Eliciting situated feedback: A comparison of paper, web forms and public displays

Highlights

• Public displays, paper and web forms were compared as feedback mechanisms.

• We examined the quantity and quality of feedback obtained from each medium.

• Public displays produced a high quantity of feedback but mostly noise.

• Paper and web forms generated lower quantity of feedback but better quality.

• Public displays can be leveraged as significant interest generators.

Abstract

Interactive displays are becoming an increasingly popular civic engagement mechanism for collecting user feedback in urban settings. However, to date no study has investigated (i) how the situatedness of public displays affects the quantity and quality of collected feedback, and (ii) how public displays compare to traditional paper or web feedback mechanisms. We answer these research questions in a series of lab and field studies. We demonstrate that because people tend to approach this technology with no specific purpose in mind, the feedback collected with public displays is noisier than web and paper forms. However, we also show that public displays attract much more feedback than web and paper forms, and generate much more interest. Furthermore, we found that users appropriated our technology beyond its original purpose. Our analysis provides implications on the tradeoffs of using public displays as a feedback mechanism, and we discuss ways of improving the collected feedback using public displays.

Introduction

Public interactive displays offer a unique opportunity to promote civic engagement in urban settings. The visibility of these displays is an advantage that can be leveraged by city officials when collecting feedback and in an attempt to enhance civic engagement [16]. In this sense, the attractiveness and inherent situatedness of this medium have been suggested as catalysts in promoting civic engagement within a community [19], [28]. Researchers have so far been mostly concerned with the usability and design aspects of providing feedback on such displays [2], [29], [36], for example considering how to use mobile devices to minimize on-screen typing on public displays [28], [35]. However, they have mostly overlooked the issue of content: what kind of feedback do such displays elicit, and of what quality? In previous work, researchers have either claimed success in their deployment [e.g. 7] although their experiments are conducted in an artificially controlled environment, or have simply ignored noisy or irrelevant feedback without exploring the issue [e.g. 18]. We argue that a systematic investigation is crucial to our understanding of the reasons for, and potential solutions to, this question.

Furthermore, it is not clear what are the added benefits of public displays in relation to more traditional mechanisms for gathering feedback and eliciting engagement, such as paper forms or web forms. Is the increasing popularity of public displays justified, or do they introduce some bias in the way they engage users? Answering these questions is challenging due to the “in the wild” nature of these public interactive displays, and because the public is a diverse audience that tends to give mostly “noisy” feedback [18].

In this paper we present the first, to our knowledge, series of lab and field studies that investigate how public interactive displays are used for the purpose of providing civic feedback. Our investigation of public feedback mechanisms is far from novel, however no studies have considered this in the context of public interactive displays. In this paper we seek to measure the quality and quantity of feedback collected on public displays, and investigate whether the situatedness of this technology has an effect by considering two other mechanisms of collecting feedback from the public: paper and web forms.