Utilities for applying Wizard of Oz technique on HTML prototypes.
The Wizad of Oz is a technique for simulating events when prototyping. Events such as receiving a call, or approaching your destination require the system to act proactivelly. sinceprogramming this logic may be hard, sometimes it is easier to make a human t trigger the event and fake the interaction.
oz.js is a simple script that will ping periodically a URL for status information. When the status changes, the page is automatically updated with the new status as the URL hash. That is, if index.html gets "call_from_joe" as a response, the browser will go to index.html#call_from_joe
For the server part you can write your own code or even use Dropbox and modify the hosted file with a text editor.
Add to your HTML the following code:
<script src="../jquery.js"></script>
<script src="../oz.js" data-remote="oz.json" data-delay="6000"></script>
The first line adds the jquery library which is a dependency for Oz. The second line, loads oz.js and defines two parameters:
- data-remote: the URL that the page will be sending requests to.
- data-delay: time (in milliseconds) until the next request to the server.
You can see an example at the example folder.
oz.js can be used in conjunction with the showcase template for pencil which uses the hash part of the URL to identify the different pages in the prototype.