CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems

Longitude / Latitude
g
/
Coord.
(‐27.46758, 153.027892)
Name: „Coffee Palace“ +
folksonomy tags
Rating from
R ti f
1‐10
Comment: „This place
serves the best coffee in
town!“
Contact Information
(email, phone, mobile,
(email, phone, mobile,
SMS)

CityFlocks: A Mobile System for Social Navigation in Urban Public Places
CityFlocks: A Mobile System for Social Navigation in Urban Public Places
Mark Bilandzic
Ludwig‐Maximilians‐Universität München

Does this phone really tell you WHERE to go…?!

…or rather how to get somewhere, once you have figured out where to go?

CityFlocks: A Mobile System for Social Navigation in Public Urban Places

2

Social Navigation: Physical Objects Provide Visible Interaction History


3



4



5

Community Driven Services vs. Professional Information Services
Classic Mobile Information Services are mostly
controlled by a single entity

Profession Information Provider
Profession Information Provider

CityFlocks is controlled and fed with information
by „The Wisdom of the Crowds“

CityFlocks


6

CityFlocks* Workflow: Three Simple Steps to Gather Social Navigational Help

1

2

Tag Search
(folksonomy)

3

Relevant Places +
Average Rating

User Created Comments +
Contact Information

*URL: http://staff.ci.qut.edu.au/~foth/historyLines/login/login.html


7

Community Driven Mobile Information Systems: Designing for Social Navigation I

# of comments
left at a place/
local service

Average rating
of a place/ local
service



8

Community Driven Mobile Information Systems: Designing for Social Navigation II

Voice link to an
expert resident
(direct)
SMS to an
expert resident
expert resident
(direct)
Location based
user comment
(indirect)

Context information
• Information Provider
• Message Meta‐Info



9

Community Driven Mobile Information Systems: Designing for Social Navigation II

Context
information
about the expert
user
Link to see
further areas of
further areas of
expertise



10

CityFlocks improves Social Navigation using Locative Media and Mobile Web 2.0 Technology

Mobile Spatial Interaction
Location Based Services
Location Based Services
Context Awareness
Virtual Post‐Its

CityFlocks /
Mobile Web 2.0
Mobile Web 2.0*
Social Navigation

Web 2.0

Wisdom of the Crowds

User Generated Content

Knowledge Sharing

Folksonomy

Social Capital
Social Capital

Geotagging
AJAX

* A. Jaokar and T. Fish, Mobile Web 2.0


11

Focus Group Sessions – How do people make use of Social Navigation?


12

User Interface Design: Iterative Paper Prototyping


13

CityFlocks Connects People who Have not Known Each Other Before
Is such a social navigation system better than information from professional sources?
Do users rather prefer direct‐ or indirect link to local residents? In which situation?

CityFlocks

Finds an
expert‐resident

search for keywords
e.g.‚fast‐food‘

1
User Comments

2
Voice‐Link / SMS

Visitor

Local Resident


14

CityFlocks‘ Research Questions

CityFlocks […], eine Art touristischer Empfehlungsdienst:
Einheimische versehen ihre Stadt mit Annotationen über Clubs,
Restaurants und Freizeitaktivitäten, und Besucher der Stadt können
,
diese Informationen abrufen und sogar die Verfasser kontaktieren.
Schon bei diesem Beispiel zeigt sich das doppelte Gesicht der neuen
Technik. Will ich wirklich von einem Touristen angerufen werden,
der sich für das Nachtleben meiner Heimatstadt interessiert?
Christoph Drösser, DIE ZEIT, Nr. 39
(Germany National Newspaper)


