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This user, who we’ll call Joe, is a 26-year old student who uses location-based services like facebook check-in almost every day. He is also using other involuntary location services. He likes sharing his location information with his friends because it is a useful way to convey his personality and interests to other people. However, he is sometimes hesitant to publish his location for fear that people might know too much about him. Joe is also interested in sharing his location information in exchange for discount offers from stores.
Lessons Learned:
Things not being done properly by the existing systems:1.
- He finds that general location-based ads (ex: Groupon) are annoying since they provide the offers that he doesn’t want. He finds that it would be useful to receive personalized discounts based on his habits or context.
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- He does not know how much information he has made available to others.
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- He wants to share his location information only with certain groups. For example, he mentioned that he does not want his mother to know his whereabouts.
Suggestions given by the subject:1.
- Would be interested to know the available offers from stores such that he can make the most out of his location information.
Task Analysis
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- Initiate location sharing relationship
- Define people to share with
- Define type of aggregate/derivative data to
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- share
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- View notifications about friends’ locations
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- Opt-in to offers from companies/organizations/retailers
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- View/edit
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- existing relationships
Detail:
(Goal, precondition, location, frequency of use, how learned, possible errors, time constraints, who else involved)
Initiate location sharing relationship
The goal of this action is to share some socially meaningful location information with friends or family. As a precondition, the user must desire to share something with a specific person or group of people. The types of things that can be shared can be learned in part by doing. Because the relationships are ongoing, the frequency of use may be anywhere from several times a week to several times per year. When the wrong type of relationship is defined, the relationship can be edited.
View friends’ notifications
The goal of viewing notifications is to learn something socially meaningful about friends who are sharing location information. As a precondition, the friends must have already established a sharing relationship with the user. This activity may be performed as much as several times per day, if the information is compelling. This activity can be learned by doing: some information is presented, and the user can browse by scrolling, clicking, zooming, and panning. This is a fairly safe task -- the worst thing that can happen is the user is not viewing the desired data, but this can be remedied by backing up in the interface. Friends are involved in providing data to be viewed.
View and negotiate offers from organizations
The goal of this task is to view offers from organizations that are geographically located near the user’s current location. The user would be able to negotiate the level of location information to share with the organization. In order to start this task, the user should be physically present near the organization and the organization should have offers to present to the user. This task may occur multiple times during a day depending on the places that the user visits. A user would be able to learn this task by experimenting with the various location settings displayed on the screen. The user may have a particular location setting in mind, but the options presented may cause her to select a different one. This error is irreversible but can be prevented with a confirmation dialog box that asks the user to confirm the location setting. Since the offers are shown when the user arrives at a particular organization, the user may feel obliged to make a decision quickly. Therefore, presenting relevant information in an easily-digestible way is important. We could imagine that an agent from the organization would be involved in the negotiation. However, for this course project, we assume that the organization presents a canned list of options and the user selects one of them.
View/edit existing relationships
The goal of this task is to review and perhaps change the type of data the user is sharing with others. The precondition is that one or more relationships have been previously established, and the desire to review or edit is generated either by curiosity, or by some recent behavior that a user might want to share or not share in some existing relationship. Because the user can see all of his/her own data here, the task may be performed multiple times per week. We expect people to be curious about their own data and how it appears to others. This activity can be learned by doing -- it just involves scrolling, clicking, zooming, and panning. Viewing is inherently very safe, and editing can be made more safe by including the option to undo actions.