Exploring everyday needs of teenagers related to context-aware mobile services

In recent years there has been research on context-aware mobile services that have supported e.g. making appropriate calls, being aware of others, and going on a guided tour. However, there is a lack of user studies that could show that others than engineers and researchers themselves need those services. Therefore, in this paper we will present the results of an observational study on teenage mobile phone users and how they could benefit from context-aware services in their everyday life. Key words: context awareness, mobile services, user needs 1

ContextContacts: re-designing Smartphone’s contact book to support mobile awareness and collaboration

Acontextuality of the mobile phone often leads to a caller’s uncertainty over a callee’s current state, which in turn often hampers mobile collaboration. We are interested in re-designing a Smartphone’s contact book to provide cues of the current situations of others. ContextContacts presents several meaningful, automatically communicated situation cues of trusted others. Its interaction design follows social psychological findings on how people make social attributions based on impoverished cues, on how self-disclosure of cues is progressively and interactionally managed, and on how mobility affects interaction through cues. We argue how our design choices support mobile communication decisions and group coordinations by promoting awareness. As a result, the design is very minimal and integrated, in an “unremarkable ” manner, to previously learned usage patterns with the phone. First laboratory and field evaluations indicate important boundary conditions for and promising avenues toward more useful and enjoyable mobile awareness applications

ContextContacts: Re-Designing SmartPhone's Contact Book to Support Mobile Awareness and Collaboration

Acontextuality of the mobile phone often leads to a caller's uncertainty over a callee's current state, which in turn often hampers mobile collaboration. We are interested in re-designing a Smartphone's contact book to provide cues of the current situations of others. ContextContacts presents several meaningful, automatically communicated situation cues of trusted others. Its interaction design follows social psychological findings on how people make social attributions based on impoverished cues, on how self-disclosure of cues is progressively and interactionally managed, and on how mobility affects interaction through cues. We argue how our design choices support mobile communication decisions and group coordinations by promoting awareness. As a result, the design is very minimal and integrated, in an "unremarkable" manner, to previously learned usage patterns with the phone. First laboratory and field evaluations indicate important boundary conditions for and promising avenues toward more useful and enjoyable mobile awareness applications

Using Dramaturgical Methods to Gain More Dynamic User Understanding in User-Centered Design

In this paper we introduce the method of dramaturgical reading, which was originally a method of producing different crystallized and associative theatrical and graphical presentations of a role character in a drama context. We transfer dramaturgical reading into the field of user-centered design in order to understand, analyze and represent user-centered material. We compare a persona created with dramaturgical reading to a user profile and persona. We state that adapting a role character as an embodied and concrete user description in user-centered design improves the designers ’ ability to empathize and understand the users, thus improving the results of the design process. We believe personas must be enabled to “come to life ” and allowed to develop in the minds of the designers using them. The dramaturgical method is one way of accomplishing this. Author Keywords User-centered design, dramaturgical methods, interactiv

InfoRadar: Group and Public Messaging in the Mobile Context

Previous research has sought to utilize everyday messaging metaphors, such as the notice board, in location-based messaging systems. Unfortunately, many of the restrictions associated with the metaphors have been unnecessarily reintroduced to interaction, and results from the previous field trials have been disheartening. InfoRadar builds on experiences with these systems by presenting improvements in user interface functionality and services. By providing a novel radar interface for accessing messages, desktop-like temporal storage for messages, location-independent message threading, filtering functionality, contextual audience addressing, multimedia messaging, social activity indicator, and voting, InfoRadar attempts to combine both public and in-group messaging into one system. A preliminary field trial indicates that location-based aspects may have a role in facilitating mobile communication, particularly when it comes to engaging in social interaction with unknown people

Collective creation and sense-making of mobile media

Traditionally, mobile media sharing and messaging has been studied from the perspective of an individual author making media available to other users. With the aim of supporting spectator groups at large-scale events, we developed a messaging application for camera phones with the idea of collectively created albums called Media Stories. The field trial at a rally competition pointed out the collective and participative practices involved in the creation and sense-making of media, challenging the view of individual authorship. Members contributed actively to producing chains of messages in Media Stories, with more than half of the members as authors on average in each story. Observations indicate the centrality of collocated viewing and creation in the use of media. Design implications include providing a “common space ” and possibilities of creating collective objects, adding features that enrich collocated collective use, and supporting the active construction of awareness and social presence through the created media. Author Keywords Mobile group media, collective use, computer-mediate