15

The CityFlocks Relational Database Model


16

Publications
Following publications form parts of this thesis:
Bilandzic, M., & Foth, M. (2008, forthcoming). Social Navigation and Local Folksonomies: Technical and
Design Considerations for an Urban Mobile Information System. In S. Hatzipanagos & S. Warburton (Eds.),
Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
Bilandzic, M., Foth, M., & De Luca, A. (2008, Feb 25 27). CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban
Bilandzic, M., Foth, M., & De Luca, A. (2008, Feb 25‐27). CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban
Mobile Information Systems. Paper to be presented at the ACM SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems (DIS)
Conference, Cape Town, South Africa.
Bilandzic, M., & Foth, M . (2007, Sep 3‐5). CityFlocks: A Mobile System for Social Navigation in Urban Public
Places. Paper presented at the Locative Media Summer Conference, University of Siegen, Germany.
Places Paper presented at the Locative Media Summer Conference University of Siegen Germany
Bilandzic, M., & Foth, M. (2007, Sep 5‐6). Transferring Web 2.0 Paradigms to a Mobile System for Social
Navigation in Public Inner‐City Places. Paper presented at the Towards a Social Science of Web 2.0
Conference, York, UK.
Klaebe, H., Foth, M., Burgess, J., & Bilandzic, M. (2007) Digital Storytelling and History Lines: Community
Engagement in a Master‐Planned Development. In Proceedings 13th International Conference on Virtual
Systems and Multimedia (VSMM'07), Brisbane.
Bilandzic, M., & Foth, M. (2007) Urban computing and mobile devices: Mobile Location Bookmarking. IEEE
Pervasive Computing, 6(3), pp. 53‐57.


17

Contact Details

Thank you!

Contact:
Mark Bilandzic
markbilandzic@gmail.com
+49 170 6130 306

18

Methodology

Focus Group Interviews
How do people make use of Social Navigation in their
everyday life?

What obstacles do they experience when navigating
socially?

Requirements and design implications for system architecture

User Survey
Are
A residents willing t share th i t it k
id t illi to h
their tacit knowledge?
l d ?
With whom and with whom not?

Which h
Whi h channels d residents prefer t provide
l do
id t
f to
id
access to their local knowledge?

Design implication for communication channels

Paper Prototyping
Sketch typical use cases

Refine user interface, user interaction and screen flow

Design implications for user interaction and interface design
Iterative
Development

Implementation
Mobile web application

User Study - Evaluation of a mobile information system
that follows the social navigation approach
How does the system perform
compared to professional information
sources?

Which concept, direct- or indirect social
navigation, works better as a design
and interaction approach and under
which conditions?

Which communication modes do
people prefer when using social
navigation on a mobile device?


19

CityFlocks is a Meshup of Folksonomy‐Tags, User Comments and Geographic Coordinates

Tags
(ice-cream,
(ice-cream
desert, coffee)

User
Comment
„This place
serves the best
ice-cream
ice cream in
town!“

Urban Place /
Service
Longitude /
Latitude
(-27.46758,
153.027892)
153 027892)


20

CityFlocks‘ Research Questions

CityFlocks […], eine Art touristischer Empfehlungsdienst:
Einheimische versehen ihre Stadt mit Annotationen über Clubs,
Restaurants und Freizeitaktivitäten, und Besucher der Stadt können
diese Informationen abrufen und sogar die Verfasser kontaktieren.
Schon bei diesem Beispiel zeigt sich das doppelte Gesicht der neuen
Technik. Will ich wirklich von einem Touristen angerufen werden,
der sich für das Nachtleben meiner Heimatstadt interessiert?
Christoph Drösser, DIE ZEIT, Nr. 39
(Germany National Newspaper)


21

Selected Area for the Field Study: The Kelvin Grove Urban Village, Brisbane, Australia


22

CitiyFlock‘s Database Model uses Folksonomy to Organise User Created Contents
Users define particular places, submit comments to these places and describe them with tags.


