Martin Porcheron

Using Mobile Phones in Pub Talk

We present the findings from a study of how people interleave mobile phone use with conversation in pubs. Our findings, informed by ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, unpack the interactional methods through which groups of people in pubs occasioned, sustained, and disengaged from mobile device use during conversation with friends. Fundamentally, the work that is done consists of various methods of accounting for mobile device use, and displaying involvement in social interaction while the device is used. We highlight multiple examples of the nuanced ways in which interleaving is problematic in interaction, and relate our findings to the CSCW and HCI literature on collocated interaction. We conclude by considering avenues for future research, and discuss how we may support or disrupt interleaving practices through design to overcome the highlighted interactional troubles.

Measuring the effect of think aloud protocols on workload using fNIRS

The Think Aloud Protocol (TAP) is a verbalisation technique widely employed in HCI user studies to give insight into user experience, yet little work has explored the impact that TAPs have on participants during user studies. This paper utilises a brain sensing technique, fNIRS, to observe the effect that TAPs have on participants. Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a brain sensing technology that offers the potential to provide continuous, detailed insight into brain activity, enabling an objective view of cognitive processes during complex tasks. Participants were asked to perform a mathematical task under 4 conditions: nonsense verbalisations, passive concurrent think aloud protocol, invasive concurrent think aloud protocol, and a baseline of silence. Subjective ratings and performance measures were collected during the study. Our results provide a novel view into the effect that different forms of verbalisation have on workload during tasks. Further, the results provide a means for estimating the effect of spoken artefacts when measuring workload, which is another step towards our goal of proactively involving fNIRS analysis in ecologically valid user studies.

Talking with Conversational Agents in Collaborative Action

This one-day workshop intends to bring together both academics and industry practitioners to explore collaborative challenges in speech interaction. Recent improvements in speech recognition and computing power has led to conversational interfaces being introduced to many of the devices we use every day, such as smartphones, watches, and even televisions. These interfaces allow us to get things done, often by just speaking commands, relying on a reasonably well understood single-user model. While research on speech recognition is well established, the social implications of these interfaces remain underexplored, such as how we socialise, work, and play around such technologies, and how these might be better designed to support collaborative collocated talk-in-action. Moreover, the advent of new products such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, which are positioned as supporting multi-user interaction in collocated environments such as the home, makes exploring the social and collaborative challenges around these products, a timely topic. In the workshop, we will review current practices and reflect upon prior work on studying talk-in-action and collocated interaction. We wish to begin a dialogue that takes on the renewed interest in research on spoken interaction with devices, grounded in the existing practices of the CSCW community.

Co-curator: designing for mobile ideation in groups

We introduce Co-Curator, a prototype mobile app designed to support collection and sharing of referential sources of inspiration in face-to-face design ideation meetings. The design of the app stems from both ideas of repurposing mobile devices in everyday mundane tasks and existing practice amongst designers to share and collate sources of inspiration during the early stages of collaborative design projects. The findings from a trial show that the app was positively received and that people felt that it supported creating a collection of sources, as well as the task of sharing within design ideation meetings. Furthermore, the trial suggests that the synchronised gesture required to share sources seemingly alleviates the awkwardness arising from public gesture performance. Finally, from the findings we also highlight further considerations that need to be given to better support coordination and focus within these meetings.

Collaborative use of mobile devices to curate sources of inspiration

We demonstrate a prototype mobile application designed to support individually collecting personal sources of inspiration on mobile phones, and then the sharing and curating of these collected materials in a face-to-face situation.

Reflecting on the Study of Mobile Collocated Interactions: The Changing Face of Wearable Devices

Wearables, unlike smartphones, typically afford increasingly private or discrete interactions that are invisible to the casual observer. This shifting paradigm of device interaction combined with the increasing popularity of wearables presents an exciting opportunity for researchers to reflect on existing qualitative methodologies employed in observational studies of mobile collocated interactions, and how these can be adapted to the changing landscape of technological interaction. This position paper discusses some of these methodologies, and questions the suitability of these approaches with respect to the changing form that devices can take.