Bridging the gap

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i

BRIDGING THE GAP

by

Evan Sforza

A Thesis Paper Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC SCHOOL OF CINEMATIC ARTS
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF FINE ARTS
(INTERACTIVE MEDIA)

August, 2013

Copyright 2013 Evan Sforza

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures iii

Abstract 1

Introduction 2

Concept Overview and Objective 6

Messaging 10

Leveling and Experience 15

Prior Art 20

User Experience Description 28

Avenues for Further Research 34

Conclusion 36

Bibliography 37

iii

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Propagate’s Dark UI Style 9

Figure 2: Map Grid 11

Figure 3: Growing Ping Range and Experience Bar 16

Figure 4: The Six Ping Type Symbols 18

Figure 5: Highlight Application 22

Figure 6: Bump API 23

Figure 7: Banjo Application 24

Figure 8: What’s Shakin’ Application 26

Figure 9: Letterpress 31

Figure 10: Facebook Feedback 32

Figure 11: Message Viral View 33

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ABSTRACT

We live less than twenty feet away from many people but often know nothing
about them, yet, at the same time, we are continually connected – continually
plugged into the net, and, often, looking down into our screens. This paper dives
into the design process of a location based application called Propagate and the
methodology of taking cues from the physical world – how objects with mass and
heft – something tangible – can inform the design of virtual objects that are so
vital in the ecosystem of our civilization: messages.

2

INTRODUCTION

Social networks aren't new; they've been in existence long before even
the earliest ancestral specimens labeled paleontologically with the 'homo' prefix,
and their importance is undeniable. They've enabled not only our ancestors, but
any form or flock of social life to better preserve themselves, and this is the case
for even the various kinds of cells that make up who we are. The collaboration
between the various cells of our body, combining to form a higher order organism
that looks out for its own well being is what enabled this collection of cells to
persist – to survive in an environment such as ours - this one here on Earth. We
don't only utilize and exist within social networks; we are social networks.
The phrase is buzzing around today’s blogosphere, but just what is a
social network anyway? In today’s society, when one hears the term ‘social
network,’ they’ll often immediately think of or associate it with a tool that allows
for the connections of a social network to be more comprehensible, more tactile –
their data more indexed and visualized. The best-known examples are tools like
Facebook
1
, Twitter
2
, Instagram
3
, or LinkedIn
4
. They provide us with friend lists,
connection lists, and instant messaging, but the most important and defining
aspect of any social network are its nodes.
In the case of modern, electronic driven social networks, these nodes are
man machine hybrids – human beings coherent with an interface capable of

1

Facebook
-‐
www.Facebook.com

2

Twitter
–
www.Twitter.com

3

Instagram
–
www.Instagram.com

4

LinkedIn
–
www.LinkedIn.com

3

accepting input and providing relevant output; in our case: smartphones, tablets,
and laptops. But, as noted in the opening, social networks (SNs) aren’t
dependent on modern technology, only augmented. SNs rely on organisms being
able to transfer and exchange information; this is what they are fundamentally:
systems of communication between points of varying levels of intelligence. It
should be noted that they aren’t anthropocentric; crickets with their chirping, birds
with their tweeting, whales with their song, and monkeys with their howling all
form SNs.
Given the drive of organisms and their genes to survive the cold and
indiscriminate harness of primitive environments, it becomes clear why being part
of a SN can be beneficial to survival and the propagation of a species; biological
beings rely on everything their sense organs tell them in order to best
comprehend and internalize their environment, but biological bodies are
physically local; the information readily available to a nervous system only
extends so far. This is where the communication channels present in a SN allow
for the single organism to essentially extend the reach of its sense organs. The
other nodes – other organisms of the network – could be situated at different
locations of the environment, and, should one find food or see a threat, it could
relay that information into the network, usually through sound, allowing the
information to propagate to the other nodes – the other individuals. This enables
these spatially separate beings to respond accordingly to the newly shared
information and react as if they had sensed it themselves.