23

Database Model Supports Various Communication Channels and Prevents Privacy Issues
Users can specify for each place individually if and how they wish to provide direct advice


24

A User Generated CityFlocks Message Consists of 5 Information Layers

Longitude / Latitude Coord.
(‐27.46758, 153.027892)
Name: „Coffee Palace“ +
folksonomy tags
Rating from
1‐10
Comment: „This place serves
the best coffee in town!“
Contact Information
(email, phone, mobile, SMS)


25

Applying the Folksonomy Paradigm for a Mobile Service

Web 2.0

Mobile Web 2.0

Tagging
•
•
•

Photos (Flickr!)
Videos (YouTube)
Weblinks (Delicious)

Geo‐Tagging
Geo Tagging

Folksonomy

•
•
•

Longitudes / Latitudes
Urban places
Local services
Local services


26

Different Stylesheets make CityFlocks easily accessible via a Web UI or a Mobile Device
Using the same backend system, different stylesheets are used to optimize the representation for
computer‐ and mobile device screens
CityFlocks – Database/Backend

Stylesheet ‐ Web

Stylesheet ‐ Mobile


27

CityFlocks is Cross System Compatible: Separating Content and Representation

CityFlocks


28



29


Graffiti on election campaign posters
[http://www.graffitieuropa.org/wahlplakate.htm]


30


Graffities in inner‐cities
[http://www.graffitieuropa.org/graffitiwien/pages/hotspots%20Kopie.htm]


31

Local Services in a City: When Visitors Only Could Know What Locals Know…

excellent
coffee
cheap
tztz

friendly

“ …we just walked through the town and find the place
we just walked through the town and find the place
with the most people, you know, that's where the
good food is! We would just pick the busiest
place...”
or look around for the busiest shop the place
“… or look around for the busiest shop, the place
where the most people go to is probably the
best food. I've tried it a couple of times, it
mostly turns out to be good”

Which cafe would your rather go to?


32

Web Users Upload Location Based Content that can be Requested by Mobile CityFlocks Users

CityFlocks
Database

Data Input
Google Maps
Web User Interface

Data Output
Mobile Device


33

Designing Urban Information Systems with the Collective Intelligence of Local Residents

The Wisdom of the Crowds


34

CityFlocks provides two different channels to let people access the pool of social knowledge

Local Residents

Location Based Comments

Contact Information

CityFlocks ‐ Server
y


35

Focus Group Outcomes
People use three different sources to get recommendation about local services in a new city
Imagine you're new in a city and you want to find a good restaurant. What do you do…?

Direct Social Navigation

“I think I would ask the local people. I would
“I thi k I
ld k th l l
l I
ld
probably go to a shop and ask the local business
people”
“I think just about anything I would do to be
honest, my first call would be other people,
either my friends or colleagues”
h
f
d
ll
”
“I’ll ask friends who live there. How is it, where I
go. Friends first, then websites”

Indirect Social Navigation

• “
“ …we just walked through the town and find the
j t lk d th
h th t
d fi d th
place with the most people, you know, that's where
the good food is! We would just pick the busiest
place...”
Local Service
Recommendations

•

“… or look around for the busiest shop, the
or look around for the busiest shop the
place where the most people go to is probably
the best food. I've tried it a couple of times, it
mostly turns out to be good”

“Websites and even information centres. Booklets, restaurant guides”
“Outside Australia, definitely Lonely Planet!”
“I would probably Google it, if there was a language barrier with the local
people, I would just look it up in the internet
people I would just look it up in the internet”, “…I go to Wikipedia
I go to Wikipedia”

Professional Information Sources


36

Designing a Mobile System to facilitate Social Navigation
CityFlocks bridge time and as well as space barriers

Direct Social
Navigation
‐ Voice‐link to expert residents
‐ Location based user created
comments

Indirect Social
Navigation
‐ Rating system providing
average grade for urban
public places.
‐ Context of people who have
been there before


37

Applying the Folksonomy Paradigm for a Mobile Service

Web 2.0

Mobile Web 2.0

Geo‐tagging

Tagging
•
•
•

Photos (Flickr!)
Videos (YouTube)

