Our Three Good Things application (3GT) is based on a positive psychology exercise that encourages people to record three good things that happen to them, as well as the reasons why they happened. By focusing on the positive, rather than dwelling on the negative, it is believed that people can train themselves to be happier.

Example 3GT tag clouds

Limited success for Word Clouds

When we interviewed 3GT users, we expected to find that the participants believed the word clouds helped them notice and reinforce trends in their good things. Results here were mixed. Only one participant we interviewed described how the combination of listing reasons and seeing them summarized in the word clouds had helped her own reflection:

“You’ve got tags that show up, like tag clouds on the side, and it kind of pulls out the themes… as I was putting the reasoning behind why certain [good] things would happen, I started to see another aspect of a particular individual in my life. And so I found it very fascinating that I had pulled out that information… it’s made me more receptive to that person, and to that relationship.”

A second participant liked the word cloud but was not completely convinced of its utility:

I like having the word cloud. I noticed that the biggest thing in my reason words is “cat”. (Laughs). And the top good words isn’t quite as helpful, because I’ve written a lot of things like ‘great’ and ‘enjoying’ – evidently I’ve written these things a lot of times. So it’s not quite as helpful. But it’s got ‘cat’ pretty good there, and ‘morning’, and I’m not sure if that’s because I’ve had a lot of good mornings, or I tend to write about things in the morning.

Another participant who had examined the word cloud noticed that “people” was the largest tag in his good things cloud and “liked that… [his] happiness comes from interaction with people,” but that he did not think that this realization had any influence over his behavior outside of the application.

One participant reported looking at the word clouds shortly after beginning to post. The words selected did not feel representative of the good things or reasons he had posted, and feeling that they were “useless,” he stopped looking at them. He did say that he could imagine it “maybe” being useful as the words evolved over time, and later in the interview revisited one of the items in the word cloud: “you know the fact that it says ‘I’m’ as the biggest word is probably good – it shows that I’m giving myself some credit for these good things happening, and that’s good,” but this level of reflection was prompted by the interview, not day-to-day use of 3GT.

Another participant did not understand that word size in the word cloud was determined by frequency of usage and was even more negative:

It was like you had taken random words that I’ve typed, and some of them have gotten bigger. But I couldn’t see any reason why some of them would be bigger than the other ones. I couldn’t see a pattern to it. It was sort of weird… Some of the words are odd words… And then under the Reason words, it’s like they’ve put together some random words that make no sense.

Word clouds did sometimes help in ways that we had not anticipated. Though participants did not find that they helped them identify trends that would influence future decisions, looking at the word cloud from her good things helped at least one participant’s mood.

I remember ‘dissertation’ was a big thing, because for a while I was really gunning on my dissertation, and it was going so well, the proposal was going well with a first draft and everything. So that was really cool, to be able to document that and see… I can see how that would be really useful for when I get into a funk about not being able to be as productive as I was during that time… I like the ‘good’ words. They make me feel, I feel very good about them.

More work?

The importance of supporting reflection has been discussed in the original work on Three Good Things, as well as in other work that has shown how systems that support effective self-reflection can improve users’ ability to adopt positive behaviors as well as increase their feelings of self-efficacy. While some users found benefit in word clouds to assist reflection, a larger portion did not notice them or found them unhelpful. More explanation should be provided about how word clouds are generated to avoid confusion. They should also perhaps not be shown until a participant has entered a sufficient amount of data. To help participants better notice trends, improved stop-wording might be used, as well as detecting n-grams (e.g. “didn’t smoke” versus “smoke”) and grouping of similar terms (e.g., combining “bread” and “pork” into “food”). Alternatively, a different kind of reflection exercise might be more effective, one where participants are asked to review their three good things posts and write a longer summary of the trends they have noticed.

Navigation to Apps
Formerly, the application dock made it easy to access an application from anywhere in Facebook. One click to get to a bookmarked application; two clicks (without waiting for page loads) to get to other applications. In the new homepage, this has been removed.

Not so with the new design. If an application doesn’t have a tab on your profile page, the only way to access it is from the home page. From my profile or someone else’s profile, this means: click to the Facebook home page, wait for the page to load, click the app icon (or, if the application is not one of your top three book marks, click more and then click the app icon). Yes, this is only one more click, but it requires waiting for an entire page load, and it’s worse for non-bookmarked apps: one click to the home page, wait for it to load, one click to the application dashboard, wait for it to load, one click for “see all of your applications,” wait for that to load, and finally click on the application.

One possible remedy might be to add an “applications” drop-down next to the new notifications, requests, and messages icons.

Notifications
At the end of the month, Facebook will turn off the ability of applications to send notifications. This is a method I’ve been using to send reminders in Three Good Things, for both automatically generated reminders and user-to-user reminders.

