POE 2.0: exploring the potential of social media for capturing unsolicited post-occupancy evaluations

Abstract

This article presents a scoping study in which unsolicited user feedback of the Seattle Public Library was gathered from selected social media and user-review websites to determine the viability of utilizing social media as a novel and unconventional approach to post-occupancy evaluation (POE). Fourteen social media/review websites were surveyed and all available review-data were extracted. This resulted in a rich dataset of almost 500 reviews, which were subjected to further analyses of temporal and geographical patterns, numerical ratings and the semantic content of the reviews. The study's results suggest building users are quite willing to share, without solicitation, their experiences. The results showed: a high proportion of local reviewers (40%); highly regular, temporal patterns of posting, suggesting a sustained interest in reviewing over a period of seven years; numerical ratings suggesting that comments were not dominated by highly opinionated, extreme reviewers but represented a broad range of views; geographical differences in the semantic content of the reviews. The article suggests that highly valuable information is currently available from peer-to-peer networks and that this forms a new class of POE-data which are radically different from current POE paradigms. It concludes that these data might be most valuable through augmenting, and not supplanting, traditional POE.

Keywords:

• post-occupancy evaluation
• evidence-based design
• human behaviour
• human–computer interaction
• occupants-feedback

Acknowledgements

To SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition for co-funding this study. To Dr Nick ‘Sheep’ Dalton (The Open University, UK) and to Jana Wendler, David Kühner and Anselm Geserer (University of Freiburg, Germany) for their assistance in retrieving the data from the websites reviewed in this article. Also to Laura Carlson (University of Notre Dame) and Amy Shelton (Johns Hopkins University), and their respective teams, for their work on the aforementioned two studies of wayfinding in Seattle Public Library. Last, but not least, we thank our anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on an earlier version of this article.