Reflection, Direction

Both Carolyn and I are thinking we'll push CLUSTER into the new year, so before our brains go on complete holiday, I want to get a few (possibly off topic) points down:

Women: Carolyn and I both spend a lot of time thinking about women. How they code, how they communicate, how they integrate with male engineers on and off the academic or professional clock. Carolyn goes so far as to blog about it over at tech-women.blogspot.com and one post she made this quarter (The After Hours Old Boys Club) really resonated.

In general, I don't discuss technical things with my engineer friends outside of our direct academic interactions. Color me weird, but networks and compilers don't whip me into a frenzy of off hour excitement, certainly not at the level that it draws many of my (predominantly male) colleagues. So it's been somewhat of a change of pace for us because we talk about CLUSTER all the time. When we're in lab, when we're at lunch, when we're out beering... it's always there, and I'm pretty sure this is the first time for both me and Carolyn that we've been completely absorbed in and engaged by a technical project. I won't do myself or women the disservice of drawing conclusions, I probably shouldn't have even started this observation on the "women" note, but I think that the connection is not irrelevant.

Experience Sampling: Our competition is dealing with location and privacy in a MUCH looser way than we are. We'd love to get our hands on their user studies, but that isn't really an option. More realistically, we need to get our hands on some of those smart phones and do another round (or five) of experience sampling, preferably in some statistically legitimate manner. Also, I didn't like the ESM tool, so I'd like to find out more about their thought process there, and what sort of flexibility it has. Also, I want to know more about phone APIs.

The Whole Design: I don't think we like it.

The "look": We need one.

I lost steam, I don't have the blogging brain bit that Carolyn possesses, more posting later, more pudding now,

Sierra

Finals Sign Off

The Final Exam for this half of the course is today. Good luck, Team Cluster.

This is the last of all the "end of the quarter" stuff before we'll take a few weeks off. On Thursday, I gave the last of our presentations for the quarter in front of the class and some industry guests. Afterward there was a poster session where we got to mingle and talk about our design with some of the people that do this type of thing for a living. It was very helpful to reflect back on what we've done so far and also to get some perspective from the experts on where we should be headed.

Sierra and I hope to continue with Cluster in the next quarter of the course but we'll have to wait and see if the logistics allow us to play it out that way. If it works out, we'll ramp all this up again in January. But if not, it's been a great quarter and a fascinating project to work on. I hope everyone has a great couple weeks off regardless of what happens after the break.

Happy Holidays!

Disney Mobile and Helio

It looks like social location-tracking is rapidly becoming the must have feature in a mobile phone. Here are a few more companies that are buying into the "see where your friends are" service.

Disney Mobile has their "Family Locator" feature which allows for anyone who shares the plan (e.g. anyone in the family) to see where other members are. It displays the GPS coordinates of the phone you're looking for as a red dot on a map and also includes an accuracy gauge and a nearby street address. To protect privacy, the user must enter a PIN to be able to view anyone else's location.


Helio has "Buddy Beacon" though they don't go into much detail on their site about how it works. It allows you to broadcast your location to your friends so you can "Turn it on when you're up for a party" but "switch to cloaking mode when you're going low profile." It sounds like your Buddy Beacon follows you around, constantly updating your location to your friends until you turn it off. All locations show up on a Google Map.

It would be interesting to get more detailed information about the design of these products and how they relate to Cluster, but as I don't know anyone who has Helio or Disney Mobile, that would prove to be a bit difficult. What I can say is that Disney seems to have addressed the privacy concerns by really locking down the information whereas Helio has gone with an open-door policy, leaving it up to the user to guard themselves. Cluster's design falls between the two.

Cluster Poster

The Cluster Poster (aka Assignment 9) is completed and has been submitted to Kate to be printed in time for our final presentation tomorrow. You can view it in PowerPoint from the docs section of the project web or here.

Note its disctinct lack of artistic value. This class has been great for teaching us how to make things functional and less confusing, but what class do I take to learn how to make things pretty?