4

Human networks are no different; before modern civilization, we would
utilize various communication methods like voice, or the African talking drums, or
Morse code to deliver messages at speeds faster than we were capable of
moving our bodies. The further back we go, the more the knowledge transmitted
had to deal with sustenance and survival, but, now, as we’ve come into a period
of time where not dying has been made relatively easy for us, we are free to
utilize the channels of communication for recreation and entertainment. Though
much of what we need is easy to obtain, there is still a great deal of things we
want.
This is the state of modern, computer supported social networks: people
staying in touch with those they care about, or tapping into those that interest
them, sharing bits and fragments of their lives for the world to take part in; people
searching the net for love, objects, and food. Corporations do the same; like
organisms in themselves, they search for corporate relationships and sustenance
in the form of income by dispersing information about their existence into the net.
The desktop/laptop in tandem with browsers allows for and engenders these
kinds of interactions, but only recently has mobile computing become so
ubiquitous and integrated into our daily lives and habits.
Now, with the advent of mobile, many of the social tools that had started
out designed for browsers have trickled their way onto these new devices.
Facebook and Twitter now both offer mobile versions of their applications, and, in
the case of Facebook, they’re actually generating more traffic and usage through

5

their mobile device than they are through their browser experience
5
. But,
Facebook wasn’t designed with mobility and location in mind, nor was Twitter.
Although these services function just fine spatially agnostic, they have started to
offer some location based functionality. The only problem is, with them, location
feels like an afterthought – mechanics tacked on for the sake of having it.

5

http://www.cnet.com.au/facebook-‐has-‐more-‐mobile-‐users-‐than-‐desktop-‐339343163.htm

6

CONCEPT OVERVIEW AND OBJECTIVE

My project attempts to enter into a space not greatly explored yet in the
realm of consumer based mobile applications – that of location based
communication. Although there have been other applications that have made
forays into the space – apps like Banjo
6
, Whatshakin’
7
, Bubbleme
8
, Badoo
9
,
Highlight
10
, and LocalMind.
11
The list is still small. While my project is location
based, it also attempts to change the mechanics of messaging itself.
The name of my project is Propagate, and its aim is be a location based
messaging/awareness application for iOS. It seeks to help users discover what’s
going on right here right now, enable the already present physical communities
we are nestled within to generate higher levels of coherence, and, most
importantly, enable users to have fun creating and spreading content through the
network.
Some have asked, “why local?” to which I’ve responded that our bodies
haven’t obsolesced just yet. We are still dependent on our biology that,
ultimately, must continue to be maintained and nourished. We still inhabit
physical spaces, and even though online virtual communities and arenas are
becoming more commonplace, there are still many of us who extract meaningful
amounts of pleasure from being out between the bark of trees, or treading along

6

Banjo
App
-‐
http://ban.jo/

7

Whatshakin’
App
–
www.whatshakin.net

8

Bubble
Me
–
www.getbubbleme.com

9

Badoo
–
www.badoo.com

10

Highlight
-‐
http://highlig.ht/about.html

11

Localmind
–
www.localmind.com

7

the hand laid tiles of some historic part of town. We go out to events; we meet
people in person; we seek out interesting spaces and delicious food.
Given that networks – especially social ones – cannot exist without lines of
communication between the nodes, Propagate is, to some degree, an attempt at
bolstering the connections between nodes already present in the spaces we
inhabit. The nodes are all there – people in their rooms of an apartment building
or in a mall or at a concert, and so are the connections; people could, in theory
connect to anyone physically local to them through the internet, but, more often
that not, the line drawn from one individual to the next would be complex and
circuitous. Propagate hopes to both simplify and realize that line, making it direct
and actual.
An additional objective of Propagate’s is to allow for networks – graphs to
emerge and dissolve somewhat spontaneously. Let us take for example a
popular musician having an outdoor concert. Anyone within the audience using
Propagate is essentially entered into a communication space with people that
are, to a certain extent, like minded, or, at least, people that have a point of
overlap – their interest in the same musician. It is as if an ephemeral chat room
comes into being whenever a group of people happens to be at a location for the
same purpose. When they leave, the location’s chatter normalizes back to what it
was before the event.
In terms of audience, Propagate is targeted at primarily high school and
college students, but only because schools create dense communities of people
that are, more often than not, spatially local to one another. Ultimately,

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Propagate’s intended use is by anyone at a location with a dense enough
population. This could be a popular store, event, apartment complex, or
neighborhood.
The project has a few facets that make it unique when compared to other
social networks in existence, elements like its user progression and leveling
system, unlockable message types, message visualization, and its user interface.
Propagate’s user interface shies away from some of the more common
design patterns visible in many of today’s iOS applications. Instead of going with
a light or white interface, or an interface aimed at simulating paper or stationary,
Propagate uses a dark interface, near black backgrounds overlaid with vibrant
colors.
Light text on dark backgrounds versus dark text on light backgrounds has
been a point of debate for some time in the field of design. There are a multitude
of web sites and design blogs arguing for and against either. So, to a certain
extent, the choice to go with a dark interface was purely aesthetic. But, as one of
the contributors to the website uxmovement.com writes, a deciding factor could
be whether or not consumers of your content will primarily be reading or
scanning. Reading, the writer defined, “involves focusing on words for a thorough
comprehension of the subject.”
12
He argued that dark text on a light background
was better for reading, but, given that interfaces are rarely read to be
comprehended as if one were reading a book, it seemed safe to maintain a dark
interface for the app.

