Research Paper Report
The paper I read is called Design Iterations for a location-aware event planner. It focused on designing an event planner that can efficiently help individuals plan special events, such as meetings, dinners, gatherings, as well as impromptu events in which there is not much planning. The paper also mentioned a questionnaire and interview conducted in order to find out the issues currently surrounding event planning, and the problems and concerns that having a location-aware system should address. Most of the study participants mentioned that current event planners are poorly match to their tasks of meeting and keeping up with friends and acquaintances. For formal events, people usually wanted to know the location of yet-to-arrive attendees. For impromptu events, people usually want the flexibility of changing event location and time, and the ability to quickly alert participants when this happens. As for the location aware aspect, most participants are concerned about privacy, so they want the flexibility of allowing their location to be seen only when they want to, and to turn it off when they don’t. The paper also mentioned and gave the pictures of 4 prototypes that attempted to solve the problems. The first one is an intelligent keychain that alert the user when a following group of people are within a certain distance; the second one is a conference compass that can allow a meeting to happen even when some people haven’t arrive by broadcasting the content to them; the third is an interactive map, and the fourth is a smartphone with included location-awareness feature.
One problem encountered in the study is the fact that people usually have problem identifying the exact address of the event location. They want to have a more user-friendly system of location reporting. For example, for the event planner to say a movie theater instead of a GPS coordinate. Since this paper is published in 2004, I feel like this kind of problem is mostly solved with the availability of interactive map. Another interesting feature that I think worth noticing and considering is the creating event feature mentioned in the paper. Similar to our app, the user can add in time, place, and specify details, but the paper also mentions the possibility of adding invited people, and the event planner can automatically send out an invitation. This kind of feature would save a lot of time for user who wants to broadcast their events to public, but also have a set of friends they’d love to invite. A second interesting feature is the ability to “track” the attendees of an event. As an event host, people usually would love to know who is coming to their event, where exactly they are when the event happens, and whether they need assistance getting to the event site. Even though Clink! Currently already deals with the issue of getting the event attendee to get to the event more convenient, we don’t have the feature of adding in the ability for the host to know this kind of details. What the paper suggested is a system that alert the event host where their attendees are: on site, or 10 min away, etc. This would include an actual GPS tracking system within the event planner. Maybe we won’t need to be as specific as to how far away is the attendee, but details such as: present, coming, or cancelled, would be helpful for the host to know.
Paper Reference
Design Iterations for a location-aware event planner
By Zachary Pousman - Giovanni Iachello - Rachel Fithian - Jehan Moghazy - John Stasko
DOI 10.1007/s00779-004-0266-y