Persuasive Mobile Tourist’s Guide and PlannerTony Tulathimutte, Dean Eckles, Tanya Breshears

CS376: Research Topics in Human-Computer InteractionAutumn Quarter 2005

Project Milestone #1

Project Milestone AbstractMobile phones are becoming a more comprehensive aid to people as they get on in the world: they mediate social identity, retrieve requested information, aid in personal information management tasks, provide mapping and location information, and much more. But how can mobile phones best facilitate and encourage playful exploration in their users' surroundings—not only the places they live and work, but also the places they visit? We propose to prototype software for mobile phones that does just this. The software uses location information to suggest short paths for the user to follow. It guides them to their start and borrows elements from gaming to provide playful direction to the end. In this prototype, two-dimensional bar codes allow the user to register her exact location at the beginning and end of each short exploration. The paths can be community created and rated, or created and sponsored by local businesses. Users have increased awareness of interesting bits of the world around them, engaged in play and exploration towards sites of interest, and given social, success, and conventionally valued rewards. Related work in context-aware guides and mobile location-based gaming provide a starting point for our novel synthesis. The system is to be evaluated with field trials by users on a college campus, with follow-up interviews based on usage logs. This can be preceded by in-lab usability analysis and interviews to ensure that the more extensive test has maximum value.

Task AnalysisOur user population will focus on people who are unfamiliar with a given area and who are interested in exploring—many of such users will be self-described tourists. But many tourists may not fit this category e.g. families with a predefined itinerary, while many non-tourists are very open to explore their surroundings e.g. people new to an area, young urbanities. The interface should be unobtrusive, making users feel that they are being helped—provided with suggestions on which they can choose to act—and not that they lose control of planning to the system. The mobile phone is the chosen device because users already carry it with them and it provides networking and image capture facilities. The software is used with only moderate frequency—both over a long term (frequency of trips into appropriate places) and intra-trip use, so there is a premium on usability. It is not our goal to replace maps entirely; our map interface is geared towards indicating important and salient features of the user's surroundings to guide them to their chosen destination; it is not designed to provide a general view of the city of arbitrary complexity. Self-described tourists may carry paper maps anyway for their many advantages, so the system must not count on their absence or presence.

IdeationIn our brainstorming sessions we discussed the myriad needs of the short-term urban tourist: needing ideas about what to do, managing a limited tourist budget, planning a route from location to location, creating a loose itinerary that allows for diversions and last minute changes, and so on. We also considered the different ways that city navigation might be implemented on a mobile device; some ideas included a menu-based, Craigslist-style community directory of events, a straightforward location-sensitive map, and a game-like application which would guide the user through the city as a part of the game-like interaction. We were particularly fascinated by a synthesis of game-like mini-trips or -paths chosen by users from a selection they pull at will or find to pushed to them as their location changes. We felt that this provides a domain for novel interfaces and enticing value-propositions for users and other stakeholders e.g. local businesses or carriers.

See the ideation appendix for the notes from our brainstorming sessions, comprised of a few proposed interaction storyboards, ideas about user needs and constraints, and some discussion of the interaction principles that are most relevant to our project.

EvidenceContext-aware guides provided by mobile devices have been the subject of considerable HCI research, so much so that there is a large body of literature on the topic that begins by introducing this very fact [1, 2, 6]. All this work has made clear that there are numerous potentially problematic issues associated with prototyping such a system and identified some of these particular problems. However, it has also shown the existence of real user needs that can be quite well fulfilled by such systems [5]. We have incorporated these needs into defining our project: user's attitudes towards pushing alerts based on location has led us to tentatively favor a mixed push and pull approach and concern for the frequency of pushes ; the importance of exploration and spontaneity to users drove our choice of short trips with playfully exploratory ends; privacy, self-efficacy, and technical concerns led us to favor two-dimensional printed barcodes a means to quite exact location and direction input [5, 1, 6].

