Integrating User Content
In order to support the widest range of devices—and therefore contributors—You Are Here uses a platform called Twilio to let audience members submit their own audio stories in response to our site-specific podcasts. Though newer phone models can upload audio directly to a website, older phone models can’t—and we didn’t want to limit You Are Here’s engagement only to audience members with the latest phones.
Using Twilio allowed us to quickly and inexpensively set up a unique dial-in number for each You Are Here node. When an audience member calls in, they’re greeted by a pre-recorded prompt explaining that we’d like them to share their thoughts and experiences connected to the You Are Here node site. Users can then record their stories by leaving a voicemail. In order to make those audience recordings available on the correct You Are Here node, however, team member Dan Phiffer had to build a small web application to connect the two.
“In order to [both] use telephones and also to keep [You Are Here] relatively offline, we would need to have some kind of connecting middleware,” says Phiffer. In this case, that middleware consisted of a small, web-based application. Though Phiffer is relatively experienced with web technologies, he had never used Twilio until this project. Still, he was able to put together the Twilio portion over the course of just one afternoon.
“It was really easy,” says Phiffer. “It was surprising.”
Using basic web-based technologiesi, Phiffer created a script that was triggered whenever a message was left for one of our You Are Here nodes. Phiffer’s middleware would then download the user’s audio story and save a copy of it.
In addition to serving as go-between for the You Are Here node and the Twilio platform, Phiffer’s middleware offered some real-time insight into how the system was doing. That’s because Phiffer also configured his system to send an update to his Slack channel whenever a recording was made. In addition to posting an alert message, it “sends the link to the MP3 so we can listen to it,” Phiffer says.
Those real-time notifications helped the project team get an idea of how much activity there was on each You Are Here node. It also provided an opportunity to review recordings for problematic content. Although no inappropriate content was submitted to our pilot installations, our experience with news websites and prior projects made us aware of this very real possibility. Like related systems,35 You Are Here does not provide for any automated content moderation. Still, being automatically notified of new content made the review process less manual. In a fully offline context, of course, any human moderation would need to be done on-site—one of the many reasons we envision You Are Here nodes living in easily accessible places.
Given the goals of engagement and exchange that drove the You Are Here project, audience members contributed stories with the idea that they would be heard by others. Because of this, our efforts to keep the stories private as they passed from the Twilio platform to the You Are Here node were minimal. Technically, for example, a person who discovered the (otherwise unpublished) URL of Phiffer’s middleware could access the recorded stories from anywhere.
That said, Phiffer suggests that blocking undesirable access would be simple. “By having a random, long string of digits that are shared on the device and shared on the server,” he says, one could ensure that only the You Are Here stations were able to access any recordings. “If you don’t have the correct thing, [the middleware] rejects the request.”
While inspiring and maintaining user participation is always tricky, Phiffer says, platforms like Twilio can make it easier to customize the audience’s experience and stay connected with them. Initially, for example, when a contributor calls in, “It’s using this robot voice to say, ‘Hello, thank you for calling. Please leave your response.’” Replacing that message with a customized recording allowed us to offer participants a more customized experience.
While the use of Twilio to support audience participation was initially a compromise, it does offer additional functionality that could be useful for long-term You Are Here nodes. In addition to facilitating real-time content moderation as noted above, the fact that users are placing a phone call to submit a response opens up possibilities for reconnecting with them after they’ve left the area.
“Repeat participation could be a possibility,” says Phiffer. For example, one could use the Twilio/middleware combination to create an opt-in feature allowing contributors to be notified via SMS when a new You Are Here site launches or new stories are added.
Ultimately, though, the functioning of the system has little effect if audience members don’t know where it is or how to use it. To generate awareness and draw audience members in, we needed appealing and coherent graphic and user-interface design.