Last night update:

Dodgeball NEVER updated me to Fred's location.

Dodgeball Delay

Last night, I was out on the Ave...er... doing some research for our bar hopping scenario (we wouldn't want to subject our usability test users to an unrehearsed scenario, would we?) and the talk turned to Dodgeball. It just so happened that all three of my Dodgeball friends happened to be sitting there, so we decided to try out the system.

The first thing I noticed was that it took Fred a great deal of time to generate the correct text message to send in to the server. Then he got a text message back saying his venue was not recognized so he had to send the message again with a new venue name. Finally, he received a confirmation message indicating that his status had been updated. Twenty minutes later, his friends got text messages with his update.

This experience speaks more to the problems with SMS-based interfaces than it does about problems Cluster might have. These kinds of applications rely too heavily on user recall and intrude on the user by sending so many messages. However, the delay between Fred's update and when the system notified his friends is something that Cluster should avoid. To be useful in the real world, particularly in "come join me" scenarios, Cluster's updates need to be much more timely.

PhoneSpace

For assignment 7, all of the groups were scrambled so that each of us could do a heuristic evaluation of another group's project. I was assigned to PhoneSpace, the OTHER location-based social networking phone application in the class.

The idea behind PhoneSpace is that the social network drives real world interaction by allowing the user to find and friend people who are physically nearby. It also lets you organize the friends you already have based on their location.

I spent a great deal of time walking through their prototype, which they also created with Denim. They have put a lot of work into the display and navigation of social networking functionality on a phone interface and did a great job of keeping these tasks lightweight. It was interesting to see it fleshed out in detail since Cluster shares this functionality with PhoneSapce and we have left those parts of the design largely undone as they were not included in our tasks.

PhoneSpace has a different set of privacy problems than Cluster does. Their system has to decide what range of the user's social information to expose to strangers nearby whereas Cluster only has to worry about exposing one kind of information (location) to people the user already knows. Consequently, their set of privacy levers looks very different than our own. PhoneSpace makes it easy for the user to hide content, and our goal is to make it easy for the user to hide from people.

Assignment 6 Complete

After one very intense week, Assignment 6 aka the Interactive Prototype Assignment aka Project 3 is all done. The e-mail to Kate is in flight at this very moment.

So kick back, relax, and start thinking about posters for next week.

Good job, team Cluster!

Website Changes

There has been a minor aesthetic change to the Cluster Web Page. The Documents are now included in a simple page with links to the docs and images rather than just available through an unsexy peek into the directory itself.

Enjoy!

Our Sort-Of-Working Prototype

The "Working Prototype" of Cluster (and I use the term "working" loosely) that was made using Denim is up on the project web. There are a couple of things to note about it:

• Denim has a bug where buttons cannot function as links AND show text. So, since Cluster is meant to be for a touch screen interface, there are a number of big blank boxes where text would be. They still work as buttons. The .dnm file itself shows the text that SHOULD appear here.
• We do not have a button included to return to the home screen. This is because we're assuming that it would be found on the hardware of the phone and these screens are just the software representation. So if you want to get back to the home screen (and perhaps see a different module), you'll have to back out of the file and start over. The alternative would have been to have a BLANK button on every screen that would take you back there.
• It's not supposed to be pretty - that's not what this kind of prototype is for. So don't hate.
  

Your Web Based Desktop

This isn't about CLUSTER but about our process. We're keeping all our group documents on Google Docs which has so far worked pretty well (minus a couple feature desires) because we all always have internet... And then I went home for the night to see my Parents the Luddites, after 11:00 (when dad heads to bed) the wireless goes off. Three aye em rolls around and lo: no internet, no docs, no ability to work. Of course I peek around the neighborhood for other available wireless and (of course) no dice. Thus: I can't commit to web based computing until reliable interwebs blanket the burbs. It would be really *really* nice if there were slick source control with easy desktop check in/pull down...