Eliciting situated feedback: A comparison of paper, web forms and public displays

• Public displays, paper and web forms were compared as feedback mechanisms.
• We examined the quantity and quality of feedback obtained from each medium.
• Public displays produced a high quantity of feedback but mostly noise.
• Paper and web forms generated lower quantity of feedback but better quality.
• Public displays can be leveraged as significant interest generators.

Interactive displays are becoming an increasingly popular civic engagement mechanism for collecting user feedback in urban settings. However, to date no study has investigated (i) how the situatedness of public displays affects the quantity and quality of collected feedback, and (ii) how public displays compare to traditional paper or web feedback mechanisms. We answer these research questions in a series of lab and field studies. We demonstrate that because people tend to approach this technology with no specific purpose in mind, the feedback collected with public displays is noisier than web and paper forms. However, we also show that public displays attract much more feedback than web and paper forms, and generate much more interest. Furthermore, we found that users appropriated our technology beyond its original purpose. Our analysis provides implications on the tradeoffs of using public displays as a feedback mechanism, and we discuss ways of improving the collected feedback using public displays.