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Project: ePlace (Macromedia Director concept demo ~5M, Poster in PDF).

Concept: Socio-technical elements of a social interaction environment for electronic marketplaces.

Features: A novel, spatially-organized, and interactive site map that provides visibility of people, activities, and social interactions and incorporates elements for facilitating sociality, scalability, spatiality, and imageability. The social environment incorporates elements that support the development of common ground, awareness, a sense of place and facilitates social interaction.

Design: We exploited people's ability to use space and spatial cues to to interpret and guide human behavior. We applied Kevin Lynch's findings in creating the ePlace site map. The findings were that people have shared, common, visual elements (e.g., node, landmark, path, edge, and district) of a map that they use to navigate in their environment and cooperate with people.

Implementation: Developed several user scenarios in a concept prototype to illustrate different forms of collaboration paradigms in electronic marketplaces (e.g., locate, identify, and speak with a sales agent). The concept prototype was implemented in Macromedia Director by Younghee Jung (CMU Design School). I was involved in the development of an ePlace prototype for ShopIBM as part of a technical feasibility study.

Status: The concept prototype and the ShopIBM prototype were shown internally and externally to solicit business and end-user feedback.

Principals: Done in collaboration with Younghee Jung (CMU), Todd Miller (Georgia Tech) and Catalina Danis (IBM Research). I was the project lead, the mentor to the students, and manager of the design, implementation, and evaluation.

Publication: Jung and Lee, ACM DIS 2000 and Lee et al., Interact 2001.

Work Conducted: November 1998 — February 2000.