Granularities of User Experience in Ubicomp

In Mike Kuniavsky inspires himself from PARC’s inch/foot/yard scale to come up with a user-centered hierarchy for which we can design and then assign a term to. :

If you look at the articles in the Ubicomp conference proceedings, you’ll find them dominated by location sensing and tracking. Clearly, ubicomp is still about figuring where you are in a space. But what happens when you’ve done that? What happens to designing the user experience when you know location?
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My goal is to create a user-centered hierarchy (rather than hardware-centric) as a way of talking about the perceived effects of ubiquitous computing technologies. In other words, this is an attempt to talk (roughly) about end users’ radius of focus in the moment as a way to design for that moment.

In his Granularities of User Experience in Ubicomp, Mike focuses on the tangible and more physical aspect of ubicomp. My work has a similar user-centered approach on how ubiquitous technologies are perceived and how to design according to their granularity. One of my research question is “how certain do positional and tracking systems have to be in order to be useful and acceptable?”. Today, I ran a small experiment on Flickr’s map service. Each geotagged image has a related accuracy representing the level of granularity in which the user located the image on the map. Results show my and my contact’s use of the accuracy.

My use of “accuracy” in Flickr’s geotagging service

The use of “accuracy” by my contacts

Relation to my thesis: Investigating the use of granularity in spatial annotation, being inspired by Mike’s Granularities of User Experience.