Location Based Social Networking For All Presenter: Danny Swisher

Overview Describe our tasks Describe our Prototype Layout and explain how to complete three Scenarios with Radr Describe the specifics of our usability tests Explain what we learned and how we applied that knowledge to make Radr better

Our Solution to Social Networking Social networking sites today don’t take advantage of knowing their member’s location Location tracking while useful, is riddled with privacy concerns Designed to take advantage of new mobile web devices and platforms like those of the iphone, Radr allows members to find out friend’s and strangers’ proximity and location, mapping members’ social network in real time, while also letting members monitor and fine tune privacy and visibility settings.

Tasks 1.Find a friend’s location facilitating a meeting. 2.Find out information about people around you, including making it easy to tell if friends or people with similar interests are nearby. 3.Change your visibility settings to limit who can know your location

Our Prototype We built our prototype to look like the iphone to simulate and stimulate the real ways people interact with their web enabled mobile device.  Shape and structure make holding the prototype as realistic as possible  The increased size helps to make text and image recognition map between the low resolution of our drawings and the high resolution of the iphone. Our prototype made being the computer fast therefore helping to make the simulation more realistic  Tabs made switching between screens faster  Dry erasable clear screen facilitated with hard to mimic dynamic features

Scenario 1 You want to go to a party where your friend Harold is. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know the address or how to give directions to the party. You decide to use Radr to find his location.

Scenario 2 It is the first day of school and your first class is in a large lecture hall. You aren’t sure if you know anyone in the class since there are so many people. Using Radr, you try to find out if any of your friends are in the class room. If there aren’t any you decide to look up information about the people around you.

Scenario 3 Now that you have been using Radr for a while, you decide to change your settings so that only your three closest friends can see your location when you are at school.

Method 3 potential customers each with varying knowledge and experience with computing and technology. Conducted our tests in the small private meeting rooms in CSE labs No windows for privacy Closable door and quite prevented distractions Avoided using words that appeared on our interface as we attempted to find out how intuitive our design was. Visibility We chose to give our tasks in the order of easiest to hardest, so that the participant would be able to quickly gain confidence with the process and not be initially frustrated. Computer: Sean Ren Facilitator: Chris Schlechty Note Takers: Alicia Kellogg Danny Swisher

Problems and Solutions Problem: Test subjects did not recognize that the text in the upper left was where they needed to go to edit their visibility settings. Solution: Instead of displaying the name of the current visibility with the text in the upper left we changed it to read “visibility” without use of the term every subject after the change had no problems. Additionally: People associate visibility with settings and expect it to be there or in their profile settings

Problems and Solutions Problem: People did not know where to start when they entered the editing or creating new visibility process funnels. Solution: We added some helpful guiding text to the bottom of the funnel that was actually referred to by the last subject as the reason he knew how to continue.

Problems and Solutions Problem: People were confused by the drop down visibility because it did not have a done button Solution: We added a done button to create a sense of completion and solid method of closing the popped up window.

Other Observations The tab named Locations seemed to through people off, as it seemed to suggest that whenever they needed to do something that involved location they had to go there when really location features are littered throughout the site. It was interesting to notice that when people seemed unsure of how to continue with a task or just by what seemed like habit they started off by going to their profile. We will keep this in mind as we think of the layout of the profile possibly making links to common tasks etc.

Summary Despite the privacy concerns we believe that much like Facebook’s Newsfeed location based social networking will be embraced as its usefulness becomes part of member’s daily lives. We believe that key tasks for location based social networking, are: Finding a friend on a map Finding out information about people around you Updating visibility and privacy settings Through the use of our low-fi prototype, we have made changes that have fixed many of the holes in our user interface that our survey results and intuition missed.