12

http://uxmovement.com/content/when-to-use-white-text-on-a-dark-background/

9

Figure 1: Propagate’s Dark UI Style

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Messaging

Pings are to Propagate what tweets are to Twitter and what posts are to
Facebook; they are the primary messages transmitted throughout the network,
except, where tweets and posts come in only one flavor, Pings do not; they come
in six.
The reason for this variety is to tailor to one of Propagate’s goals, which is
to encourage user progression and provide users with new content as they
continue to use the service. Someone who has been using the system longer will
have an expanded breadth of features available to him or her relative to
someone who recently created an account. The same way that users value their
character in a role playing game, something like World of Warcraft, we want
people to value their Propagate account.
Apart from account value, we knew having an assortment of pings, each
functioning in a slightly different manner, would provide users with interesting
choices when preparing to send a message or some content out into the world.
In every other content sharing social network, you go through the same process
for every single message you hope to send out; this is because the other
networks only offer one kind. With Propagate, we’d like for users to think about
which species of message could potentially best serve the kind of information
they are trying to spread. Leigh Alexander, a gaming and social media culture
journalist writes about a player’s sense of value. By adding “stuff” – items with
economic value can, more often than not, strengthens a player’s perception of

11

value in their experience
13
. It may seem superficial, but many of us could just
look around in our physical lives and just see a bunch of ‘stuff.’ In our rooms and
our office desks, we collect a lot of things. For many, it is fun; things can be
rewarding and things can act as external sites of our memory. There’s a reason
objects can take on ‘sentimental value.’
Pings, and their various types, have value within Propagate because of
their associated cost. Certain Pings require more resources than others. We are
hoping users place more value on the content they put into the system when they
have to spend some of their earned resources in order to disseminate it. We
believe this could lead to an increase in the quality of content overall.
In order to determine how Pings move through Propagate’s network, we
break the world up into a spatial grid, much like the latitude and longitude grid.
Each of the various Pings spread out and affects the grid in its own unique way.
We believe this uniqueness between each of the Pings will allow for each to
serve as the optimal transmitter for certain kinds of content or information.

Figure 2: Map Grid

13

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/181331/The_immense_responsibility_of_creating_value_for_players.
php#.UT_-HNE_mnA

12

During one of our user tests, we had explained each of the various Ping
types and made them available to the tester (in theory; the service was still not
mature enough to allow for real functionality). Instead of relying on the tester to
come up with something to say, we had created a stack of cards of content
people may want to say to their local community.
The cards included things like announcing an open house party, a picture
of a cute puppy, a photo of a “nearby” lake, a comment on the quality of a cup of
coffee from a local coffee shop, a statement about marriage equality, a note
expressing sympathy for those who lost their homes in hurricane Sandy, an invite
for artists to come to live model session, and an audio clip of someone singing.
We asked the tester to draw a random card from the stack and tell us how they
would go about disseminating the message – what kind of Ping would they use.
We were pleasantly surprised after they had expressed their enjoyment in
deciding which Ping type to use to send out their message and that they had felt
some Pings would obviously serve a certain idea or piece of content much better
than others. Of course, this was only the feedback from a handful of individuals;
we still need to see how a larger group responds to having such choices.
To demonstrate more intimately how some of the Pings work: when a user
creates a Normal Ping, Propagate determines which grid location the user is at
and fixes their message to that grid square. Any other users that load up and
examine their own Nearby Feed, the page that shows what messages are locally

