Online Survey, Task Analysis, and Design Sketches

Problem and solution overview

Although existing social networking systems (SNS) are extremely successful, they lack the ability to let people interact with the physical world around them. For example, Facebook is a web application that lets people interact with each other, but only through the Internet; social interactions in reality are virtually separate from the online experiences. By incorporating a location-detection function in a mobile device, we can make SNSs more integrated into reality. Our mobile web app, Radr (pronounced like the word "radar") incorporates locating-detecting technology (GPS) with the typical functionality of popular social networking sites to create a powerful new way to interact with the people around you. Radr will provide these premium features:

Tell a customer where his/her friends are
Tell a customer information about people around him or her
Keep a group of people together (i.e. in an amusement park)
Allow for customizable visibility settings

Survey and results

Our target customers for Radr are from the same customer base as many other social networking sites that have become mature and commonplace on the Internet. We decided that our customers would primarily be young people from ages 18 to 25. Since many of the new features that we are proposing are based on being able to freely meet others, we believe that our customer base will be skewed more towards college-aged students, young professionals, and those associated with education like professors, advisers, and educational staff.

We used the Catalyst Survey tool to implement our survey, and we recruited people to participate by sending messages through e-mail or on Facebook. The survey questions we generated assumed that people would be familiar with the concepts and basic features of social networking sites. Rather than asking questions that would be used to create a social networking site from the ground up, we focused on asking the customers about the features that would make our site distinct from those that already exist.

We started our survey by asking a range of demographic questions to confirm that we had a diverse study group and that we had correctly predicted the customer base that would use our service. We also asked about what current social networking sites that the customers used and what features they primarily use that site for. We asked whether the customers currently had a smart phone or any web-enabled mobile device; this later allowed us to compare the differences in opinions between those who already use the mobile web and those who do not. Since the main feature that our social network will leverage is the ability to quickly find a friend or another person in the vicinity, we attempted to ask questions to elicit how customers currently find friends and the amount of effort or time spent trying to reach them. Then, rather than detailing all of the features that could be capable on our site, we asked the potential customers to select the features that they would likely find useful from a list of proposed features. One major downfall of this approach is that a customer might not immediately see the potential usefulness of such a feature, or a knee-jerk reaction might occur as other concerns (e.g. privacy) are prematurely mixed in to their decision.

Our survey results included data from 83 different respondents. Those that responded were typically in the 18-24 age group (87%) and were in college or professionally associated with education (87%). Of our participants, 94% were familiar with other social networking sites and most frequented Facebook. About 30% of respondents owned a web-enabled mobile device. The survey showed that, when attempting to find a friend, the customer would most likely attempt to contact the friend via text-messaging, next try calling, but would usually not go further (asking acquaintances or physically searching) when trying to determine that friend's location. When searching for friends, most customers would only spend a maximum of several minutes trying to find them.

The most interesting portion of this survey is the breakdown of which proposed features or services the customers said they would use. At first glance, there seems to be three services that are popular with the group: sharing common destinations with friends (44.5%), locating a friend on a map (32.5%), and letting others know where you are in a specified region or location (31.3%). However, a surprising percentage of customers indicated that they would not use any of the proposed services (35%) (figure 1).

Upon further analysis, we discovered that 75% of those surveyed who own a web-enabled mobile device believe that at least one--if not more--features will be useful. The difference in the results might stem from the fact that customers without web-enabled phones either lack experience with such a device, or they may find such devices not useful altogether. If we had to redo the survey, we would want to further breakdown this question in order to understand the reasoning behind "rejecting" these features.

Task analysis

Our system will primarily be used by college-aged students and those associated with education (87% of respondents), which aligns with our intuition of those who use social networking sites and our predicted target customers. Since our service will be mobile, we expect the user to access it wherever they are (as opposed to solely at home, work, or school, as done with current sites). Currently, customers use social networking sites like Facebook to send messages or keep in touch (92%), share and view photographs (72%), and plan events (43%). Current social networking sites are rarely used to find new friends (8.9%), which could be made dramatically more convenient with our services. Since we assumed that customers will be familiar with other social networking sites, the task-learning processes will be similar to those sites where the customer is primarily learning through demonstration (e.g. friends) or trial and error.

The survey shows customers are most interested in the ability to share common destinations with friends (45%), to display the customer's location to friends within a specific region (31%), and to locate a friend on a map (33%). Since customers spend little time searching for their friends (80% spending a few minutes or fewer), there is a tight time constraint on the task; the customer wants to quickly determine a friend's location with minimal effort. Other tools that the customer has available to find friends (such as text messaging, calling, or asking an acquaintance) require the customer to rely on getting feedback from their friend or another unreliable source.

Analysis of new and existing tasks

To merge a social networking site with the capability of GPS-location, we have come up with some very exciting features that we believe most effectively solve some of the daily needs and problems of our customers. The most obvious of our new tasks is locating a friend on a map. Currently, when one of our prospective customers needs to locate a friend, our survey data shows that they first attempt to locate with a text message, then a phone call, and sometimes even involve a third party or physically search for the person, spending several minutes if not half an hour to find their friend. Our site offers customers the ability to log onto our website and view a friend's location on a map as quickly as logging on to other social networking sites and viewing a friend's profile; this is an easy alternative task to the one currently carried out by our prospective customers. Our interface has also enabled this feature to be considered one of our easy tasks.

