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.