13

present, could potentially see the content. Similar to Facebook likes and shares
or Twitter’s retweets, Propagate allows users to ‘propagate’ a message. This
moves the message into the surrounding grid, allowing the content to spread like
liquid spilled on cloth.
Another Ping type within Propagate is called a Ping Strike. With Ping
Strikes, as opposed to originating at the location of the user and spreading from
there, the user can select a grid location on the map and send their message to
that location directly. This has application for businesses trying to increase
awareness of their brand in competing locations or for people looking to express
their empathy to victims of a local tragedy. In testing our paper prototypes, users
were, at first blush, excited to have an option like this available, although, due to
the sheer number of available locations to drop their message, there was a bit of
a paralysis in the decision making process. Psychologist Barry Schwartz talks
about ‘the paradox of choice’ – how having too many options available to us
could be detrimental.
14
Before assigning any drastic changes to the functionality
of Ping Strikes, we want to test the application with a sizeable number of users,
preferably some number above fifty. This is something we are still working
towards achieving.
We expect, given the options users will have for creating messages,
people will gain a larger sense of reward when a message gains feedback,
traction, and response from others. It provides a simple reward and opens the
possibility for them thinking that they had made the best choice for how to best to
disseminate their content. Making decisions and witnessing its repercussions are

14

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

14

a pivotal element to any form of interactive media. As mentioned in the book
Game Design Workshop, “”Games are a series of interesting choices.” If the
choices have consequences, then they are interesting. If not, then they are
merely a distraction.”
15
They enable us to feel a sense of reward; we make a
decision, and, if it was the right one, we feel positive about ourselves – we did
something right – we made the best choice, and, in that correct decision, we’ve
brought ourselves closer to understanding the whole of the system. The common
and popular social networks in existence today only allow for a portion of this
feedback, simply that you are able to see if something you have said has been
retweeted or liked, but the only decision point for the user is to create the
message or not.

15

Game
Design
Workshop

15

LEVELING AND EXPERIENCE

Although designed around multiple Ping (message) types, not all of them
will be available at the start of a user’s foray into Propagate. User progression
systems have been in use for a long time; their effectiveness is beyond the stage
of testing for effectiveness.
Having goals set at our horizons is an important motivational factor in not
only games and software, but in our physical, biological lives, and it’s the triumph
and accomplishment of these goals that make those dopamine channels in our
brain buzz to life and provide us with a sense of reward
16
. These
accomplishments, when stored and recorded onto an account, help strengthen a
user’s attachment to that account – their profile. The time they have invested into
building their profile is inscribed into stat numbers or an experience bar or the
available options at their disposal. They can serve as continual reminders to the
user about their spent effort.

16

www.psychologyofgames.com/tag/dopamine

16

Figure 3: Growing Ping Range and Experience Bar

Propagate has two main ways to earn experience: the first is by having
Pings you send out earn propagates. Each user deciding to propagate your
content earns you an experience point. So, if you push content into the network
that other users think is worth spreading, you will be rewarded. Additionally,
Propagate has a missions system – providing additional boons to experience. A
list of what the user can strive for and accomplish can be found on missions
page. Example missions are: creating fifty normal pings, or creating a ping that
spreads at least twenty five miles from its origin, or adding ten friends.
The missions are designed to get people to use all the mechanics of the
application. Accomplishing these will provide extra experience points that bring
users closer to the next level, and, upon gaining a new level, there are three
things that could happen. The first is that users will gain an increase to their
ping/propagation range. This indicates how many squares of the world grid their
message fills at first transmission of a ping. This range is also the same for when
they propagate others’ messages. What this does is not only allow for users to

17

value their personal account but to be valued by other users within the
community. There is an analog of this in Twitter: people with many followers are
seen as valuable to anyone looking to disseminate a message. If one can
convince a user with a substantial amount of followers to retweet a message,
then their message just went out to a much larger subset of users. The design
goal is to allow symbiotic relationships to form between regular users and local
advertisers. Not unlike how Foursquare or Yelp offer promotions at locations you
‘check into,’ we will encourage companies to offer things to users of a high level
who either create a ping about the venue or propagate some content originated
by the venue. EG: a user gets a dollar off their meal if they propagate something
about the venue while level five, but two dollars off if they’re level ten. We expect
that, with this system, users speak about the content in person as well, asking
their friends and each other for help propagating their message out into the
world.
The second thing users stand to garner from leveling up is the ability to
use new types of pings, each with the ability to affect the grid in a unique way.
The five unlockable pings are spread throughout the range of achievable levels.

