As part of the Video Prototyping Project, Kevin and Andy weighed in on some design changes for Cluster. The following is the except from their paper:
We introduced a new UI widget to CLUSTER called Friend Radar. This view shows your friends and their locations visually. Although CLUSTER already has a map view, were you can see the locations of your friends, we felt that it actually provided too much information in some cases. Especially since CLUSTER is meant to be on mobile devices with small screens, we felt that the existing Google Maps-like interface would be overkill if you just wanted to see where your friends were at a glance.
Our Friend Radar provides a much more abstracted view. The relative positions of friends does not directly correspond to their locations. Instead, friends appear as dots grouped around their current location. Readers familiar with Digg Swarm will see the analog between "friends" and "diggers", and "locations" and "stories". Much like how the Digg Swarm visualization shows diggers jump from story to story as they vote on each one, Friend Radar will show your friends jump from location to location as they move about in the real world.
We believe the Friend Radar view has several advantages over the map view. Since the locations that your friends broadcast are already discrete (i.e. they don't tell you exact longitude, latitude coordinates) for privacy reasons, it doesn't make sense to plot their locations on a map because you don't really know their exact locations anyway. Our view makes it easy to see what the popular locations are at a glance, since it's easier to pick out the locations with the most dots around them rather than to scroll around on a map, searching for your friends. Also, our view handles multistory building better. For example, the Friend Radar would should one group of friends clustered around the Atrium and another group around the Labs, but if you used the map view you might think they were all in the same place since one location is on top of the other.
The main disadvantage of Friend Radar is that it does not provide as much information as the map view. It does not show roads or buildings and the distance between two friends on the screen is not related to their real distance. However, this is only a disadvantage if the user needs such information. For example, if you already are familiar with where the favorite locations of your friends are, then you might ignore this extra information, and may even find it distracting.
1 comment:
I think their idea is a great new way to visualize collections of your friends. However, I think it is much more valuable as a supplement to, rather than replacement of, the map view.
We are assuming that we do have exact location data (such as lat-long) that we superimpose "place" data (like "Tully's" or "the labs") onto. This makes the map view both contextual and accurate. Using this, we are able to group people on the map and provide the same information about which locations have the highest concentration of your friends.
I also question how useful it is to know that someone is in the atrium vs. in the labs. I think "in the CS building" coupled with any status message that a user might put up, is enough context to address the same concerns that friend radar addresses.
I think Kevin and Andy have come up with an awesome way to answer a different sort of question than Cluster is. We want to give the user facebook style specifics about their friends - nameably where they are at. It's meant to answer the question first at an individual friend level (where is sierra at?) and then at the broader (who is nearby me). Friend radar abstracts the user out when representing their social network. We very much want to keep the user as the pivot when displaying contextual location info.
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