Search the site
What we do
Little Springs Design is a mobile product, research, design, and usability testing consultancy. We help wireless operators, associations, manufacturers, and application & website providers with product and UI design, patterns, training, research and strategy.
Contact us today.
Downloads
Sign up to get a free copy of our Mobile Widgets Whitepaper or almost-monthly newsletter. Or buy mobile Java or web design guidelines.
Recent blog entries
Blog topics
Blog archives
Group Collaboration using Location Systems
Nicholas Nova over at pasta and vinegar recently wrote about some user experience issues of location-based applications in Location matters but .... He cites the laboratory example of a collaborative treasure hunt game in which users use TabletPC software to achieve a goal.
Group members in this test collaborated with each other more when their location was not presented to their fellow users, although the group's performance (I assume effectiveness at achieving the goal) did not change. They communicated with each other better, and improved their strategy over time. Providing group members with information about each others' positions made them rely on that information rather than each other.
This makes me wonder about what I'll temporarily call the "Video Game Effect": do people, when watching moving avatars on a screen, interact with the avatars rather than the world and each other? I don't have any research to answer that question.
Regardless, it does suggest that there is an optimum amount of data that should be presented to a group of users, and that they will make better decisions if they rely on the environment for a certain class of information.
These collaborative games share a lot in common with business applications. For example, I worked with an application that tracked the location of field repair personnel. A central dispatcher would send the repair guys (almost universally male) to houses around the community. These folks are trying to collaboriatively solve a problem: how to reduce the amount of time they are driving and increase the number of stops they make in a day. The old system of defining territories has several limitations, and they found that they were frequently driving halfway across town when another customer was a short ways away.
If we assumed that the repair crew had no central dispatcher, we could likely take one of these game interfaces and make very minor modifications to help the repair crew make the best decisions. (now, if they could just find my house I'd be happy)
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.