We have just had a CHI WIP accepted for presented in Seoul, Korea in April 2015! WooHoo 🙂 This work-in-progress paper was conducted with Henriette Cramer in which we conducted a large-scale survey via Mechanical Turk to shed light on what factors of location are important when choosing a target place of interest in a local search scenario, namely restaurant search.
The survey was deployed in December 2013 and collected a range of demographic information as well as details regarding participants’ current and most recent locations. The core of the survey was a local restaurant search scenario in which participants were asked to provide freeform textual responses to the following question:
“Imagine you are searching for a place to eat. It will be tonight, and you will be with a good friend. What requirements are important for you in terms of where the restaurant is?”
We received responses from 306 participants, 145 female (47%), 160 male (52%) and used thematic analysis to find key themes/insights, that is, data was analyzed iteratively to find repeating patterns of meaning. See the above photos to get a sense of some of the themes emerging in the initial stages of our analysis.
We identified 4 key factors that influence choice of location in a shared restaurant search scenario specifically:
- Getting There: Proximity & Transport
- Area: Imageability & Activities
- Temporal/Seasonal Effects
- Multi-Person Preferences & Shared Location
Full results, insights and discussion is available in the paper. A preprint of the paper can be found here. And here is a preprint of the CHI poster. Any questions just drop us a line and if not hopefully see you at CHI in Korea!