Folksonomy

•
•
•

Longitudes / Latitudes
Urban places
Local services


38

CityFlocks Workflow II: 2 simple steps to gather direct navigational help

1

2

Select expert resident
search in the main menu

3

Enter search tag for the
wanted expertise

List of expert residents +
f
d
contact details


39

Folksonomy: Seeing Other User‘s Tags Helps to Find Related Content

1

2

3

4


40

Folksonomy: Seeing Other User‘s Tags Helps to Find Related Content

1

3

2

4


41

Focus Group Interviews:
Imagine you're new in a city and you want to find a good restaurant. What do you do…?
Answers

Problems

I think I would ask the local people. I would probably go to a shop and ask the local
business people.
I would do the same what Brooke did, you can only learn from asking around. We do
read a lot but you also have to talk to people... and use any source of information you
can get, that's the way you learn... I would like to hear everybody's version
I usually ask the people where I am staying. That's what I usually do. Although,
sometimes I might have a guidebook where I pick out something. So it's a mixture of
both... it usually depends on what I think about the people.
I always ask people who are like me. Sometimes it's pretty hard to actually find local
y
p p
p
y
y
people in strange places that are not people who have a set of things to sell you
anyway. So you really don't know whether you can trust them because they're
actually about to make a bargain. So I usually ask people who are like me, because I
think, well, if they had a good experience with a restaurant last night, then I am lucky to
have one as well.
We sort of help out each other, well, with any kind of problem, we advice people
where to go. Magret, the other day told me where the bus stop is. I didn t know where
where to go Magret the other day told me where the bus stop is I didn't know where
the bus to the hospital goes from, so Magret showed it to me.
To me it actually doesn't matter what the age is or how they dress like you know it's
just about trying to get some knowledge. And I will actually ask a couple of people to
find out what the best idea is to do in that way, you know. Everybody has different
thoughts and different opinions about things, so I would ask several people in that way.
I’ll ask friends who live there. How is it, where I go. Friends first, then websites.
I wouldn’t normally go somewhere unknown to me unless I’ve read about it
somewhere saying it’s good, or someone says to me that it’s really good and I should
check it out.
I would definitely just ask my friends to start with if I wanted to know about something.
Might depend a little bit on, sort of the type of information that I was looking for.
Maybe 'Is there a good doctor to see at the health service' for example. 'Which doctor
would you see?' ‐ that might be a different type of information to 'Where do I get the
y
g
yp
g
bus from?'. I think just about anything I would do to be honest, my first call would be
other people, either my friends or colleagues.

We are fairly elderly and we don't go out and ask 20 year olds or 25 year olds.
They might not quite understand what we're talking about. It might be to do
with the age...
Our age group determines I think to some extend. On the other hand, if you
have relatives and grand children, that's different. You react different to them.
Sometimes I find myself up for adventure, so I don't go and ask people straight
away like would look something up on a website.
I really like walking, like walking around and marking stuff for myself. So I would
I really like walking, like walking around and marking stuff for myself. So I would
go like, oh there is a doctor here, okay, so I will know for the next time when I
need it or this is a library, just kind of a very exploratory kind of mode.

Professional Information Sources
Websites and even information centres. Booklets, restaurant guides.
Outside Australia, definitely Lonely Planet.
I go to Wikipedia (for destinations outside Australia) (People then discusses the
Wikipedia and show their positive attitudes towards its credibility)
I would probably Google it, if there was a language barrier with the local people,
I would just look it up in the internet.

Do you feel comfortable ringing people for a short advice even
though you haven't kept in touch for a long time?
I woundn't do it. Depends who it is, but that's rude.
I am actually okay with doing that with male friends, but I wouldn't do it
with female friends.
If this was a close friend, it would be alright. But not with people you
don t normally keep in touch with.
don't normally keep in touch with


42

Focus Group Interviews
Indirect Social Navigation
Answers:
Once I went with my boyfriend to Cairns, and we
were just travelling and stuff and didn't know
anyone. so we just walked through the town and
find the place with the most people, you know,
that's where the good food is! We would just pick
the busiest place...
… or look around for the busiest shop, the place
where the most people go to is probably the best
food. I've tried it a couple of times, it mostly turns
out to be good.
I would take a walk around the city and pick up
different places... and eventually come back to
p
the place that looked best

