%0 Conference Paper %1 citeulike:3142735 %A Bilandzic, Mark %A Foth, Marcus %A De Luca, Alexander %B Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems %C New York, NY, USA %D 2008 %I ACM %K en mobile-computing real-navigation rfpaws social-navigation %P 174--183 %R 10.1145/1394445.1394464 %T CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems %U http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394464 %X CityFlocks is a mobile system enabling visitors and new residents in a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents, so as to gather information about their new environment. Its design specifically aims to lower existing barriers of access and facilitate social navigation in urban places. This paper presents a design case study of a mobile system prototype that offers an easy way for information seeking new residents or visitors to access tacit knowledge from local people about their new community. In various user tests we evaluate two general user interaction alternatives - direct and indirect social navigation - and analyse under what conditions which interaction method works better for people using a mobile device to socially navigate urban environments. The outcomes are relevant for the user interaction design of future mobile information systems that leverage off of a social navigation approach. %@ 978-1-60558-002-9

@inproceedings{citeulike:3142735, abstract = {{CityFlocks is a mobile system enabling visitors and new residents in a city to tap into the knowledge and experiences of local residents, so as to gather information about their new environment. Its design specifically aims to lower existing barriers of access and facilitate social navigation in urban places. This paper presents a design case study of a mobile system prototype that offers an easy way for information seeking new residents or visitors to access tacit knowledge from local people about their new community. In various user tests we evaluate two general user interaction alternatives - direct and indirect social navigation - and analyse under what conditions which interaction method works better for people using a mobile device to socially navigate urban environments. The outcomes are relevant for the user interaction design of future mobile information systems that leverage off of a social navigation approach.}}, added-at = {2018-03-19T12:24:51.000+0100}, address = {New York, NY, USA}, author = {Bilandzic, Mark and Foth, Marcus and De Luca, Alexander}, biburl = {https://www.bibsonomy.org/bibtex/2826f1ead841d26d44150d4e579585f6f/aho}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems}, citeulike-article-id = {3142735}, citeulike-linkout-0 = {http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1394445.1394464}, citeulike-linkout-1 = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394464}, comment = {(private-note)INTRODUCTION Information is a significant factor in our everyday lives. The process of finding the right information source and then identifying the relevant component requires time, money and effort. An alternative method is to gather information by directly asking other people for advice. If we have a question concerning a specific field in which a friend or colleague is an expert, it might be more efficient to consult them rather than trying to figure out a solution independently [2, 3]. Tourists visiting an unfamiliar city might choose to ask residents for directions rather than looking them up on a map. Motivated by the fact that asking other people for advice or 'doing what other people do' is a seemingly popular way of navigating new environments. SOCIAL NAVIGATION In a digital environment people do not leave interaction traces, leaving us, according to Erickson and Kellogg [4], 'socially blind'. However, the high value placed on social navigation in the physical world has motivated people to start thinking about it as a general design approach for digital information systems as well. The rising trend of embedded mobile broadband internet access and GPS navigation, means mobile phone users are able to employ 'geo-tagging', a technique to combine longitude and latitude coordinates with all kinds of location-specific multimedia content and information [5]. Authors believe that such a digital augmentation of physical spaces, combined with user-generated information, opens up opportunities to design and develop more sophisticated, interactive approaches for social navigation in the physical world using mobile devices. CityFlocks' Design of Social Navigation People regularly use both direct and indirect social navigation to seek information about facilities, local services and places in a new city. Authors argue that social navigation is thus an important factor to consider when digitally augmenting the decision making process of information seekers who are exploring unknown terrain. CityFlocks, a mobile phone application, facilitates both direct and indirect social navigation in urban public spaces. CityFlocks enables any person who has experienced a local service, shop or other urban public place to share this experience with others. The unique proposition of CityFlocks is that it dynamically creates a list of user generated comments for any urban place and local service in the