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Figure 4: The Six Ping Type Symbols

The third and final element users can earn from a level acquisition is an
increase to their maximum ‘props’ (pR).
Props are Propagate’s internal energy/currency system. It’s designed to
restrict spamming as well as to restrict users’ ability to create the more powerful
pings too often. Each of the six ping types has an associated prop cost. These
currently range between one and one hundred twenty five. In addition to the
experience point earned from a propagation, users will also earn a prop that can
later be spent on sending out new pings. This also serves as another means of
incentivizing users to push worthwhile content into the network – the more
‘infective’ content one shares, the more one can create.
User progression and currency systems have been successfully utilized
within social networking applications before; Foursquare
17
considers users the
‘mayor’ of a venue or building if they have the most check-ins out of everyone
that had checked into that location. What is valuable about their system is that it
does not require one to change much about your daily routine. If you frequent a
coffee shop often, all you need to do is load the app up and hit a button. There is

17

Foursquare
–
https://foursquare.com

19

also another, more obscure service called Empire Avenue. It has a currency
called ‘Eaves,’ and users can offer some amount of Eaves to others in exchange
for helping their content percolate into the panoply of social networks. For
instance, I could earn five thousand Eaves for following someone on Twitter and
retweeting one of his messages. These two examples never really affect much
about the user’s experience of the service; essentially, the service remains static;
it offers them the same options throughout their entire time engaged with it. We
want what Propagate has to offer users to be dynamic – to grow and evolve with
the user, like how new game content becomes available to MMO players as they
level up their characters. There’s no reason why a social network can’t employ
the same feedback.
Propagate aims to reward users with benefits that have real-world
significance, things that affect their ability to be social – their ability to spread
content. To foster these rewards, the user experience is built around a leveling
system; similar to many roleplaying games, if you earn enough experience doing
certain actions you are thrust upwards in rank to the next level, with each level
bringing you new powers and abilities.

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PRIOR ART

As mentioned earlier, networks are inherently social, but only now, with
the advent of modern tech and high-speed connectivity has social media and
gaming really begun to take off. Considering such, there are huge amounts of
data and prior work to learn from, remix, emulate and innovate upon. With
regards to Propagate, some of the most influential pieces of software have
included both the major players in the social space, Facebook and Twitter,
smaller yet popular services like Foursquare and Banjo, as well as applications a
bit under the radar; these include Whatshakin’, Bubbleme, Highlight, and Local
Mind.
The software that most closely resembles functionality of Propagate is
Highlight. Highlight is a location based communication and introduction platform
for both iOS and Android. The app taps into both your own Facebook friends as
well as the friends of your friends and notifies you whenever someone from those
networks is nearby. When examining the application for research purposes, the
issue we were having was, “why should I care?” It makes a bit more sense for
people I may be directly connected to, but there isn’t any impetus or motivation to
say something to the person who is a “friend” of my friend. I put friend in quotes
because, to a certain extent, our Facebook friends lists are becoming replete
with, what are really more, acquaintances. After more closely examining her
friends list, Claire O‘Neil, writer of an article on NPR titled, “Are Your Facebook
Friends Really Your Friends?” points out that “what I found were some people I

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hadn’t met in ‘real life’; a few people I was not speaking to in ‘real life’; ex-lovers
with new partners; ex partners of friends; art dealers, curators and high school
friends who I hadn’t see in over 20 years.”
18
These sentiments aren’t only her
own; for myself as well as a handful of people I had asked, the majority of
individuals that populate our friends lists are people whose daily lives we have
little interest in. On top of that, if those kinds of people make up the majority of
our friends lists, then their friends are even further removed from what I care to
be notified about. It was a problem; there just wasn’t anything fun to do with
Highlight. As a matter of fact, its main mechanic, that of ‘highlighting,’ was about
highlighting other users, essentially marking them as an interesting person. But
again, there was no impetus to say something to someone simply because a few
of their friends thought they had a few redeeming qualities.

18

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2012/04/23/151201002/are-your-facebook-friends-really-your-
friends

22

Figure 5: Highlight Application

The desaturation of actual friends within our Facebook friends lists
inspired another system within Propagate. We knew allowing users to create lists
of friends would be important, because, more often than not, we would rather
hear what our friends are up to than strangers. But, we didn’t want people’s
friends lists to fall the same fate as they do on Facebook, and, because,
Propagate is focused around locality, we wanted to ensure users’ friends list only
had their closest of friends. The means by which we thought to do this was to
utilize a publicly available API called Bump.
Bump was first developed to enable individuals to essentially “fist bump”
while holding their phones in order to exchange personal information, things like

23

email addresses and phone numbers. But, after releasing their API to the public,
applications were free to use it for anything. We’ve decided to use it for adding
people to your friends list. The physical contact required to befriend someone, to
us, seemed so much more intimate. Fist bumping is something close friends do,
and just how Propagate hopes to add a sense of physicality back to digital
messages, it hopes to carry that through into the act of adding friends as well.