Our second easy task is managing photos that are automatically mapped to the locations where they were taken. This task is very similar to the task of managing photos within other social networking sites. There are two main subtasks within the main task of managing photos: the first is adding photos, and the second is viewing/organizing photos. There will be nothing new for the customer in terms of adding photos since our customers tend to be active on other social networking sites and have already learned the simple process of uploading photos; the real differences are how photos are viewed and organized. The customer will now be able to view and organize their photos automatically in relation to where they were taken. This means that photos could be placed on a map or listed by vicinity relative to the customer's current location. The customer will have a new feature at their fingertips that will, much like tagging friends, change the way they view and interact with their photos.

Our first moderate task is finding out information about people (including non-friends) within a customer's vicinity. Most people today, including our customers, avoid learning about people around them that they do not already know, and often even avoid people they do know. An example might be in a classroom at our university; unless students in a class are in some way forced to meet each other, they will probably never even learn each other's names. Our task will surely not eliminate all of the difficult and scary process, but meeting the people around you would be much easier if you at least knew their names and personal interests. Additionally, re-acquainting yourself with an old friend would be much easier with some information about what they have been doing lately. Essentially, our site would facilitate the decision of who to meet, and provide some information that could be used as an icebreaker.

Sharing favorite destinations with friends is our second moderate task. Sharing favorite destinations today is done mostly by word of mouth; however, when such information is relevant, it is difficult to also remember the recommendations that were made. Our site aims to make recommendations available when customers need them, by making such information available at all times through each friends profile. Instead of struggling to remember restaurant or clothing store recommendations, customers simply have to remember a friend with particularly good tastes in food or clothing, then view their favorite places. This capability enables the customer to explore new tastes and cultures nearby that they possibly never knew existed. To get a similar experience today requires that friends that are either very vocal about their recommendations and an amazing memory, or trial and error searches in the yellow pages and online.

Keeping a group of people together at a theme park or other large setting is very difficult, especially for our customers who typically have to deal with heightened social politics, leading to conflicts about who should lead and follow. While we consider our site's solution relatively difficult because it is conceptually new, our solution will greatly improve upon the current situation. In our site, the task of keeping a group together expands on other social networking sites' implementations of events. Currently, our customers have almost no tools available to keep a group of people together aside from themselves and the structure of their social bonds.

A huge problem with location based social networking will be giving customers the right amount of control over who and where people can see their location. Our last difficult task helps to solve this problem by allowing only specific people to see where you are within a specific region. This task can be expressed more simply as setting your visibility. Currently, our customers do not have a comparable task to setting their visibility aside from perhaps wearing concealing clothes or hiding behind something. To be clearer, we believe that selecting or changing which visibility is being used should be very easy; however, creating custom visibilities will inevitably be relatively difficult to allow for flexibility in customization. Essentially there are two parts to letting people know where you are within a specified region: choosing a visibility and creating custom visibilities. We believe that the amount of control customers have over their visibility will help to assuage privacy concerns.

Interface Design

General User Interface Overview

The application is oriented in portrait view because most of the mobile devices, by default, have portrait-oriented interfaces. It would be easier for users to use the default orientation to view Radr and it also reduces the size of the navigation bar while providing a larger view for the main section.

In order to let user get access to the functions above easily, we decides to have five main tabs on the navigation bar: "Home", "Profile", "Friends", "Locations", and "Inbox".

Above the main tabs, there is a header containing the logo, a visibility drop down menu, and a link to the settings of the entire application. Since the visibility setting should be accessible anywhere, it is placed at the top left corner of the screen. The settings, too, is a persistent element that needs to be shown on the top of the screen. After clicking the visibility setting, a transparent drop menu appears, allowing the user to select one or more visibility modes. If the user clicks any "edit" or "new" button, a process funnel will replace the header and the main tabs, letting the user focus on going through the process other than be distracted by other tabs. Same process funnel comes out if the user clicks settings.

The first of the main tabs--"Home" --displays the updated information about the customer's friends, such as updates of locations and status (figure 2). This tab keeps customers informed about their friends' status and locations. The second tab--"Profile"--includes information about the customer that others can view; for example, the customers's name, interests, and most importantly, his or her location (figure 3). The third tab--"Friends"--includes all the information about the customer's friends, and in special occasions, information about strangers nearby. The "Locations" tab includes most of the geographical functions in Radr (figure 4). For instance, customers can view the map and edit their list of favorite locations under this tab. "Inbox" is a message service that allows customers to communicate with each other (figure 5).

Under the main tabs, there are secondary navigation links that link to specific sections of the main tabs. The secondary links usually only take up the left side of the bar, leaving extra space on the right side for UI elements that are needed for specific pages. For example, under the "Inbox" tab, there is a "Compose" button on the right side of the secondary navigation bar. Since "Compose" is a button that links to a process funnel, it should not be one of the secondary tabs on the left.