Lessons From Failure : Re-conceiving Blogging as Personal Change Support

Abstract

This paper reports on research-driven design of quite ordinary social technologies. It describes an exploratory field study involving re-conceiving a social technology designed to operate across devices and networks – Nokia LifeBlog – to support life change. Here we briefly describe LifeBlog's design and summarise results of a field study of its extended use by people trying to quit smoking. Through this summary we reflect on how issues of personal disclosure, connectedness, visibility, awareness, accountability and privacy are critical to LifeBlog's design for this problem space. Although we clearly document some notable features of failure, both of the technology and the quit attempts, understanding the nuances and subtleties of failure highlights important design considerations. Finally, we present and describe some possible enhancements to LifeBlog and a specific set of (albeit untested) design ideas emerging from: a design workshop involving the participants in the field study; and a desktop design exercise.