Author(s):

Tamminen, Sakare; Oulasvirta, Antti; Toiskallio, Kalle; Kankainen, Anu

Title:

Understanding Mobile Contexts

Publication:

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing

Keywords:

adaptive user interfaces; anthropology; context-aware computing; design guidelines; ethnographic study; ethnomethodology; field studies; interaction; location-aware computing; mobile computing; naturalistic observation

Paper Summary:

This paper contributes to user-centered empirical methodologies by trying to understand how context-aware computing integrates with mobile activities. During the study, data was gathered by ethnographic participant observation and analyzed from an ethnomethodological standpoint. (Ethnomethodology is interested in how people make sense of their social world.)

During the study 25 participants (from five user groups) were analyzed using mobile devices while moving from place to place. Five researchers spent one to three days with each participant using video cameras, digital cameras and field notes to document observations. The data was then transcribed into a notebook with images on the left and story captions describing the events. Events were divided into "travel episodes" with each event consisting of a beginning, middle and end. In addition, special emphasis was given to finding nodal events or "events where an action transformed the present context into another recognizable context."

The data was then analyzed based on three criteria:

1. diagnosticity (specific to mobile contexts, but rare to fixed contexts)
2. generality (reoccurring in many travel episodes)
3. concreteness (specific enough to be taken into account in the design of context-aware systems)

Based on their observations, the authors developed design implications in regard to navigation, mobile communication, mobile games, and general user interface issues.

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