Figure 6: Bump Api

Although Highlight presents users in a well designed way with who is
around them and what they’re saying, the app focuses on making introductions –
informing you about what interesting people are nearby and giving you the
opportunity to send them a private message.
Ntro, a location based app that launched from within USC fell into the
same category. When creating an account, you would be asked to populate a list
of interests. After creating your list, you would be notified about who is nearby
with overlapping interests. A similar issue arises: just because someone else

24

likes the same musician as me, does not mean I would make good friends with
them or even have an enlightening conversation.
Banjo, one of the more popular location based applications, allows users
to select a location and see message feeds occurring at that location. But, what
seemed a bit superfluous about Banjo’s design and presentation was how it
presented users with a predefined list of locations, places like London, or New
York City, or San Francisco. If one were living in New Jersey, how often would
they be checking the messages happening in London or Houston? Getting to
utilize Banjo’s system allowed us to cut something similar we had initially planned
for our design. There just was not enough reason, reward, or payoff for seeing
what random people are saying at places so distant.

Figure 7: Banjo Application

25

Because one of Propagate’s main issues will be making sure users are
provided with content without a large user base having been established, we had
to think of ways to ensure that content is available. Today, we see many
applications allowing for users to login via their Facebook or Twitter accounts. It
is, undeniably, a great way to streamline the sign up/login process for your
application by skirting the process of entering an email and password and the
usual tedium of filling out a form. Aside from speeding up the registration
process, these larger services allow for some of their content to be displayed in
other applications. This, at first, seemed like a potential option for Propagate; we
could take tweets from Twitter or posts from Facebook and push them into the
nearby feeds of users. Fortunately, we stumbled upon another application doing
this already. Whatshakin’, another location based messaging platform, takes
tweets being created in your area and pumps them into your feed. Although, in
concept, this may seem to be a good idea, in actuality, the user experience is
very weak. The reason for this is due to the impetus and motivation driving users
of Twitter, the source of the tweets, to create their messages in the first place.
More often than not, the user’s location has little to do with the content of their
message. With Whatshakin’, you could be picking up the chatter of someone
speaking to their following of close friends or what someone who tweets about a
very specific topic is saying. During our experimentation, this completely
destroyed any sense of locality; location rarely played into the content we were
receiving. We did not feel to be tapping into the happenings of our immediate

26

location at all. We quickly decided against feeding content from the other
networks into Propagate in order to avoid this kind of user experience.

Figure 8: Whatshakin’ Application

Given our motivation to provide users with the opportunity to accomplish
missions and progress through varying stages of available functionality, we
sought to find other examples of social media providing this. The only application
we had found offering some ‘game like’ experiences was a social application
called Foursquare. Foursquare allows users to check into locations they happen
to be physically located at. If the user has the most check-ins out of every other
user at a location, they are considered ‘the mayor.’ While checking in at various

27

locations, users unlock badges. Unfortunately, these badges are just aesthetic;
they have no associated functionality or inherent value. With Propagate, we
decided to make sure each achievement a user completes should bring with it
something that makes them slightly “more powerful” as a virtual socialite. This is
why, as users of Propagate progress through the ranks, they earn things like
additional props, new message types, and range increases. Each of these
directly affects each of the main mechanics Propagate offers.

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USER EXPERIENCE DESCRIPTION

Terminology is an important thing – language in general. It’s what
summons things into the imagination – what sparks the mind’s eye to visualize.
One could argue that terminology played an important role in determining the
victor between Blu Ray and HD DVD; the combination of words ‘blue’ and ‘ray’
elicit something mentally tangible; we can easily visualize a streak of blue laser
light arcing through our minds. It feels futuristic – advanced. The term ‘HD DVD’
thuds up against us like a plastic disc dropped carelessly on a table. Where’s the
sense of advancement with that term? What’s mentally elicited, a circular piece
of plastic? This is a reason why we selected the nouns and verbs we did for use
within Propagate; we want to mentally stimulate users; we want to stir their
imagination, even if it requires taking the slight risk of utilizing a term that varies
from what people are used to for a given action or mechanic.
Deciding a good name for Propagate’s message was extremely important
for us. Messages are the application’s primary mechanic. Whatever word we
would decide to us would be said and said a lot. We needed it to be strong. At
first, our messages were termed ‘shouts;’ people could automatically understand
or at least estimate how a shout works: you say something with some kind of
volume, and people around you can hear it. During a few user tests, where we
would ask people what they thought a ‘shout’ would do in a social networking
app. People were spot on in guessing what it did: a message that had range. The
word does do a pretty good job encompassing the characteristics of a message

