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.