Jeni Paay

Using mobile phones to support sustainability: a field study of residential electricity consumption

Recent focus on sustainability has made consumers more aware of our joint responsibility for conserving energy resources such as electricity. However, reducing electricity use can be difficult with only a meter and a monthly or annual electricity bill. With the emergence of new power meters units, information on electricity consumption is now available digitally and wirelessly. This enables the design and deployment of a new class of persuasive systems giving consumers insight into their use of energy resources and means for reducing it. In this paper, we explore the design and use of one such system, Power Advisor, promoting electricity conservation through tailored information on a mobile phone or tablet. The use of the system in 10 households was studied over 7 weeks. Findings provide insight into peoples awareness of electricity consumption in their home and how this may be influenced through design.

Just-for-us: a context-aware mobile information system facilitating sociality

Mobile computer technologies are increasingly being appropriated and used to facilitate peoples social life outside the work domain. Addressing this emerging domain of use, we present the design of a context-aware mobile information system prototype facilitating sociality in public places: Just-for-Us. The design of the prototype system was informed by two empirical studies: an architectural analysis of a recently built public space in Melbourne, Australia and a field study of small groups socialising there. We describe these two studies and illustrate how findings informed our prototype design. Finally, we outline an ongoing field study of the use of the Just-for-Us prototype.

Blended interaction spaces for distributed team collaboration

In recent years there has been an introduction of sophisticated new video conferencing technologies (e.g., HP Halo, Cisco Telepresence) that have led to enhancements in the collaborative user experience over traditional video conferencing technologies. Traditional video conferencing set-ups often distort the shared spatial properties of action and communication due to screen and camera orientation disparities and other asymmetries. These distortions affect access to the common resources used to mutually organize action and communication. By contrast, new systems, such as Halo, are physically configured to reduce these asymmetries and orientation disparities, thereby minimizing these spatial distortions. By creating appropriate shared spatial geometries, the distributed spaces become “blended” where the spatial geometries of the local space continue coherently across the distributed boundary into the remote site, providing the illusion of a single unified space. Drawing on theories of embodied action and workplace design we discuss the importance of this geometric “blending” of space for distributed collaboration and how this is achieved in systems such as Halo. We then extend these arguments to explore the concept of Blended Interaction Spaces: blended spaces in which interactive groupware is incorporated in ways spatially consistent with the physical geometries of the video-mediated set-up. We illustrate this discussion through a system called BISi that introduces interactive horizontal and vertical multipoint surfaces into a blended video-mediated collaboration space. In presenting this system, we highlight some of the particular challenges of creating these systems arising from the spatial consequences of different interaction mechanisms (e.g., direct touch or remote control) and how they affect movement and spatial configuration of people in these spaces.

A longitudinal review of Mobile HCI research methods

This paper revisits a research methods survey from 2003 and contrasts it with a survey from 2010. The motivation is to gain insight about how mobile HCI research has evolved over the last decade in terms of approaches and focus. The paper classifies 144 publications from 2009 published in 10 prominent outlets by their research methods and purpose. Comparing this to the survey for 2000-02 show that mobile HCI research has changed methodologically. From being almost exclusively driven by engineering and applied research, current mobile HCI is primarily empirically driven, involves a high number of field studies, and focus on evaluating and understanding, as well as engineering. It has also become increasingly multi-methodological, combining and diversifying methods from different disciplines. At the same time, new opportunities and challenges have emerged.

Public Pervasive Computing: Making the Invisible Visible

The increasing deployment of pervasive computing technologies in urban environments has inspired researchers to explore the intersections between physical, social, and digital domains. The multidisciplinary Just-for-Us project is developing a mobile Web service designed to facilitate new forms of interaction by adapting content to the users physical and social context. These trends have motivated researchers within the human-computer interaction (HCI) community as well as sociologists and city architects, planners, and designers to explore the use of pervasive computing technologies in inhabited environments

Out on the town: A socio-physical approach to the design of a context-aware urban guide

As urban environments become increasingly hybridized, mixing the social, built, and digital in interesting ways, designing for computing in the city presents new challenges—how do we understand such hybridization, and then respond to it as designers? Here we synthesize earlier work in human-computer interaction, sociology and architecture in order to deliberately influence the design of digital systems with an understanding of their built and social context of use. We propose, illustrate, and evaluate a multidisciplinary approach combining rapid ethnography, architectural analysis, design sketching, and paper prototyping. Following the approach we are able to provide empirically grounded representations of the socio-physical context of use, in this case people socializing in urban spaces. We then use this understanding to influence the design of a context aware system to be used while out on the town. We believe that the approach is of value more generally, particularly when achieving powerfully situated interactions is the design ambition.