Despite the important guidance we gathered from context-aware guide systems, substantial differences between our system and existing systems in the space demanded other considerations. Since our system brings computer-assisted social play into the physical world, we considered augmented reality games (e.g. ilovebees, The Go Game) and other mobile location-based games (e.g. MobileHunt, Frequency 1550, Undercover 2). Our approach differs in the relative shortness of individual episodes and the design of the system for sporadic usage. Expectations of consistent long-term commitment or interest, or short-term but necessarily highly engaged play seem to have prevented wide appeal for such games. We borrow the use of the real world for in-game features, but avoid bringing in fantasy—real world features largely have value in their real world interestingness. Attitudes of potential users suggested this approach.

Further Evidence

We plan to do interviews with potential users about existing systems of both types and mockups and/or lo-fi prototypes of our system. We will involve users in the consideration of existing use scenarios and evaluation of various approaches for those scenarios.

Evaluation

The prototype system could be quite usefully evaluated in two phases.  The first phase will be in a laboratory setting, where CS 147 students will use our prototype to conduct specific tasks such as planning an itinerary.  Users will talk about what they are doing and why during the task, we will note and enquire about interesting choices, return in depth to breakdowns after the task, and solicit evaluation. In this phase, we will refine the usability of the control flow of our application and verify that the users understand our application and can use it easily.  We hope to conduct interviews with about 5 users.  This approach is supported by [1].

Because our application is meant to be used over the course of a day or more and not in a single sitting, for the second phase of the evaluation we will give students actual phones with our application installed.  In order to test the location-based services aspect of our application, the participants will keep these phones for a week and use our application as they please on the Stanford campus.  Although we see our application as being adapted for a more populous urban area, such as San Francisco, for testing purposes we will develop services tied to various locations around Stanford campus.  Students will carry the phones that we provide to classes and other activities, and be prompted at various locations with information about their location and the opportunity to interact in a mini-game.  We hypothesize that using the application will change user behavior: they will visit more unfamiliar locations and diverge from their regular daily path. We also expect positive attitudes towards these explorations, but success or failure here cannot be solely attributed to the system. Data for this evaluation will include how much the participants use the application, their divergence from their normal schedule, where they visited, and their reported subjective experience. For this phase, we hope to have 5 participants.

Works Cited

[1] Borntr¨ager, C., K. Cheverst, 2003, Social and technical pitfalls designing a tourist guide system. Proceedings of HCI in Mobile Guides, Udine, Italy.

[2] Borntr¨ager, C., K. Cheverst, N. Davies, A. Dix, A. Friday, and J. Seitz. Experiments with multi-modal interfaces in a context-aware city guide. In Proceedings of Mobile HCI 2003. Springer.

[3] Espinoza F, Persson P, Sandin A, Nystro¨ m H, Cacciatore E, Bylund M (2001) GeoNotes: Social and navigational aspects of location-based information systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2201. Springer pp 2–17

[5] Kaasinen, E. (2003) User Needs for Location-Aware Mobile Services. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing. Vol. 7, no. 1, 70–79.

[6] Kjeldskov, J., Graham, C., Pedell, S., Vetere, F., Howard, S., Balbo, S., and Davies, J. (2004) Evaluating the usability of a mobile guide: the influence of location, participants and resources. To appear in Behaviour and Information Technology.

Ideation Appendix:

Figure 1: Map Layout (ver. 1) and General Interaction Storyboard

Figure 2: Notes on persuasion

Figure 3: General notes on user needs and interaction

Figure 4: Proposed "Automated Itinerary" feature, w/ storyboard

Figure 5: Map Layout (ver. 2)

Figure 6: Map Layout (cont.)

Figure 7: Map Layout (cont.)

Figure 8: "Game" interface

Figure 9: Itinerary layout (text-based ver.)

Figure 10: Itinerary (text-based ver.)

Figure 11: Usage of 2-D barcodes in game mode

Figure 12: Game layout

Figure 13: Persuasive game ideas

Figure 14: Ideas for social component of location-based game

Figure 15: Map-based game display ideas