Shailendra Rao - Stanford University



Shailendra Rao

Abhay Sukumaran

CS 376 : Research in HCI

November 17, 2005

Project Milestone 2

Introduction

Online social networking is rapidly growing in popularity and usage. It has become wildly popular in the United States. The initial goal of our project was to build a social networking website for the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) community in India. Because this community is closely knit and socially isolated from others because of their odd work hours, we thought that an online social networking platform would enhance their social interactions.

Our preliminary research and discussions with people connected to the industry pointed out a key flaw in our concept. Internet access for this user population is both limited to particular sites at work and not as ubiquitous and always on as we are used to in the United States. However, the overwhelming majority of BPO workers have cell phones. This turned onto a project focusing on moving social networking to text messaging, which is widely used in India.

Our project focus shifted once again after we reflected about multimodal interfaces in the CS376 class readings and discussions. What if we could combine both the affordances of text messaging with voice? Cell phones offer both capabilities in a familiar and ubiquitous manner. Our project has evolved into constructing a social networking tool that runs entirely on the mobile platform, taking advantage of both its voice and text messaging capabilities. This implementation will offer a new paradigm for social networking.

Hypothesis

We believe that our system can provide the affordances of a social networking site in the form factor of a mobile phone. Additionally, incorporating voice into profiles will provide a medium for self-expression, which in some ways is richer than the current text and picture profiles that online sites currently offer.

Evaluation Plan

We will test our claim that mobile phones offer a sufficiently rich interface to mimic many of the key tasks of social networking websites with a usability study involving 7-15 Stanford students. Some of these key tasks include creating a profile, making changes to it, looking up other members, etc. This lab-based usability study will allow us to observe the actions of our users while they use their phone (keypad and text messaging) to navigate our voice user interface. We will record both the audio and video of our participants interacting with our system.

Creating a profile for the first time will be our most telling task. The content of this profile will be similar to those featured in popular web-based social networking sites such as Facebook, Friendster etc. This task will test whether a voice input on a mobile phone is sufficiently usable for creating a rich representation of oneself. Users will create a profile complete with their demographic data and sound bytes describing their interests, perspectives, hobbies, etc by going through a question-answer session.

Other tasks in our usability study will involve looking up a person by name, accessing parts of their profile, and selectively editing their own profile. All these tasks will be conducted on our prototype system, using voice, DTMF tones, and possibly text messages. At the end of the study participants will fill out a 15-item questionnaire that covers attitudes towards the system, including its ease of use and their satisfaction with it.

The system is meant to be sufficiently robust and general that it can work with whatever phones the participants might currently be using, eliminating concerns of variance in familiarity with any particular model of phone.

Current Prototype

The focus of our current prototype is on having a carefully-designed interactive voice response system that allows the test user to create a profile. To access the system, the user dials a standard number from their mobile phone. They then go through a series of voice prompts. Since there is a social / dating context here, we use cross-paired voices – male test subjects get female interviewers and vice versa. The conversation then proceeds, with the user giving responses to the voice prompts and pressing # on their phones to indicate the end of a response.

System: Hi (name), welcome to Goldspot social networking. Please use a short phrase to describe what you want to do. You can say things like create profile, edit profile, find person, add friend, change password.

User: create profile*

System: You are now going to create a profile. You will be asked several questions about yourself. You can hang up at any time to cancel and your progress will be saved. Press # to continue.

User: #

System: You will now be asked some demographic questions. Press # after you have recorded each response. Are you male or female?

User: Female #

System: Ok, you’re female. Pick an age range from the following …

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System: Now let’s talk about your interests. What are your favorite movies?

User: My favorite movies tend to be romantic comedies, but I also love dark drama. For example, I like Maid in Manhattan, but I really love stuff like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. My other favorites are … #

System: OK. What about your taste in music.

User: Classic rock’s the way to go! #

System: OK. What are some of your favorite books.

User: I’m not really that much of a reader. I like to read some non-fiction though. Last one I liked was this autobiography of Richard Branson.#

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System: Thanks! You have answered everything required to create your profile. It will now be available to your friends as determined by your privacy settings. Have a great day, and thanks for joining Goldspot!

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* speech-to-text by Wizard of Oz techniques.

In this way the system assembles an audio profile of the person, in their own voice, which can be accessed by other people. It is akin to an audio presentation of yourself, and the interview format makes it easy for people to supply standardized categories of information.

Further Development

There are several elements we plan to introduce into the prototype by the end of quarter. They might rely to some extent of Wizard of Oz techniques to do things like voice-recognition or speech-to-text. Our main focus will be on:

1. Ability to look up a person by name, and get an audio representation of your linkage to that person.

2. Editing parts of your own profile selectively

3. Accessing other people’s profiles

4. Adding to a friend list

Some of these could involve short text messages. For example, since it is difficult for voice-recognition systems to input names accurately, lookup could be done via a message sent a standard number, e.g.,

“Find Reena Vyas”

And the system would send you back a message which listed the people that matched and their linkages to you.

Other possible goals could be –

1. Refine the user control of the voice interface. Allow them to do things like undo, skip, re-record.

2. Explore the possibilities of sending photos via MMS

Related Work

Wired for Speech by Clifford Nass and Scott Brave

Wired for Speech will guide us in our selection of voice interface gender, tone, accent, emotion, and personality. It will also give us ideas on how to make our users feel comfortable disclosing their personal information. Encouraging honest answers is another thing we hope to get from this source. Our audio profiles are only interesting if a person’s real personality is showcased.

Voice User Interface Design by Michael Cohen, et al.

This book is billed as the definitive guide for VUI design. It will offer us both great psychological principles to base our design decisions on as well as real world examples to learn from.

SCANMail: a voicemail interface that makes speech browsable, readable and searchable by Steve Whittaker, et. al

In essence the SCANMail team has converted Voice UIs to GUIs. Our system was not intended to convert text in user’s profiles to voice (the opposite of SCANMail), but there does seem to be some valuable evaluation insights that we can get from this paper.

Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster by Danah Boyd

One of the interesting points in this paper is how profiles on online social networking websites such as Friendster have been used as communicative tools, rather than static representations. One of our long term goals of this project is fostering narrative creation. Because people always carry their mobile phones, they can document interesting life events at any time of their choosing. This will transform our system from a static profile container to a more lively and active communication resource that is updated and checked frequently. We also aim to get hints of what specific portions of a profiles people want to edit update frequently, so that we can provide easy access to this functionality.

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