Motivations for “off the grid check-in” on Foursquare

TechCrunch is generally not a website I follow that much, but there’s an interesting article by a Guest Author about “Off the Grid” check-ins on Foursquare. Following up on the blogpost about automatic location capture I wrote last week, I think it’s worth having a look at this survey mentioned in the TC article.

The survey was about the purpose of using the “OTG” feature, i.e. the possibility on Foursquare to avoid disclosing the location where you checked-in to your contacts. Being “off the grid” however enable to gain points, badges and compete for mayorship. Although the methodology may be a bit rough in terms of sampling (I wonder less about the quantity of peeps who participated than the stratification), here are the conclusions I found interesting:

• “The single largest reason for OTG was hiding from friends [46%]. People gave a variety of motivations [examples: buying a gift for girlfriend, on a date, avoiding someone in particular, hiding one’s poor eating habits from friends, and seeing a doctor.]
• 60% of respondents cited the desire to keep track of where they’ve been for their own future reference. (…) your Foursquare History is a flat set of your check ins but the user interest here points to the opportunity for a much more robust feature. (…) loyalty programs and offers; customer acquisition and retention instruments.
• 34% of respondents used OTG to check into a location that could have been considered confidential or sensitive to their job.
• Mayor stalking was the surprise motivation for many OTG check ins since they count towards mayorships but don’t display your name associated with the venue.
• Only 15% of users report using OTG to signal a “check out” — leaving a venue and not wanting to publish location out of concern friends will arrive to find you departed.
• 26% of people utilize OTG for repeat check ins at a location over the course of a few days (such as a hotel). These could easily be public but collapsed into a single line. Or subsequent check ins might be public, but not published as alerts.”

Why do I blog this? Simply because we (Lift Lab) are currently conducting a short user study of Foursquare with both lead users and people who abandoned using it after a while. Our approach is much more open-ended and based on visualization of spatial data (such as the one generated with where do you go). The TC data will allow to triangulate our qualitative data with this quantitative insights.

Interface history: d-pad

This succession of Nintendo game platforms reveals the slow evolution of interfaces: from buttons to the d-pad, with the intermediary phase (made of 4 buttons). Designed by Gunpei Yokoi and his team, this feature circulated from these devices to other console afterwards. Material to be used in upcoming work and talk for the game controller project.

What can we learn from the analysis of disorientation?

An excerpt from this presentation by Ruedi Baur:

“We simply allow ourselves to be guided by the system, led by the hand, almost to the point of losing any notion of orientation in the process. So we can fairly easily imagine this future world in which everyone would be systematically guided by his device, connected to the synchronized global network, and gradually lose any sense of natural orientation. It is a matter of everyday observation that being guided considerable reduces our capacity to know where we are and have any spontaneous sense of the route towards our chosen destination. Neither is this phenomenon only connected with satellite navigation technology; more generally, any guidance by a reliable artificial system tends to reduce our capacity to orientate ourselves naturally, that is to interpret what is in front of us in the environment and independently take decisions that would truly enable us to find our way. (…)
What can we learn from disorientation? How can a design project leave room for individual choice? How can we orientate without guiding?“

Why do I blog this? Although the tone here is slightly over-deterministic, I like the design issue that is at stake when creating urban signage (supported by digital and non-digital means). There’s plenty of study about how people orientation but it would be good to grasp the user experience of disorientation… and use it as a starting point to create meaningful systems.

About sailor messages, café and Lift11 in Geneva

I ran across these post-its notes at Café Sport in Horta, Azores. They feature various questions and messages about sailing crew. You want to go to Marseilles? Bermudas? You have certain kinds of skills, help yourself.

These inscriptions are interesting as they show the social importance of certain places where people could access this kind of messages. Sailors know that if they show up at this café, they might meet like-minded people to help them. Life being what it is, social interactions are generally asynchronous, which is nicely supported by the yellow inventions of 3M: post-its notes (printed and folded A4 papers too).

The place enable a sort of filtering: in terms of people who come over here, and in terms of messages that can be exchanged. One of the dream of location-based platform designers (and the social media crowd) is to enable this kind of touchpoint with digital tools. This is by the way a topic we will address at Lift11 in Geneva.

The importance of futility in innovation

Convinced that innovative artifacts always seem futile at first, I am a long-time observer of weird patents or odd pet gear.

A curious article in the IEEE Spectrum entitled “Whimsy and Invention: Why ridiculous inventions are a good thing”, highlights the importance of weird peculiar objects such as “A laser pointer to divert a cat? A plastic sphere of silence, for tête-à-têtes in noisy bars? A rocket belt, for escaping boring tête-à-têtes? An atomic-powered airplane? A life-expectancy watch? An electric spaghetti-twirling fork? A tiny generator of random noise, to secrete in a friend’s office to drive him crazy? An air-bag bodysuit for motorcyclists?“.

