Communicating in a Ubicomp World: Interaction Rules for Guiding Design of Mobile Interfaces

As computing resources become accessible anytime anywhere, rules of interaction and engagement between humans are changing. For example, response-time expectations have dramatically decreased in recent years because of the assumption that recipients are constantly checking e-mail and text messages on their mobile devices. Likewise, expectations of context-awareness have become an important part of interactions. For example, the tag-line “Sent from my iPhone” is a means of conveying the context (mobile) of the message sender, which also serves to explain—or offer an excuse for—the brevity of the response. In this manner, there are several design strategies that are needed for managing expectations, as new rules of interaction emerge due to the ubiquity of our access to computing resources. This paper presents a list of 12 such interaction rules based on theory and research in interpersonal communication and psychology. These rules provide design ideas for mobile ubicomp interfac-