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 This project identifies a number of important aspects for exploration in terms of the value of developing knowledge about local mobile usage information (not just using US stats) and the value of proximity, locality and social networks for connecting people. It would interesting to know if in doing the research the team looked at other existing mash ups that combine geolocated tweets and maps, or any of the generic apps that are designed to exploit geolocation and locality e.g. Fixmystreet, FourSquare, Gowalla, www.neerlife.com, www.glympse.com to see how these differ or compare. (n.b I tried to follow the links provided but they don't seem to go anywhere at this stage.)
 This is a great research area with lots of potential and the personas and scenarios really help to bring to life some of the issues and the potential for this concept. I would ask though - did the personas feed the product concept, or were the personas written to support a particular product concept that had already been defined? The later helps you explore the concept more fully, but perhaps limits the possibilities of what you might learn or trigger through the use of personas and scenarios. The concepts sketches successfully convey key idea and some potential variations on the interface presentation. It would be great to also see information in the sketches about how this interface responds to "what Ghanaians want". Currently the sketches explore emphasis on the presentation of status updates onto a map, the research and the personas and scenarios identified a number of local applications for this interface and it would be interesting to see those explored in the concepting stage through scenarios, or wireframes or story boards that relate back to how the product will actually be used and experienced. It might also be interesting to consider other ways in which people could navigate this information, (e.g., lists of friends that were close by) other than the map interface.
+<br>
+General feedback for MAPD and Apps (from Penny Hagen)
+Interviews are a great way to interact with users and gain an understanding of what people think about different things. One of their limitations is that people can only tell us what they remember or what is top of mind, so they don't necessarily get us to the depth of how people interact with technology (or other things) in their daily life. In addition, as I am sure you've heard before, often what people say they do is different to what they actually do - this is not intentional, its just that we don't constantly observe ourselves or own behaviour - so interviews can be good for getting at explicit information but they rely on people having a good, reflective sense of their own practices but often we have to work a bit to access to things that people themselves aren't aware off.
+To help people delve into this kind of detail for example, we can try asking them to describe a recent time when they used their phone, or were frustrated with their phone. Getting people to talk in examples often moves us beyond the obvious. Also, try asking "why" more often - not just "what" i.e why do people use or prefer particular things, people may use things for reason quite different to that which we expect. It can also be useful at times to use a kind of primer before the interview that helps to sensitise the participants to their own behaviours and attitudes. I.e., asking people to record for a day or two what they are doing with their phone, this helps to make things that are implicit more top of mind at the interview. Habits and rituals in particular are hard for people to identify in an interview, but a diary or primer prior can sensitise them more deeply to their own practice, and help them to share them with you.
+We also need to be mindful of asking very specific questions in the interviews as these can limit the kinds of information people will share. (Though of course sometimes specific questions are very appropriate). Often its good not to embed assumptions into the questions. For example, rather than immediately exclude the making and of receiving calls, letting people describe in their own words how they use the phone, and what they consider to be most important (and then following up with prompts or more specific questions) might allow some surprising things to come out, as people describe their phone using their own language and in their own way. A technique I have used before is to ask people to give you a "tour" of their phone and the most important features. <br>
 == References ==