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within Propagate, but the issue we encountered was with ‘shout’s’ connotations.
People shout at each other when they’re angry or in the middle of an argument;
little kids shout when they don’t get what they want from their parents. There’s a
sense of immaturity – a selfishness and negativity that lives within the core of the
word ‘shout.’ We decided it would be best to keep those kinds of feelings and
interpretations as far as possible from a piece of software aimed at uniting
people, regardless of how well it communicated the idea.
After leaving ‘shout’ crying and yelling on the cutting room floor, we had
gravitated toward another word: ‘ping.’ It took a little warming up to, but professor
Mark Bolas convinced us of the word’s sense of playfulness. It’s a cute sounding
word, but it sounds like something fun to do. On top of its playfulness, the term
‘ping’ actually has a rich and appropriate history in computer networking. Pings
serve as a tool for network administration; they are used to detect and determine
the ‘strength’ of a connection between a client and server. But, before being used
within the realm of computer networking, the word actually stemmed from sonar
terminology; the ping is the pulse of sound emitted in order to detect surrounding
objects within the environment. We thought this was quite fitting for our
application of the word: users transmitting blips of messages out with hopes of it
being received on some other end. It has a sense of life to it.
Aside from having a set of much more lively connotations, we wanted
Pings to be unique amidst the collection of location based messaging apps
starting to surface. ‘Shout’ was actually already employed by an app called
Whatshakin’. When you hear the term ‘tweet,’ you immediately know its from the

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message ecosystem of Twitter, and it, too, does an excellent job of eliciting a
mental image; you can just hear all the birds tweeting and chirping; users are
transformed into birds. We wanted Propagate to have its own verb, so that,
should it ever become a topic of people’s discussion, when you hear that people
are pinging about something, you know they’re using Propagate.
The way a game or application comes across “feeling” a certain way to the
player or user is normally through something called feedback. Kyle Gabler does
a great job explaining the value of good feedback in games. He uses the term
“juicy”
19
to illustrate that there should be many affectations from the game system
in response to something the user does. For example, a player could touch a
character on the screen before giving them an order and, in response to the
touch, the character could jump up, make a sound, and have some kind of light
bloom around their feet. Halo is also a great example of providing juicy feedback.
Its main mechanic is firing weaponry at moving opponents, and, when you land a
bullet on your target, their shields light up, a few dots flicker around your reticle to
indicate that the server registered your shot as a hit, your gun kicks back, and
audio of the firing gun is played.
Propagate plans to incorporate a few different kinds of feedback in order
to make the interface feel a bit more “juicy.” More often than not, sound is left out
of social networking applications on iOS. Out of every app mentioned within this
paper, not a single one used sounds as a source of feedback within the UI. But,
when dealing with a touch screen, there is no haptic feedback; there is nothing to

19

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130848/how_to_prototype_a_game_in_under_7_.php?print=1

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feel. The only means of providing users with feedback to a UI action is through
visuals and sound. There exists a game on the App Store called Letterpress
20
.
It’s a simple word game, but every tile and menu option the player ever touches
emits a tiny click sound when the user’s finger initially touches the icon and a
second sound when the user pulls their finger off the screen. From an experience
point of view, the whole screen nearly becomes what feels like a satisfying
mechanical device with moving parts, much like the click on a mouse.
Given how highly rated the app has been, and how satisfying the double
click feedback was, Propagate will also boast a click sound for both finger down
and finger up. And, in addition to sound, there will be some button animations
that play for a few of the most utilized UI elements.

Figure 9: Letterpress

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Letterpress
app
-‐
http://www.atebits.com/letterpress/

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When thinking of other feedback to include within Propagate, we looked to
Facebook to see if there was anything it was doing to keep people coming back.
Facebook’s primary feedback is relatively simple; the three icons at the top of
Facebook’s webpage (friend requests, new messages, notifications) each display
a red box with a white number in it to the top right of the icon. This is meant to
draw the user’s attention and inform them of any new happenings since their last
visit. While the red boxes are extremely telling, they are really the only form of
feedback Facebook offers. The only other would be showing you how may times
a post has been seen, but this is only for posts within a Facebook Group.

