Milestone 1

Abhay Sukumaran and Shailendra Rao

We are exploring social networking tools tailored to niche audiences with specific needs.
Our belief is that certain communities have features that cause social isolation, which
could be mitigated through an online social networking platform. Our prototype design
has a text-messaging based mobile phone interface. Our hypothesis is that having an a)
always-on b) asynchronous c) unobtrusive interface to the social net in the form of text
messages would improve social interaction within the community by facilitating a)
meeting people who have shared interests b) knowing your friends schedules and
availability in real time c) expanding your social network through friends of friends. The
prototype would have a web component and a mobile component, partitioned along ease
of text entry (creating a user profile is easier on the web), and real-time nature of
interaction (getting an alert when someone is available is easier on a phone).

To evaluate the effectiveness of the system, we will conduct surveys to evaluate whether
the system did increase social interaction, and whether the mobile interface was
appropriate.

Task Analysis

Our users are members of the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) community in India.
We find that this community has a lot of shared background and is geographically
localized, but because of long, unusual work hours, frequent relocations, and lack of web
access at work, is socially not as vibrant as it could be. Currently, most interaction is
limited to people at your own workplace. Most of these people would like to be more
active socially, but find tasks like meeting people outside their own workplaces, or
scheduling times to hang out with friends, difficult and time-taking. The mobile phone is
the biggest tool for social communication, but it is not easy to make frequent voice calls
in the workplace.

SMS or text messaging is increasingly popular, because people can unobtrusively

communicate even in the workplace. This still requires a lot of back and forth messaging,
and does not help to meet new people, or discover social connections. Our plan is to
couple the advantages of the SMS medium with profile information on a website, thus
creating a social network easily accessed via a mobile phone.

Ideation

See attached storyboards and interface ideas.

Evidence
Our preliminary needs finding and task analysis is based on informal in situ interviews
with BPO employees, and publicly available data on demographics and mobile phone
usage levels.

Social networking websites have been around for a while now, but none of them cater
specifically to one industry. We feel that it would be easiest for these people to establish
social relationships within their community, because of the nature of their jobs. Thus our
system is tailored, both interface and interaction-wise, to take advantage of that
specificity.

Social mobile software systems based on text messaging (e.g., Dodgeball) have also
proven successful.

Further evidence

We are currently in the process of conducting a large scale (100+ participants) survey to
do more detailed needs finding. We also intend to make the prototype public, and gather
feedback data from the users.

Evaluation

It is difficult to evaluate a social networking system within a short time frame since users
need to adopt the mechanisms it affords, and because of critical mass requirements.
However, as mentioned above, our public prototype will allow us to gather user feedback.
We also plan to conduct a post-deployment survey to capture attitudinal measures.