Development of an analysis tool to facilitate check-in research in social media

• Main Authors: Liang, Chih Hsuan, 梁芷瑄
• Other Authors: Li, Tsai Yen
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/gvw84c

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 資訊科學學系 === 105 === Check-in is one of the functions that users often use on social media systems such as Facebook. In the past, most of the researchers about check-in use qualitative methods. Before interviewing users, qualitative researchers often need to manually check the user's timeline on Facebook to collect and sort out data, which is time consuming. In addition, the ways of a user's check-in’s on Facebook are diversified. Many check-in’s do not synchronize in time and place. To understand the motivation of a user in doing check-in’s, we need to collect more data such as the actions and location on user's mobile phone to restore the context. In order to assess the need of researchers, we use an interdisciplinary approach, in which qualitative research and tool development run in parallel. We develop a visual analysis tool aiming to help qualitative researchers to analysis data. Our tool collects check-in data from Facebook and synchronizes them with the user log on the user’s mobile phone. By visualizing the data in various forms such as bubble chart, timeline, map, and table, we hope to provide researchers with a quick overview of user behavior as well as in-depth studies of specific events. We use a 5-point scale to evaluate the system in our experiment. The average score of usefulness is 4.6, and the subjects think that our tool is very helpful for them to analyze check-in behaviors and the follow-up qualitative study. The average score of ease-of-use is 4.1. Although most of subjects agree that our system is easy to use, some think that practice is necessary to master the system. In addition, some subjects have found creative uses of our system that were not thought of by the designer, which reflects the nature of our tool in data exploration.