Location Based Social Networking

1. Location Based Social Networking Chris Schlechty, Alicia Kellogg, Sean Ren, Danny Swisher

2. Problem • Current social networks lack interactions between people and the world around them • Social networking sites today don’t take advantage of knowing their member’s location • A number of privacy concerns exist when incorporating location information

3. Our Solution: • Location aware mobile web application • Allows user to view friends and strangers along with proximity information • Provides means of limiting access to personal information, primarily location • Demo

4. Overview • Representative tasks • System evolution and changes • Current UI and Demo • Remaining problems and solutions • Summary • Questions

5. Tasks • Find a friend’s location facilitating a meeting • Find out information about the people around you • Change your visibility settings to limit who can know your current location

6. Initial design • Simple tabbed interface • Incorporated existing social network features • Inherit learned behaviors by using standard formats

7. Viewing Location Info

8. Region Creation/Editting

9. Lo-fi Prototype

10. UI Changes Problem: • Participants did not see that the upper left link was where they needed to click to edit visibility settings Solution: • Changed title to read “visibility” regardless of selected visibilities

11. UI Changes Problem • Missing Done/Save button caused confusion Solution • Added Done button

12. UI Changes Problem • Confusion at visibility process funnel • Steep learning curve when adding region Solution • Added a tool tip

13. Prototype

14. Friends

15. Map feature

16. Visibilities

17. Task Demonstration Demo

18. What’s Missing? • Real GPS/position data • Current user is hard coded • Distances are hard coded • No visibility logic is applied • Labels on map markers

19. Remaining Problems • Strangers button in Locations page wasn’t visible enough • Fixed by making bold and adding color

20. Remaining Problems • Size of window was too large and placed important pieces off screen requiring scrolling • Found through lab experiment • Resize the height of prototype

21. Remaining Problems • No means of identifying person on map • Distances and map position out of sync • No “me” indicator on map • Some participants completed task to our standards, but reported not completing it

22. Summary • Unique and fun mobile web application • Brings position data to traditional, “lifeless” social networks • Interesting implementation challenges still exist • Very extensible

23. Questions?