3GT Notifications. Left: system generated reminder. Right: user-to-user reminder.

I understand that notifications have gotten a lot more intrusive with the addition of push notifications to the iPhone app, and that some app developers have used them more than some Facebook users would prefer. Facebook has also added additional integration points. On the balance, though, I think notifications are going to be an unfortunate integration point to lose.

Application Privacy
Along with some others building health and wellness applications for the Facebook platform, I’ve felt fairly strongly that Facebook needs to give users and developers enhanced privacy controls for applications. At a minimum, this should include the ability to hide one’s use of an application from friends (i.e., not appearing under “friends using this application” in the application’s profile page).

With the recent updates Facebook’s designers and developers appear to have recognized some of these concerns. Application developers are able to set an application as “private,” causing one’s use to not appear in the new application dashboard. This is a good start, but it feels incomplete for a number of reasons. First, users, not developers, should have control of privacy. What’s to stop a developer from later reverting to a more public setting, instantly and completely changing what user activity is revealed? Currently, users do not have any way to remove this information once it appears, either.

Second, this level of privacy does not extend far enough. Friends who use private applications still appear on the application’s profile page under “friends using this application.” Furthermore, the model of application use and content being either private or public is insufficient. In health and wellness applications, for example, participants may benefit from sharing and interacting with other participants in the intervention as well as their friends or family members on Facebook, while also wanting to keep their activity private from coworkers.

This is something that Facebook has already discovered and addressed with the newsfeed (now stream) content, but application content does not enjoy the same privacy controls. To share with only a subset of one’s friends within an application, however, application developers must implement their own social graph features and users must built a second network within the application. Enabling privacy controls similar to those for the newsfeed for application content and use could help people to feel more comfortable using health wellness applications on Facebook while creating more possibilities for designers. A user could only allow an application to be aware of relationships in one or more friend lists or networks, or to select some to exclude from the application while allowing the other connections to remain visible. Assuming a user had created the necessary friend lists or that their privacy preferences mapped to their networks, this would allow someone to filter out their coworkers or to allow only close friends to see their participation.

Update: As of 17 February, Facebook has added a privacy argument to calls for publishing methods (e.g. Stream.publish that gives applications much more control over shared content.

Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.

I think there’s an important corollary: adding more features and content types to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.

Recent concerns about Beacon are one example. Yes, the privacy issues of an opt-out tool that follows you around from site to site recording your behavior are huge. But there’s also the issue of having this content added to the Facebook at all. Even among my close friends, I don’t want a list of their recent purchases. It’s not something we do in person, and it’s not something I want to do online. A site, though, can cause the same problem by adding content that I share with some people, but not necessarily my current friends. Facebook users presumably friend each other based on the norms for sharing the content that existed on Facebook at the time, adding more content or just changing how Facebook shares the content already there can cause some problems. Some of the content Beacon tried to so forcefully share isn’t that much different than if LinkedIn suddenly started sharing relationship status: you don’t want software deciding to re-purpose one set of social ties into another. For now, Facebook is handling this challenge with extremely fine-grained privacy controls, but that’s a lot of overhead.

The de-placing of facebook
When Facebook was smaller and the bounds were clearer, users had less need of the privacy settings. Two years ago, I had a pretty clear distinction in my head. Facebook was for some social communication and sharing among my college friends and some friends from high school. It had a clear identity, and felt either like a place or very connected to my school as place. I knew who I would “run into” on Facebook, and I knew that the content would be related to college students’ self-expression, communication, and socialization. Within the bounds, it was possible to identify a fairly consistent set of behaviors and information that members were willing to share with each other. Not so anymore. As Facebook adds users and features, it undermines this sense of place. Anyone, including the creepy ex-coworker, might show up. With new features and new applications, I am also less able to anticipate Facebook’s content.

I’m not necessarily criticizing Facebook’s decision to reduce their placiness. Its leadership has decided to trade some of the sense of place for growth, instead becoming an application platform and contact/identity management system. That’s their gamble to take, but I am critical that they seem to be moving in this direction without clearly thinking through some of the consequences for their members.

Other examples of repurposing contacts
Facebook isn’t the only company that has recently re-purposed existing social network information to share additional content. This December, if you use Google Reader and GTalk, Google decided to share all of your shared RSS feed items with all of your GTalk contacts. Your GTalk contacts were already being added to from people you email, so for many users, this exposed their shared items to many people they’d emailed a few times. This decision seems to be based on the incredibly naïve assumption that if you share content with some people, you want to share it with everyone you email. One user reported that this “ruined Christmas.”

Unforunately, as Google and Yahoo increasingly leverage our inboxes to compete with Facebook, we can probably look forward to more of the missteps.

