Reducing the Stress of Coordination

Abstract

We explore the everyday use of a new abstraction for mobile location-sharing. By sharing the travel time between contacts calculated for walking, transit, and driving, we have enabled users to more easily coordinate meeting up and planning family obligations. Specifically, our participants reported that the information helped to lower the stress of these activities and provided reassurance of the arrival times of their close friends and family. In this paper, we describe our system, motivate its design, and explore results from a 20-user, 21-day field trial showing the usefulness of the abstraction as well as attitudes towards privacy when sharing travel times with close friends or family.