This or That

Mobile social shopping

Mobile experience, Mobile Social Software, Social Shopping
Barcelona (ES) / MIT, July - November 2008

Mobile technology presents a range of new opportunities for bringing online human interaction into the physical world. One way to do this is in the context of shopping, where technology can allow buyers to connect with one another, enhancing the social nature of the shopping experience. The MIT Mobile Experience Laboratory, in collaboration with Telefonica - Investigacion y Desarrollo (R&D), explored how the combination of social networks, location-based systems, instant blogging, emerging user experiences and ubiquitous computing can enable the next-generation of mobile-commerce applications.

Brief / Concept

Using This or That, a shopper faced with a buying decision, can quickly take photos of the different options, add descriptions, select a group of experts out of own social network, set a short time duration and send the notification to the selected group. Each of these personal opinion leaders receive notification and can log into the application to check the option the shopper proposes, rank them and leave their opinion. At the end of the poll duration, the shopper is notified with the tallied results of all the friends' opinions.

This or That is composed of five different systems that work together to build a robust application. A Facebook integration system allows users to tie the application directly to their personal Facebook account and allows the application to leverage the data available from Facebook, including user’s connections on Facebook (1). A reputation system allows users to group their Facebook friends according to their expertise and manages each group member’s relevance and reputation within each group (2). The polling and notification system handles the creation and dispatching of polls within the system. This system keeps track of creation and expiration times of individual polls and sends notifications to group members and also to the poll creator(3). An election calculation engine tallies all of the votes received for a poll and calculates the winning option (4). Finally, the iPhone communication layer manages the exchange of data between the device and the Web application when a new poll is created or when the final results of a completed poll are available (5).

Design Process

The research area was defined during a workshop held at Telefonica R&D headquarters in Barcelona. The following concept generation phase focused on this topic to figure out opportunities in the mobile social softwares combining the usage of iPhone and Facebook. Wireframes were afterwards designed to discuss the interactions and the overall service design. During this phase, an ad-hoc reputation system was implemented to rank the users’ participation and to individuate opinion leaders for each personal topic of interest. Accordingly, quality feedback that are useful for the final decision-making process are awarded in the reputation system.

An advanced prototype was deployed in November 2008 and tested through interviews and ethnographies in Madrid and Barcelona.