city. CityFlocks has a built-in search function based on the folksonomy concept. Users who search for keywords like 'fast food' for example will get a list of places which other users have annotated with the same tag. Moreover, the places are sorted by their level of popularity which is represented by an individual rating code and consists of the number of submitted recommendations for the respective place and its average grade. Figure 1 shows some of the system screens. INFSCI 2480 Paper Summary - Artem Beaty-Avdonin | arb148 CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems Figure 1. Facilitating indirect social navigation: Average ratings (2) and comments (3) from local residents describe the quality of urban places This provides qualitative contextual information, based on the social knowledge and experiences with this place submitted by a number of local residents. Furthermore, there is a link below each comment to call or text message the respective resident. The community of urban residents is able to upload and organize recommendations for any existing facility or place in the city. Incorporating the location based comments submitted by local residents, CityFlocks tackles two crucial problems that people usually have with social navigation. How do you identify for example, a good restaurant at non peak-times, when it is hard to make a decision based on how many other people are sitting in the restaurant? Popular paths from earlier navigators and recommendations from local residents are logged in the CityFlocks database and can be requested anytime. Additionally, the fact that CityFlocks runs as a mobile phone application allows local recommendations to be accessible to anybody from anywhere. CityFlocks applies the folksonomy concept to categorize and retrieve location based comments in urban places. For every entry users make, we let them attach a number of tags to describe the comment and place they are submitting. CityFlocks uses two social navigation approaches. The first one is the indirect social navigation approach, allows users to browse through a list of comments and recommendations related to specific places in the city that were previously uploaded by city residents. Second one is the direct social navigation approach, allows participants to set up a direct link to an 'expert resident', who is local resident of the city who allowed authors to store his, or her contact details in the system so people could ask them for personal advice about the location. CityFlocks rating-module provides recommendations from a number of residents and implicitly leverages 'the wisdom of the crowds' [6], the collective intelligence of community members, to inform the user about the quality of a place. EVALUATION OF INTERACTION METHODS FOR SOCIAL NAVIGATION The user tests tackled two issues. The first aim was to find out if people perceived the information provided through CityFlocks by the local community of residents as beneficial, compared to information provided by professional sources, such as a street press magazine. Also authors explored which feature and communication mode (based on direct and indirect social navigation) the participants would use to gather the information they needed. Browsing Location Based User Comments All field study participants found that the tag-search was a convenient method to get a quick list of options of where to go. Furthermore, they perceived the rating notes as a valuable first impression of a place's quality and evidently, the more positive recommendations a place had, the more trustful it appeared to be. In contrast to city magazines and other information material from professional sources, CityFlocks was perceived as a channel where information was being published uncensored, by people INFSCI 2480 Paper Summary - Artem Beaty-Avdonin | arb148 CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems who had no conflict of interest with the places they wrote reviews about. One drawback of the user comments that was identified during the tests is that some places had none or only very few comments, so an information seeker would not get sufficient feedback on what a place is like. Direct Voice Link The participants in field tests would barely use the direct voice link function. This was in spite of the fact that they were aware that all expert residents who left their number in the system had acknowledged that they are happy to provide direct advice to any information seekers in the city. The main reason for not making use of that function was that they were scared of talking to a complete stranger. Some of our non-native English speaking participants perceived the language barrier as an additional}, doi = {10.1145/1394445.1394464}, interhash = {99b5d6bd62bc65b78ec05f410777087d}, intrahash = {826f1ead841d26d44150d4e579585f6f}, isbn = {978-1-60558-002-9}, keywords = {en mobile-computing real-navigation rfpaws social-navigation}, location = {Cape Town, South Africa}, pages = {174--183}, posted-at = {2009-11-13 19:09:16}, priority = {4}, publisher = {ACM}, series = {DIS '08}, timestamp = {2018-03-19T12:24:51.000+0100}, title = {{CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems}}, url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394464}, year = 2008 }