Video Prototyping
CSE 490F HCI
Andy Hou
Kevin Chiu

Project and Task
We chose to work on the CLUSTER project. The task that we chose to focus on was task 1: Find out if your friend is nearby.

New UI Ideas


We introduced a new UI widget to CLUSTER called Friend Radar. This view shows your friends and their locations visually. Although CLUSTER already has a map view, were you can see the locations of your friends, we felt that it actually provided too much information in some cases. Especially since CLUSTER is meant to be on mobile devices with small screens, we felt that the existing Google Maps-like interface would be overkill if you just wanted to see where your friends were at a glance.

Our Friend Radar provides a much more abstracted view. The relative positions of friends does not directly correspond to their locations. Instead, friends appear as dots grouped around their current location. Readers familiar with Digg Swarm will see the analog between "friends" and "diggers", and "locations" and "stories". Much like how the Digg Swarm visualization shows diggers jump from story to story as they vote on each one, Friend Radar will show your friends jump from location to location as they move about in the real world.

We believe the Friend Radar view has several advantages over the map view. Since the locations that your friends broadcast are already discrete (i.e. they don't tell you exact longitude, latitude coordinates) for privacy reasons, it doesn't make sense to plot their locations on a map because you don't really know their exact locations anyway. Our view makes it easy to see what the popular locations are at a glance, since it's easier to pick out the locations with the most dots around them rather than to scroll around on a map, searching for your friends. Also, our view handles multistory building better. For example, the Friend Radar would should one group of friends clustered around the Atrium and another group around the Labs, but if you used the map view you might think they were all in the same place since one location is on top of the other.

The main disadvantage of Friend Radar is that it does not provide as much information as the map view. It does not show roads or buildings and the distance between two friends on the screen is not related to their real distance. However, this is only a disadvantage if the user needs such information. For example, if you already are familiar with where the favorite locations of your friends are, then you might ignore this extra information, and may even find it distracting.

Making the Video
We didn't encounter any major problems in making the video. We felt that it was easy to create a new interface using this prototyping technique, because we could get away with using a rough paper prototype, since we could use different camera angles and video editing to help fudge the interface details.