The IEEE Spectrum column gives some interesting lessons about all these odd artifacts:

“The more closely you scrutinize the process of invention, the less confident you will be of understanding it. We are told, for instance, that invention typically begins in one person’s exasperation over a defect in the standard way of doing things. Oh, really? Then there must be a great deal of exasperation concerning the care and feeding of pets.
(…)
Again and again this pattern recurs: What begins as a lark develops into a major invention. Remember back when big-iron jockeys dismissed the early personal computers as mere toys? They had a point: The first PCs really were toys. Now, though, PCs and their handheld descendants rule the world. Facebook, begun as a way to keep up with members of the opposite sex on the Harvard campus, is now also poised for world domination.
(…)
We see the reverse pattern as well, when what begins with serious intent devolves into a form of whimsy. Take the antimissile laser: After decades of work and tens of billions of dollars of government funding, the technology has yet to prove itself on the field of battle. Yet substantial aspects of that technology have found application in protecting backyard barbecues from mosquitoes“

SOmething encountered in Lyon few years ago, I have not clue about its use.

Why do I blog this? I sometimes feel a bit lonely when I discuss with clients about the importance of futility in environmental scanning/user research. This kind of arguments (and examples) are very good to show them why it’s relevant to take into account weird innovations.

This discussion echoes with the notion of “needs” and the desperate quest lead by big companies to find “new needs”. Looking for these so-called new needs is not a matter of asking people what they want or asking them what they would crave for. Instead, observing how products and services that may seem futile at first can be adopted, domesticated, appropriated and tweaked for other purposes is a better strategy.

Location-Based Social Media and the automation bias

Reading this blogpost left me wondering about some companies/people that do not understand the notion of “active check-in” on Foursquare (or now Facebook Places). See for yourself: “The active checkin requirement is one thing holding back location-based social networks (also called “geosocial” networks) from widespread adoption. (According to Forrester, only 4% of Internet users have ever used them.)“. It reminds of the opinion about Foursquare stated by this analyst: “It seems like the marketplace has taken a step back 5 years. All of a sudden people seem to be convinced that this kind of technology — where you have to actually remember to tell people where you are — is the best thing since sliced bread. (…) The crucial flaw with FourSquare et al., is that it’s based around manual push notifications.”

For this kind of analyst, an explicit interaction (doing a check-in) is perceived as backward and lame. In engineering circles, this sort of argument is highly common and I would refer to it as the “automation bias“, i.e. the firm belief in automating whatever human activity that can be transferred to computers/machines (which is grounded in strong positivist ideas about progress obviously). The comments I quoted above do not acknowledge the reason why interaction designers have chosen this solution over, say… CellID triangulation or a nearly magical GPS signal detection. Readers here have certainly read my opinion about this topic here, there (or in French). But I think it’s worth repeating the claims here:

1. Of course, decreasing users’ burden is an important adoption factor, I fully acknowledge it. However, automating this can be perceived as a threat by people who feel that they will loose control of their personal data. It can also be problematic for some individuals because this automatic feature will make explicit situations they don’t want to make public. Technologies should be “conservative of face” as described by Adam Greenfield some time ago: wherever possible they not unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate, or shame their users. See for example this comment in the original Mashable blogpost: “I go places that I am not always proud of (think Waffle House at 2:30am) and at that point (think less than sober) I can see myself forgetting to turn the auto check-in off. (…) there has to be a better way for it not to be obtrusive, but still controlled.“. Letting people doing manual check-in is more respectful of people’s habits and, above all, it enable people to lie (which has always been a good adoption factor). This is why the proposition to have an intermediary solution is interesting: “ the app would have some sort of pop up/notification that lets you know you are in a check-in-able location“
2. What is showed in my research: self-reporting one’s location has a value in itself. Declaring your whereabouts is not just a piece of information, there is also an intention attached to it. Say I’m in a Bar and the name of this place is sent to my colleague, it’s both a statement about where I am and an act of communication that tells others that they can act upon this information (to draw inferences about my availability or my willingness to interact socially for example).

Having said that, the problem is not about the manual check-in but instead, it’s about the extent to which people use this feature. I know “checkin fatigue” is important… but doing it manually means that the place where people check-in are more meaningful to others… since Foursquare removed the leaderboards (and hence the incentive to gain as many points as you can), users I have interviewed said that they stopped checking-in everywhere (supermarkets…) and only made their position available when they wanted to meet others or access to certain information. I am curious about this and we are currently launching a user study of Foursquare to understand this kind of issue.

Protected design: no pictures, no copy

A sign encountered at the airport in Lisboa, issued by the Centro Portugues de Design displayed next to different pieces of portuguese artifacts (jewelry, pottery, food).

And yes, I’m back to the office.