PosterBoard
Group Members
Manasi Vartak
Tristan Naumann
Chidube Ezeozue
Problem Statement
MIT event organizers want to effectively publicize their events with the least amount of effort. A traditional means for doing this involves putting up posters on boards located all over campus. The organizers usually target boards in the daily path of target audience. However, while this is a time-tested approach, its true effectiveness is debatable. In one of our user studies, we waited by a noticeboard for about an hour and only about 4 of the approximately 30 people passing the board actually glanced at it. As a matter of fact, only 1 of those 4 stopped (for about 10 seconds) to look at it. Traditional paper posters also make it hard to estimate attendance.
More commonly these days, the ubiquity of the web and mobile phones makes them an obvious channel for advertising events (eg. events.mit.edu). However, students are unlikely to visit event websites for the primary reason of checking out the posters there. Also, many of these new channels (email, for instance) contain a text-based version of the advertisement (with an occasional attached flyer). But the users asked said they were attracted to posters by visual design thus revealing the reduced impact of the text-based channels.
We therefore intend to provide a platform that will allow event organizers put up a geotagged copy of the actual event poster and allow the users to engage with these posters instead of just being able to view them.