Tuula Kärkkäinen

Expected user experience of mobile augmented reality services: a user study in the context of shopping centres

The technical enablers for mobile augmented reality (MAR) are becoming robust enough to allow the development of MAR services that are truly valuable for consumers. Such services would provide a novel interface to the ubiquitous digital information in the physical world, hence serving in great variety of contexts and everyday human activities. To ensure the acceptance and success of future MAR services, their development should be based on knowledge about potential end users’ expectations and requirements. We conducted 16 semi-structured interview sessions with 28 participants in shopping centres, which can be considered as a fruitful context for MAR services. We aimed to elicit new knowledge about (1) the characteristics of the expected user experience and (2) central user requirements related to MAR in such a context. From a pragmatic viewpoint, the participants expected MAR services to catalyse their sense of efficiency, empower them with novel context-sensitive and proactive functionalities and raise their awareness of the information related to their surroundings with an intuitive interface. Emotionally, MAR services were expected to offer stimulating and pleasant experiences, such as playfulness, inspiration, liveliness, collectivity and surprise. The user experience categories and user requirements that were identified can serve as targets for the design of user experience of future MAR services.

Communication technology for human-dog interaction: exploration of dog owners' experiences and expectations

Whereas communication technology to connect people has long been an integral part of our everyday lives, it has only recently expanded to offer applications for dogs and dog-owners. In this paper, we present two explorative studies to understand the experiences and expectations of dog owners for communication technology to support their interaction with dogs. These studies look at two different user groups, hunters and pet owners, charting the lessons learnt from the current technology and exploring the aspects that should be taken into account when designing future applications and services. Our findings reveal that usability problems are still the dominant issue with current applications. We also suggest key design implications which can be utilized in the development of future human-dog interaction systems.

I don't mind being logged, but want to remain in control: a field study of mobile activity and context logging

People have a natural tendency to capture and share their experiences via stories, photos and other mementos. As users are increasingly carrying the enabling devices with them, capturing life events is becoming more spontaneous. The automatic and persistent collecting of information about ones life and behavior is called lifelogging. Lifelogging relieves the user from manually capturing events but also poses many challenges from the users perspective. We conducted a field study to explore the user experience of mobile phone activity and context logging, a technically feasible form of lifelogging. Our results indicate that users quickly stop to pay attention to the logging, but they want to be in control of logging the most private information. Although logging personal content, such as text messages, is experienced as a possible privacy threat, browsing the content and getting insight to the revealed life patterns was considered interesting and fun.

Cool interaction with calm technologies: experimenting with ice as a multitouch surface

In this paper we describe our interactive ice-wall installation, which is a multi-touch surface built from ice. Our demo seeks to stretch the boundaries of current ubiquitous computing systems by trying out a new material, which embeds itself to the environment -- here, outdoors in a snowy winter. In addition to the function of the interactive installation, where we show that ice as a material can be used for such purposes, we seek to offer an inspirational aspect to the design of ubiquitous computing systems. We also present the feedback collected from 33 surveyed and 10 interviewed users who interacted with the system.

A diary study on annotating locations with mixed reality information

With advanced sensor technologies and tools for content creation, current mobile devices possess features for providing information services based on users location. There are several services for geographically pinned user-generated content focusing on providing information to users in unfamiliar locations. However, information needs regarding location-based content services in the familiar everyday context have so far been quite little researched. Our research entailed a 12-day user study where nine participants kept a diary, in which they reported needs for annotations of locations they had come across in various day-to-day situations. Based on our results, we present design implications for annotation services, taking into account the user needs in various daily situations. The results show that the services should support flexible controls of the visibility of annotations, notifications about selected annotations within the vicinity, and easy remote annotations. In addition, the system should support collective and living annotations that can be contributed by several users.

Experience explorer: context-based browsing of personal media

We designed and built a system for browsing digital content and activity data created and gathered with mobile phones. We evaluated the system with 13 users to study the value of the context-based visualizations in real life. In addition to supporting reminiscing, content aggregated on the map revealed life patterns supporting reflection. Aggregation of items from several people also revealed common interests among friends.