Figure 10: Facebook Feedback

Because Propagate is about spreading messages across space, we
thought it would not make a lot of sense not to depict that. As mentioned before,
each message will have a viral view, depicting where the message originated
and how it spread to the other cells of the map.

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Figure 11: Message Viral View

34

AVENUES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH

Although Propagate allows for the transmission of recorded audio,
Propagate really only pushes the envelope of text based communication – the
use of the written language – symbols etched across a surface. But, humans and
animals have both created and evolved a panoply of different methods for
communication, things like pheromones, echo location, body gestures, morse
code, and smoke signals; the amount of ways to get some piece of information
from one location to another is, at this point, only limited by our imagination.
To think that we’ll be communicating with things like text and the vocalized
word for even the next hundred years would be naïve. As humans begin to
merge more intimately with our technology, bringing our hardware into our bodies
and cells, our consciousnesses will be privy to a whole new range of input and
data that our current body apparatus has no way of sensing and parsing.
What if we could leave a complex message through the computer aided
design of an aroma that our augmented bodies could interpret? Or, what if, with a
device as soon to be released as Google’s Glass, we could leave augmented
reality smoke signals floating for people in front of their house or out in a public
park? There are going to be innumerable ways to communicate thought in the
upcoming future, and it will be our role as designers to think about how to make
use of the new mediums provided to us to enable channels of communication
that both feel natural, rewarding, fun, and beautiful.

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But, to stay more grounded in modern forms of communication with things
like text and images, there are still a handful of things that we employ with text
but have yet to utilize for messaging, things like font and line breaks. Unless a
user is creating an image, there are next to no communication platforms that
make it easy to also communicate typeface. A message written in the heavy,
almost stone-like letters of Arial Black carries with it a very different connotation
than the same message written in, say, the flowing, nearly living arcs of Scriptina.
Line breaks are an additional layer of information that can manipulate, with
quite artful effect, the reception of a group of words. Poets have been using line
breaks for centuries as a means to both create multiple strata of meaning and to
play with the music – the rhythm and cadence – that is audible language.

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CONCLUSION

Communication is something our species will never stop doing, and it is
possible to argue that, fundamentally, communication is the only thing anything
does. Our computers and our internet allow for brand new kinds of
communication that could not exist in a system comprised of only air and vocal
chords.
Sending messages is something utilized for every kind of interaction
possible; we send them for work, for play, to teach and to learn, and to love and
to hurt. Propagate is an attempt at taking characteristics inherent in physical
forms of communication and artificially applying those to digital messages in
order to restore some of the tangibility our bodies are familiar with to our virtual
world.
This kind of design has only had its surface scratched in terms of its
potential. A popular app called Snapchat was the first public foray into something
called “ephemeral messaging.” With ephemeral messaging, pieces of content are
given an amount of time – usually a few seconds – they can be displayed on
another user’s screen. In essence, they are self-destructing digital messages. In
a world where digital content is normally taken to be quite permanent, the
messages acquire a corporeality they did not have before. It’s this corporeality –
the only thing our bodies know – that we often try to simulate in our virtual
worlds, and, by now, it should be fairly clear that the line between worlds is
blurring.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Applications

Facebook, Inc. 2004. Browser and Mobile. Facebook

Banjo, Inc. 2011. Mobile. Banjo

Highlight. 2012. Mobile. Highlight

Localmind. 2011. Mobile. Localmind

Snapchat, Inc. 2013. Mobile. Snapchat

What’s Shakin’, LLC. 2011-2012. Mobile. What’s Shakin’

Foursquare. 2013. Mobile. Foursquare

Other Sources

O’Neil, Clair. “Are Your Facebook Friends Really Your Friends?” NPR
April 23, 2012

Gabler, Kyle. Gray, Kyle. Shodhan, Shalin. Kucic, Matt. “How to Prototype a
Game in Under 7 Days.” Gamasutra
2012

Alexander, Leigh. “The ‘Immense Responsibility’ of Creating Value for Players.”
Gamasutra. November 13, 2012

Schwartz, Barry. “The Paradox of Choice.” TED
September, 2006

Anthony. “When to Use White Text on a Dark Background.” UX Movement
April 11, 2011

Fullerton, Tracy. Game Design Workshop. Morgan Kaufmann, 2008

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets