Paper Reading #3: Experience in Social Affective Applications: Methodologies and Case Study

Comments

Comment #1: Adam Friedli

Comment #2: Paola Garza

Reference Information

Title: Experience in Social Affective Applications: Methodologies and Case Study

Authors: Paul Andre, Alan Dix, M.C. Schraefel, Ryan W. White

Conference: CHI 2010 Atlanta, GA

Summary

Taking into consideration the various social networks and connections and the experience of use as well as the affect and focuses on two key aspects. The concept and design of a tool to share well-being information and evaluating the experience of how that information is precieved, interpreted and used. The goal of this paper is to find an appropriate evaluation solution in an application which detects the affect of the user. Motivated by psychology the Healthii application tool is used for conveying the well-being status in a social network. It consist of four dimensions: busy; enjoyment; stress and health, with three possible values: not; quite and very.

The emotions could be set using an interface and it could also be customized with other adjectives. The author states that this application isn't novel, but what is novel about this application is that concept being studied (flexibility, not within constraints) and the specific methodology used. The study took place among a group of friends and over the series of five weeks. The group would meet each week; and a survey was taken at the end of the five weeks to get individual feedback. In order to find an acceptable way to measure they combined the concepts from various other methodologies in similar affective studies. This centered in on the awareness of the user, the awareness of others in the group and tailoring both the concept and tool to fit the user's desired experience, promotion of discussion, and sufficient period of evaluation of the experience to promote higher level of discussion. As results didn't necessarily meet the desired goals of the project's team, they end the article stating that this paper was aimed to inform a discussion on whether or what types of methodologies are needed, what attributes to use in order to study and learn from them in that field of study.

Discussion

I was looking forward to reading a paper on a case study. I personally think implementing applications with the intent of conveying affect is very neat. As I started to read their experiment I realized that indeed, this wasn't a novel application. I've seen similar applications on various other places that do similar things, about at least 3 years back. When I was reading the results they disclosed that this didn't really produce the desired outcome as they expected. I found it interesting how they had argument after each finding to, in my opinion, justify that they found something useful. I can identify with the users in some sense because I think that I wouldn't want to be updating my emotion status, with the other usual status that we often update in facebook or twitter. I remember I used a similar application on facebook a while back and yeah, I often neglected to update the emotion status. Even people that update it rather frequently it's rare that you'd update it with ever emotion change in your day. So while I think the application is somewhat interesting (I must admit the first thing I noticed was that they were using a Mac from the pictures and coincidentally they used i's in their application name, I'm such a dork, haha). Nonetheless, I wasn't too impressed with there findings.