Normative Social Applications: User-centered Models for Sharing Location in the Family Life Domain

Social media platforms are used by a massive, growing number of users, who use these platforms to share content such as text, photos, videos, and location information. As the spread of social media is playing an increasingly important role in our world, literature has shown that while aiming to promote a number of human values (e.g. friendship, social recognition, and safety), this type of technology may pose risk to other values (e.g. privacy and independence), creating what has been defined as value tensions. This thesis proposes the norm-based, Social Commitment (SC) models as a solution that could potentially provide tailored support for user values. As research shows that norms can fulfill (or pose risks to) values, SC models could utilize their normative core to as well as their ability to contain key relevant information that complement the missing features in social applications’ preference settings, to give users a rich, flexible, and adaptive structure that improves their social application experience. Location sharing in the family life (i.e. within families with children in the elementary school age) was selected as an application domain, as it provided potential use cases that are abundant with value tensions (e.g. a child’s safety vs. their independence), while embodying the essential elements of data sharing using social platforms. The research followed a Situated Cognitive Engineering approach, and an exploratory investigation into the social context of the application domain was conducted: focus groups and cultural probing studies with parents and children, and the collected data was analyzed using grounded theory. The result was a grounded model that showed (1) how activities, concerns, and limitations related to family life are connected through specific user values, and (2) that norms can support these values by promoting activities, alleviating concerns and overcoming limitations. Further on, a conceptual model was built, and subsequently a SC grammar (and a semantic lifecycle) were developed for this domain: the SC-model allowed users to construct commitments amongst each other for sharing and receiving social data, harmonized to their values via normative statements. A location-sharing application was developed so that, in addition to location-sharing features found in familiar commercial platforms, it also contained an implementation of our SC grammar. The SC model’s expressivity was validated through a qualitative user study with parents and children, where nearly all participants’ normative statements were found to be expressible through the proposed model. The SC grammar’s usefulness (within the application domain) as well as its ease of use were validated through a crowd-sourced, online user study. The SC model’s ability to provide improved human value support was validated through a user study conducted with elementary school children using the location-sharing application we developed, as well as a questionnaire constructed to measure fulfillment of children’s values relevant to the domain. Results demonstrated that enhancing the app with the SC model has improved its support a number of children’s values while posing no risk to the remaining measured values in the process. In the thesis’s final user study, we demonstrated that using contextual information (e.g. a user’s value profile) as well as commitment attributes (e.g. recency and norm type), can be used to create predictive models that are capable of automatically resolving the vast majority of conflicts that may occur amongst location-sharing commitments. In conclusion, this thesis demonstrates that SC models possess the potential to provide an easy to use, flexible tool that allows social applications to work better in users’ favor,