Pursuit of places
I do think it’s possible to grow while keeping a distinct sense of place. After purchasing Flickr, del.icio.us, and upcoming, Yahoo! kept their contact lists separate and retained the identity of each property. Some would probably criticize Yahoo! for not integrating their brand, but I think that time will show they’ve made the right choice. It’s also true that managing the separate contact lists is very similar to the overhead of Facebook’s privacy settings, but there are a some key differences: managing your Flickr contacts does not interfere with the sense of Flickr as a bounded place, and you can (at least currently) be reasonably comfortable that Flickr is not going to repurpose your Flickr contacts outside of the social norms for Flickr users.

This also makes me believe that social startups like dopplr and others can succeed by creating a clear identity as a place. Even if Facebook offered better features (and perhaps more convenience) for sharing my travel status and tips with others, I’d still seek out Dopplr for its characteristics as a space — it’s a much more pleasant experience.

Anthropologist Ken Erickson explores the world of FAA and Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) regulations in the design of Boeing airplanes accessible to people with physical disabilities. He addresses how interdisciplinary teams handle the conflicts between the ethos of citizen-centered designing and formal government regulation.

Ken’s company, Pacific Ethnography, did some work with my group on universal cabin design.

On a mostly unrelated note, a profile of my workgroup appeared in this month’s Frontiers (pdf).

Specific numbers of people, dates, and times are never shown. These features would increase the cognitive load on pedestrians, while we intend this service – once people become accustomed to it – to blend into the background and become a moving, changing part of the cityscape. Our goal is not to guide people to a specific path, but to highlight flows at a pedestrian’s given location. In doing so, we restore the idea of “the beaten path” to urban landscapes – something that has largely been lost with permanent, paved pedestrian ways. It is up to you to decide whether to stick with the crowds or see what lies in less frequented areas.

Explore the WalkOn presentation (Flash). The other projects in the class are worth a look too.

Inspired loosely by Steven Johnson’s work Everything Bad is Good for You, we began thinking about intermixing the ideas of place and people markup with play. This led to imagining a game in which you tag other people. If tag from two strangers match, aside from some stopwords, within a certain range of time and place, each player might get points.

The idea of being tagged by strangers ultimately feeds into peoples’ curiosity of what others think about them. This became our focus for the project, which we are calling Mirror. We built in anticipation (you can only check how you’ve been tagged once per day) and ambiguity (tags, for you, are only localized to the resolution of a cell tower). You can only be tagged by people who are not in your social network.

These tags also build identities for places. Imagine a space that displays the way people currently in it have been tagged — reflecting its current occupants. Browse a map that shows the way people have been tagged in a neighborhood. We also imagine games, such as scavenger hunts in which the goal is to go out and get tagged in certain ways.

We tell show some of the possibilities in the above storyboard. There is another write up on the project’s page, as well as (an admittedly hand-wavy) tech/design explanation (pdf).

We actually believe that such a product could be bad for both you and community in general, but that doesn’t stop it from being fun to think about.

As Ducheneaut observes, the café is a lot like the WoW experience. People are surrounded by background chatter and social interaction, even if they choose not to participate. The person who checks email at Starbucks did not attribute his behavior to seeking an environment, but instead to seeking serendipitous social interaction even though he does not actually experience this interaction when he goes to Starbucks. I am curious about how broadly this applies, and if it is generalizable to experiences like WoW.

There is also another potential distinction linked to the split between what the person says he is seeking (social interaction) and what he gets (a social environment). For most visitors (or is it most locations?), Starbucks does not meet Oldenburg’s criteria for a third space. In a “true” third space, the person’s expectation of serendipitous social interaction would not be unreasonable. Working backwards through the analogies (perhaps more than is reasonable), Ducheneaut et al’s work on the limits of sociability in WoW may bound or even push back against Steinkuehler and Williams’s persuasive argument that WoW is a third space.

The inside of an airplane is not the same and currently has more in common with Marc Augé’s description of non-spaces. People are not transiting airports and flying for the experience of being confined with 300 neighbors. Yet the people environment is similar, as are many of the things that people do in cafés and airplanes: read, consume beverages and small amounts of food, watch movies, listen to music, and catch up on work on paper or on laptops. In the economy section of an airplane, the people are too close, while in the coffee house people seek out others’ presence.

The media, though, is being used in part for different reasons. At Starbucks, it might be to relax or to get things done. This is true on the plane, sure, but it is also an escape from the environment. This is not a new observation, but bears repeating. Both sorts experiences suggest, though, that virtual realities are no more likely than truly virtual communities — more and more day to day situations are becoming intermingled, hybrid experiences. As hybrid environments become more prevalent and in more mundane settings, the design possibilities start to get exciting.