Interpreting and Acting on Mobile Awareness Cues

Mobile awareness systems provide user-controlled and automatic, sensor-derived cues of other users’ situations and in that way attempt to facilitate group practices and provide opportunities for social interaction. We are interested in investigating how users interpret these cues as a situation, action, or intention of a remote person and then act on them in everyday social interactions. Three field trials utilizing A–B intervention research methodology were conducted with three types of teenager groups (N = 15, total days = 243). Each trial had a slightly different variation of ContextContacts—a smartphone-based multicue mobile awareness system. We report on several analyses on how the cues were accessed, viewed, monitored, inferred, and acted on. HUMAN–COMPUTER INTERACTION, 2007, Volume 22, pp. 97–135 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Antti Oulasvirta is a cognitive scientist with an interest in the psychology of mobile interaction; he is a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Renaud Petit is a computer scientist with an interest in software for context-aware mobile services; he is a researcher in the From Data to Knowledge group at the University of Helsinki and at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Mika Raento is a computer scientist with an interest in context awareness, particularly privacy issues; he is a researcher in the From Data to Knowledge group at the University of Helsinki and at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Sauli Tiitta is a cognitive scientist with an interest in field trial methodology; he is a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. 98 OULASVIRTA ET AL.