From the small to the large: learnings from the deployment of serendipitous family stories / storyplace.me

Research in the large is quite different from the more traditional small-scale field studies conducted in Ubicomp over the past decade. Large scale studies are not just small scale ones with a larger n, they allow researchers to answer fundamentally different questions about use and adoption and enable the studying of systems in real and messy social networks and situations. However, conducting large-scale research often requires large-scale resources. We present the evolution of the Serendipitous Family Stories system into StoryPlace.me and discuss how large-scale research required 5x more time and effort to prepare a system for a field trial.