Are you interested in mobile devices or maps or both?
Do you like the idea of helping a few fellow students understand how students new to an area could share annotated maps and location traces?

If you are interested, and are going to be in Ann Arbor from September 8th – September 12th, choose times to meet with us and send us an email, bcx@umich.edu. Most of our interviews will take place in 405B, with some exceptions, after you signup we will tell you which room to meet us in.

Study Information:
Recent technological advances in collaborative map creation have made it much easier for end users to create and share annotated maps. End users are now able to attach metadata to latitude and longitude coordinates and have this data overlaid on maps. For example, tools such as Google maps allow anyone to build annotated maps to share with their friends. We believe that advances in mobile technology will make the creation of annotated maps almost effortless, and wish to understand the potential sociality around these maps.

We are interested in both how students view maps created by others, and how they create their own annotated maps, including the features they choose to highlight and the aspects of their maps they would like to share with others.

This is a relatively quick preliminary study, and thus it shouldn’t take up very much of your time. You will view about 7 maps created by other students, and will be asked questions about what you can learn about each student from viewing their maps. Then, you will complete your own map and  discuss the creation process with the experimenter. Finally the map you created will be posted publicly in the student lounge.