma is an applet that bring the Mycroft virtual assistant to KDE's Plasma that makes it easy to find quick answers and complete a variety of tasks on the user's behalf.

Personas

Susan - While Susan seldom uses her computer for work, it has become an essential part of her social life. With her computer, she can be creative and spread this creativity in the world. She chats with her friends, shares music, playlists and other media, creates videos and uploads them to her web space, and runs a blog with her own style. She can't imagine a life without her laptop. Still, she is a fun person and does not want to worry about technical details. She expects her machine to work.

Santiago - Santiago runs a medium-sized business for electric installations. For him, technology needs to be comfortable and make him feel smart. As a manager with engineering background, Santiago's major work is to negotiate with customers. However, to avoid costs, he administrates the small network in the company himself, including a file server and fifteen PCs for his office clerks. He loves comfort and does not like to dive into manuals or use the command line to set up the small network. The system has to be reliable and easy to use, so his employees get along with it.

Scenarios

1. Berna is working on a new video for her vlog on her favorite film directors. One of her favorite directors directed "The Prestige" but she forgot his name. She asks Mycroft for the name of the director of "The Prestige", Christopher Nolan, and adds a segment to her video discussing the director's work.

2. Santiago works late into the night on a project. He asks Mycroft if he has any early morning meetings so he can decide whether to stay up later working on that project, or go to bed so he can get enough rest for the next day.

3. Berna is travelling to meet her colleague for an art exhibit opening in London tomorrow. She needs to know which clothes to bring so she asks Mycroft what the weather will be in London tomorrow. Mycroft responds with the weather in London tomorrow, and also shows the forecast for the following few days.

4. Santiago sits to, along with other managers in a meeting for the quarterly marketing review. He has historically found Mycroft quite helpful in these meetings to keep up to speed with some of the new marketing terms and strategies used by the capable new marketing manager. However he doesn't to disrupt the meeting so he sets Mycroft to stay silent so he can interact discretely with it when needed.

Organization

Command Structure

The primary command interaction with Mycroft is a query by voice or text input. Commands to see the current list of skills available, as well as install, or remove skills. The ability to set a quiet mode, disable mic input, disable audio response, or disable mycroft entirely is also desirable. The command structure is simple.

As a plasmoid, all primary interaction will be through direct manipulation. Recommend review, addition and removal of skills via the standard plasmoid settings affordance.

Content Structure

The content for the primary interaction are simply the query and the response. The history of queries and their attendant responses are also desirable. The content structure is flat and is sufficiently represented by a list with each entry representing either a query or a response.

The skills are also adequately represented by a list which each entry showing install/available state.