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

Comments:
Adam Friedli
Jessica Gonazales

Reference Information:
Title: Experience in Social Affective Applications: Methodologies and Case Study.
Authors: Paul Andre, Alan Dix, M.C. Schraefel, Ryen W. White.
Presentation: (Paper) CHI 2010. April 10-15, 2010, Atlanta, GA.

Summary:
The authors of this paper are discussing the experience of use and the affect that social networks are able to provide. They express their interest in finding out if combining the previous mentioned characteristics would enhance quality of life, or at least in the social interaction aspect of it.

They developed Healthii, an application that allows users to express their current status of well being utilizing the following set of descriptors: 'busy', 'enjoyment', 'stress' and 'health'; and 'not', 'quite' and 'very'. The state of well being is represented by an avatar, which can be updated through Facebook or Twitter. 

Two related works are discussed, Affector and eMoto. Affector is a video window that can be placed in between neighboring offices of two friends, and thanks to sensor readings, such as movements in the office, it can communicate the mood of the person. eMoto is an application that allows "emotions" to be transmitted through text messages, depending in the way the user inputs the text message.

The authors explain they were not only interested in developing a tool that could express the state of well-being, but also in understanding the concept of well-being expressing, and trying to understand the experience of the user when trying to determine their well-being state. The method they utilized on testing Healthii was the following: they selected ten people from their own lab, who were already friends and users of a social network. They were given the Healthii tool, and asked to use it for a period of five weeks, during which they would meet regularly to discuss about the effect that Healthii was having on them as well as positive and negative aspects of the tool.

Furthermore, they present two areas of critiques obtained from the reviews of their original CHI paper. One area is how they were opened for redesign during the testing period, and the way they designed the tool itself. They also explained how existing methodologies, such as Participatory Design, longitudinal studies, ethnography or focus groups did not exactly fit the goals they had for their project. In the final part of the paper, the authors discuss arguments for and against the aspects of their chosen methodology. 

Discussion: 
On the design of the tool itself, I believe the numeric representation of moods can be somewhat confusing, and take away from the intentions of the tool. If the avatar representation is supposed to convey the mood of the user, then either there is no need to have a code, or instead of the code have the spelled out well-being state. Something I liked from the design, is how it gives you the constrained vocabulary, which makes it easier to decide how you are feeling, but they also give you the 'More' option, which lessens the constraints of the design.

I liked how it gives a brief explanation of related work, how they express they share a common goal, but at the same time their applications are really different from each other.


I think this is a good example of how to think through a methodology for a project. The fact that they do not just utilize one set method, but design their own, the one that best fits the goals of their project. Also, the fact that they recognize the pros and the cons of their methodology, gives the reader a sense of trust, since they are showing how they evaluated their options, and how they think this is the best option to take.