Piggyback Prototyping: Using Existing, Large-Scale Social Computing Systems to Prototype New Ones

ABSTRACT

We propose a technique we call piggyback prototyping, a prototyping mechanism for designing new social computing systems on top of existing ones. Traditional HCI prototyping techniques do not translate well to large social computing systems. To address this gap, we describe a 6-stage process for prototyping new social computing systems using existing online systems, such as Twitter or Facebook. This allows researchers to focus on what people do on their system rather than how to attract people to it. We illustrate this technique with an instantiation on Twitter to pair people who are different from each other in airports. Even though there were many missed meetings, 53% of survey respondents would be interested in being matched again, and eight people even met in person. Through piggyback prototyping, we gained insight into the future design of this system. We conclude the paper with considerations for privacy, consent, volume of users, and evaluation metrics.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing