The Research And Design Of A Context-aware Social Networking Service

The social networking services have been blooming in the recent years of web2.0 era. Nowadays, the global communication network has been entered into the 3G era, and the mobile social networking services would flourish rapidly in the near future. In the domain of mobile interaction design, there are more and more focus on the context-awareness technology. The author has proposed the topic of the integration of the context-awareness technology and the mobile social networking service based upon this background.This paper work is constituted of for parts, literature review, requirements analysis, prototype design, and user study experiment. Firstly, the author explores the two core concepts, context-awareness and mobile social networking and summarizes the related work. Then the author limits the target users to the students in campus, and studies the user needs by employing the participant design method. After that, the author proposes the concept of Mobile Wenwen, a context-aware social networking Q&A service. Then the author designs and develops the prototype of Mobile Wenwen from low-fi prototype to hi-fi prototype by employing the UCD methods, and the user testing has also been done during this period. Finally, the author carries a user research experiment by exploiting the Mobile Wenwen prototype.Through the experiment, the author studies the usage patterns of Mobile Wenwen, and compares the differences of behaviors between Mobile Wenwen, Baidu Knows and renren.com (using the status messages to ask questions). The author describes the usage patterns from six aspects, use scenarios, dynamic information, inputting, searching, asking and answering. The author focuses on the asking and answering behavior, and describes the question types, question topics, the attributes of question, the speed of answering, answers' quality and motivations of asking and answering.