Meeting With Our Mentor

Sierra and I sat down with Danyel, Cluster's industry mentor, at a coffee shop on the Ave today. He had a lot of comments on everything from broader trends in social networking to transparency of functionality to the user. The discussion wound through many different topics but here are some of the major points:

Dodgeball:

Cluster's "Use This As My Current Location" functionality is remarkably similar to services offered by the social networking agent Dodgeball. With Dodgeball, you can update your location via SMS and they will send a message to all of your friends to alert them to the changes. Some of the differences between their services and Cluster is that ours would be built into the application and, at least on the surface, would not rely directly on SMS. Also, we've decided to scale down the level of intrusion on your friends. Your location information is available to them, but only if they take action to go see it. We will be spending more time looking into some of the other design decisions that Dodgeball has made.

App Home Screen:

We had previously envisioned the Application Home Screen as a fork between three monolithic modules: calendar, local search, and social networking functionality. The more we add functionality to the design, however, we've realized that there is no clear distinction between the realms and that all of the tasks between them bleed together. For example, it doesn't make sense that separate information for Tim would show up if I happened to drill in and find him on my local search map rather than through my regular social networking view. Since the home screen was the only real separation between these modules, we're now toying with the idea of providing more generalized information on this screen (high-level updated information) rather than using it as a navigation agent. However, in doing this, we are eliminating cues that provide the user with a sense of the overall geography of the application.

Levers:

Levers, switches, knobs or whatever you want to call "user-controlled settings" are threatening to seriously weigh Cluster's UI down. By having the touch screen interface, we've made toggling privacy options faster than it might be otherwise, but the sheer number of things we want our user to be able to set have become a big problem. What exactly does the user need to see before pushing the big red button can be worry-free? Or does the fact that we have a big red button imply that it should just be that simple - no verification of settings required?

In our user studies from the low-fi prototyping stage, all of our users said that they would never broadcast location information about themselves without first checking who would be able to see the information. So we added an "OK/Cancel" screen that pops up when you push the big red button that shows the groups that would be able to see this update. But there are other kinds of highly relevant information that you might want to send with an update that would need to be verified before sending. For example a "Join me/Don't join me" switch would allow the user to easily switch between sending the message "I'm looking for company" vs. "Just wanted to show you the cool thing I'm doing right now."

In general, levers are a design element that plague a lot of software products and there are a lot of heavy design decisions to be made in this area. The first part is to determine exactly what functionality is necessary to protect the privacy of our users. The second, and perhaps trickier part, is to scale how visible that functionality is. I heard once that perfect software would accommodate all user scenarios without including levers. I fear that having that as a primary design goal for Cluster would severely limit functionality.