Human-Centered Computing Foundations, Fall 2010 » Assignments » Assignment15 » Final Report (Team Cacti)

Final Report (Team Cacti)

Last modified by Jacob Burton on 2010/12/09 16:17

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Title

Footprint

Authors

Zac Clark, Thomas Cavalier, Aaron Stockton, Jacob Burton, Luke Mattingly

Abstract

As portable devices become more powerful and ubiquitous, businesses will need to leverage these devices in order to stand out from their competitors. Any service that utilizes the location of a person's device is referred to as a Location-Based Service, or LBS. One such LBS is Foursquare, a location-based social networking application that allows its users to "check-in" to the locations they visit. While Foursquare is mainly used for social networking purposes, can it be used for other purposes, such as to help people become more aware of their energy usage when traveling?
The goal of this project is to extend Footprint by exploring human-centered computing concepts such as user interface design and system usability. There are a wide range of possible areas of work, such as concepting/prototyping, front-end programming, and back-end programming.

Keywords

Energy, Foursquare, Web2.0, Mapping, Anti-consumption

Problem / Goal

The idea that cars are bad for the environment is not new or unusual, but its specific applicability to individuals is hard to see and quantify easily. By hooking into an already existing system that tracks a user's travel (Foursquare), Footprint can show the user statistics about their travel with relatively minimal investment. One does not need to be vigilant about tracking their gas expenditure, average travel distance, etc. As long as the user frequently checks in to venues when arriving, all they need to do extra is to tag these trips with some meta-data about their travel (ie: by car, by bike, etc). This is an important problem because raising awareness of carbon emissions is important to help reduce our footprint and lead to more sustainable lifestyles. Also, the project is interesting because it allows us to actually work with data and visual representation, rather than abstract concepts and reasoning.

Initially, our role in the project was to refine the interface to make the application as easy to use as possible. The rational behind that decision is that by lowering the amount of work required to use the system, the barrier of entry is reduced, making it more likely to be used by more people. We were to improve visual design, as well as the logical flow between pieces of the application. As part of the visual design piece, we need to figure out how best to show the statistics we are collecting in a way that will motivate the user to make changes.

After some work on the project we realized that some "invisible" changes had to be made before we could start, such as cleaning up the existing codebase and integrating it into a version control system such that multiple developers can work together on changes to the product. This took more time than we had anticipated, and became a large part of our initial work.

Methodologies

Wireframing, Sketching, Product Flows, Software Development, Distributed Version Control

Relationship of your Project to the Themes discussed in the Course

Energy (the core of the project)

Motivation (how to encourage users to change their habits)

How to use computers to help promote better habits

Design (visual and interface)

Meta-Design (designing the development eco-system to promote application design)

While it wasn't specifically talked about in class, we saw much of the code we were writing as meta-design. On its basic level, meta-design is design to help facilitate further design by other users. In the early stages of working on Footprint, many changes had to be made to the code base to facilitate team collaboration. To to this, the code was modularized dramatically, to allow parallel editing of various features. By splitting code organization out between the backend-heavy tasks (like interfacing with 4square and handling data) and front-end design we allowed various team members to focus on specific sections of the code. Another meta-design related coding task was the creation of a set of helper function used elsewhere in the program. Zac had more experience dealing with session handling than other members of the team, so he wrote a piece of code that allowed everyone else to easily check if a user is logged in or not. This directly related to meta-design because the work of the designer (Zac) allowed users of the system (the rest of the team) to more easily use the system to create features.

Characterization of the Individual Contributions

Team Leader: Zac Clark

"Since starting the project I have taken the leadership role and worked on getting the team set up to easily share code and work together. I took the base application code provided by our sponsor and wrote up a series of detailed instructions on how to get it running on each of our machines so we can work on it. This involved minor re-writes to the application as well as adding some new functionality for setting up the database. Then I put the code in version control on Github, with a setup to allow easy collaboration between team members. After that I refactored the codebase to logically separate different pieces on functionality for easier updates.

For the second half of the project I focused on delegating work and helping out when people had issues. This included fixing issues with broken deployments, handling task delegation, providing helpful insight into various problems, and generally holding the team together and on task."

Back End Development: Jacob Burton, Aaron Stockton

UI: Thomas Cavalier, Luke Mattingly

Findings and Results so far

We have a working application that we will demo during the class presentation.

Next Steps

As we were working on this project, we realized that some ideas we had were beyond the scope of this class. We liked some of these ideas, so we thought we would document them as if we might work on them later.

Fancier mapping integrated with Google Maps. At some point later it would be useful to use Google Maps to provide better (and more visual) path estimation between check ins.

Adding more complicated data visualisation. We only scratched the surface of displaying interesting visualizations based on the data Footprint collects. We had ideas around visualizing trends across time, providing more fine grained detail, and allowing more complicated comparison.

Custom badges. Foursquare supposedly supports adding "badges" or accomplishments, to their system. This would be interesting to leverage in helping motivate users, as certain sustainable achievements could net them badges, supporting motivation through game mechanics.