Keyline Home Shopping Terminal

Keyline, conceived by General Information Systems Ltd, is a proprietary home communication network comprising a low cost customer input terminal, RSA security authentication and dedicated Head End servers.

We were asked to work with the software engineering team to develop the software interface within two key areas.

The terminal was the first of its kind to implement Natural Language text input, which parsed simple sentence structures to drive an online enquiry search engine. This allowed people to drive complex search criteria and get useful results without them having to understand the native enquiry structure or syntax.

The terminal also had a menu driven mode, using the same low resolution, five line alphanumeric display. The requirement here was to design a menu system that would arrange full access to the terminal functions whilst keeping the menu hierachy as shallow as possible, to prevent people from becoming lost down menu branches.

Schematics, simulations and design specifications were presented which were implemented in the terminal.

Service design was a key component of the system implementation, and we contributed to several key service provision concepts that were used to market the system.