Using a smartphone ‘app’ in qualitative research: the good, the bad and the ugly

This paper reflects on the use of a smartphone application (‘app’) in qualitative research following the experience of the FREE (Football Research in an Enlarged Europe) project, which investigated the lives of football fans in the UK. To meet this aim, a participant-focused audio-visual methodology was designed, featuring the use of an app to collect data. Fans were asked to take photographs and keep diaries to show the role football plays in their lives. The smartphone app was developed to allow fans to use their own mobile phones, capturing qualitative data in ‘real time’. The paper reflects on our experience of using the smartphone app in this qualitative research, analysing the advantages, disadvantages and the main risks that researchers will need to take into account when using smartphone apps in their future qualitative research projects. We encourage others to build on and advance this under-researched but potentially valuable tool

Visualization of personal history for video navigation

Figure 1. Our prototype history-based interface called the Video History System (VHS) aids navigation through the management of a user’s personal viewing history. Playback of video is controlled with familiar tools such as play/pause, seek and filmstrip (left)- the VHS records each part of the video viewed by the user. The history is then visualized in one of two ways: as Video Tiles (centre) or as a Video Timeline (right).1 We present an investigation of two different visualizations of video history: Video Timeline and Video Tiles. Video Timeline extends the commonly employed list-based visualization for navigation history by applying size to indicate heuristics and occupying the full screen with a two-sided timeline. Video Tiles visualizes history items in a grid-based layout by follow-ing pre-defined templates based on items ’ heuristics and or-dering, utilizing screen space more effectively at the expense of a clearer temporal location. The visualizations are com-pared against the state-of-the-art method (a filmstrip-based visualization), with ten participants tasked with sharing their previously-seen affective intervals. Our study shows that our visualizations are perceived as intuitive and both outperform and are strongly preferred to the current method. Based on these results, Video Timeline and Video Tiles provide an ef-fective addition to video viewers to help manage the growing quantity of video. They provide users with insight into their navigation patterns, allowing them to quickly find previously-seen intervals, leading to efficient clip sharing, simpler au-thoring and video summarization

Exploring the use of mobile multi-media to support connectedness

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 73-75).The practical demands of modern life obligate people to spend time physically seperated from the people they care about. To cope, people turn to communications technology like the telephone, e-mail, and instant messaging (IM) to maintain a connection with social contacts. These communication modalities are limited in their ability to provide social-connectedness by their failure to balance expressiveness, overhead, and social obligation. Clique Here is a mobile communications platform that attempts to address this limitation and support a higher degree of social-connectedness by complementing mobile telephone capability with media rich awareness and multiple lightweight communication modes. The Clique Here system consists of a mobile client, implemented on a camera embedded mobile handset, a home client, implemented on a wireless web tablet, and communication between clients is facillitated by an application server.by Joseph Edmund Corral.M.Eng

Communicative forms on TikTok: Perspectives from digital ethnography

TikTok is an app that allows people to create, share, and consume short-video content. Although only available internationally since 2017, it has already been downloaded more than 2 billion times and has around 800 million active users. Public interest in the fleeting and seemingly random video clips that TikTok hosts is high. In fact, it has grown steadily since the time of the Twitter-owned short-video app Vine that ended its service in 2016 with only a quarter of TikTok’s current userbase. However, despite this steady growth in popularity, observations and theorizations of short-video apps like TikTok remain lacking. In this article, I thus seek to address this lack by critically discussing how to study short-video communications from the bottom up and by presenting the results of an exploratory investigation into TikTok and its communicative forms. Doing so, this article contributes to opening a space for serious engagement with this burgeoning yet understudied element of digital culture in the future

Defining and Identifying Attention Capture Deceptive Designs in Digital Interfaces

Many tech companies exploit psychological vulnerabilities to design digital interfaces that maximize the frequency and duration of user visits. Consequently, users often report feeling dissatisfied with time spent on such services. Prior work has developed typologies of damaging design patterns (or dark patterns) that contribute to financial and privacy harms, which has helped designers to resist these patterns and policymakers to regulate them. However, we are missing a collection of similar problematic patterns that lead to attentional harms. To close this gap, we conducted a systematic literature review for what we call 'attention capture damaging patterns' (ACDPs). We analyzed 43 papers to identify their characteristics, the psychological vulnerabilities they exploit, and their impact on digital wellbeing. We propose a definition of ACDPs and identify eleven common types, from Time Fog to Infinite Scroll. Our typology offers technologists and policymakers a common reference to advocate, design, and regulate against attentional harms

Usability of Web Browsers for Multi-touch Platforms

Multi-touch interface is an improvement within the existing touch screen technology, which allows the user to operate the electronic visual display with finger gestures. This work examines how good current web browsers are positioned to avail of the next generation HCI, currently dubbed Natural User Interfaces which are largely multi-touch interfaces at this point in time