Interpreting and Acting on Mobile Awareness Cues

Abstract

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.