Indexicality: Understanding mobile human-computer interaction in context

A lot of research has been done within the area of mobile computing and context-awareness over the last 15 years, and the idea of systems adapting to their context has produced promising results for overcoming some of the challenges of user interaction with mobile devices within various specialized domains. However, today it is still the case that only a limited body of theoretically grounded knowledge exists that can explain the relationship between users, mobile system user interfaces, and their context. Lack of such knowledge limits our ability to elevate learning from the mobile systems we develop and study from a concrete to an abstract level. Consequently, the research field is impeded in its ability to leap forward and is limited to incremental steps from one design to the next. Addressing the problem of this void, this article contributes to the body of knowledge about mobile interaction design by promoting a theoretical approach for describing and understanding the relationship between user interface representations and user context. Specifically, we promote the concept of indexicality derived from semiotics as an analytical concept that can be used to describe and understand a design. We illustrate the value of the indexicality concept through an analysis of empirical data from evaluations of three prototype systems in use. Based on our analytical and empirical work we promote the view that users interpret information in a mobile computer user interface through creation of meaningful indexical signs based on the ensemble of context and system.

Understanding the user experience of location-based services: five principles of perceptual organisation applied

Within recent years, the development of location-based services have received increasing attention from the software industry as well as from researchers within a wide range of computing disciplines as a particular interesting class of context-aware mobile systems. However, while a lot of research has been done into sensing, adapting to, and philosophising over the complex concept of ‘context’, little theoretically based knowledge exists about why, from a user experience perspective, some system designs work well and why others do not. Contributing to this discussion, this article suggests the perspective of ‘Gestalt theory’ as a theoretical framework for understanding the use of this class of computer systems. Based on findings from an empirical study, we argue that the user experience of location-based services can be understood through Gestalt theorys five principles of perceptual organisation: proximity, closure, symmetry, continuity and similarity. Specifically, we argue, that these principles assist us in explaining the interplay between context and technology in the user experience of location-based services, and how people make sense of small and fragmented pieces of information on mobile devices in context.

Understanding Situated Social Interactions: A Case Study of Public Places in the City

Ubiquitous and mobile computer technologies are increasingly being appropriated to facilitate people’s social life outside the work domain. Designing such social and collaborative technologies requires an understanding of peoples’ physical and social context, and the interplay between these and their situated interactions. In response, this paper addresses the challenge of informing design of mobile services for fostering social connections by using the concept of place for studying and understanding peoples’ social activities in a public built environment. We present a case study of social experience of a physical place providing an understanding of peoples’ situated social interactions in public places of the city derived through a grounded analysis of small groups of friends socialising out on the town. Informed by this, we describe the design and evaluation of a mobile prototype system facilitating sociality in the city by (1) allowing people to share places, (2) indexing to places, and (3) augmenting places.

Understanding Individual Differences for Tailored Smoking Cessation Apps

Finding ways to help people quit smoking is a high priority in health behavior change research. Recent HCI studies involving technologies using specific quitting techniques such as social support and SMS messaging to help people quit have reported some success. Early studies using computer generated print material report significant success of tailored versus non-tailored material, however, there is limited understanding on what aspects of digitally delivered quitting assistance should be tailored and how. To address this, we have conducted an empirical investigation with smokers to identify perceived importance of different types of help when quitting and the potential role of technology in providing such help. We found that people are highly individual in their approach to quitting and the kind of help they regard as relevant to their situation. Our contribution is a collection of empirically derived themes for tailoring smoking cessation apps to individual quitting needs.