Problems:
How do you bridge time and space barriers?
e.g. if you want to go to a good restaurant
when not many people are around?
e.g. if you want to get a recommendation
when you are not in situ?
not in situ?
Not all physical objects provide interaction history


43

Focus Group Outcomes
There is a need to Democratise Information about Urban Services: The Wisdom of the Crowds
Problem
“I always ask people who are like me. Sometimes it's pretty hard to actually find local people in strange
places that are not people who have a set of things to sell you anyway. So you really don't know whether
you can trust them because they're actually about to make a bargain. So I usually ask people who are like
me, because I think, well, if they had a good experience with a restaurant last night, then I am lucky to have
one as well”
“ …you can only learn from asking around. We do read a lot but you also have to talk to people... and use
any source of information you can get, that's the way you learn... I would like to hear everybody's version”
“…everybody has different thoughts and different opinions about things, so I would ask several people in
that way
that way”
Solution
We propose a system that leveraging the collective intelligence of urban residents to rate and set comments
on local public places and services


44

Location Based Comments Provide Navigational Help

„It takes away
from you to take a decision when you don't have
enough information to make it So it's
information to make it. So it s
somebody else who's got that information and
they can give you a shot…“


45

CityFlocks vs. Professional Information Sources: Democratising Urban Information

[about an article in the kuRB magazine*]

“...they can write whatever they want, you know…
“ h
i
h
h
k
…whatever makes this place sound good”
[about the CityFlocks application]

„It sounds really vague, but it's a feeling that you're
connected with somebody. You've connected to
somebody. You ve
somebody and they've almost talked you in
something or talked you out of this…“

*a city guidebook for the Kelvin Grove Urban Village in Brisbane, Australia


46

People only use the direct voice link for friends and if they knew they would not interrupt them

[afraid of talking to a stranger]

“I wouldn’t just call a random person. I would like to know at least something
about them, before I call them. If it said, for example ‘Anne, 23, medicine
student’ I would consider ringing her up for advice, but what if it’s a professor
or doctor or whatever, you know. That could be awkward. I wouldn’t really
y
y
know how to talk to them.”

“Probably no, I prefer to call people that I know. During the day, you know,
people work, I don’t know. If I had the option to send an SMS, I would always go
for the SMS.”


47

CityFlocks Provides Information about Urban Places as well as Urban Residents

[CityFlocks comment about a park at the KGUV]

“I love to spend time here
I love to spend time here
with my granddaughter…”


48

KGUV residents compare their own opinion / rumors with the CityFlocks comments

[searching for food facilities]

“Oh I wanna see the IGA somebody told me
Oh, I wanna see the IGA, somebody told me
it’s quite expensive, let me check this out!”


49

Direct voice link is not appropriate for unimportant everyday questions

[after a phone call with an expert resident]

“That was kinda awkward, …I mean when it was
just about the bloody coffee I would just go,
just about the bloody coffee I would just go
I mean it’s 3 bucks...”


50

De.licio.us Uses Folksonomy to Organise User Created Weblinks


51

Flickr! uses Folksonomy to Organise User Created Photos


52

An Active Search Widget facilitates Local Data Input


53

Performance Issues due Content Overload
The response time of the system decreased increasingly with the amount of content submitted.


54

Current Trends make the Mobile Platform is capable to improve Social Navigation

Customised
Infotainment

Sophisticated
p
User
Interfaces

Multimedia
Capabilities

Rich
Voice/Video
Telephony

High Speed
Mobile Internet
Access

Location
Based
Services


55

CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems

Empfohlen

Empfohlen

Weitere ähnliche Inhalte

Andere mochten auch

Andere mochten auch (20)

Ähnlich wie CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems

Ähnlich wie CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems (20)

Kürzlich hochgeladen

Kürzlich hochgeladen (20)

CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems