Monthly Archive for April, 2010

A diary study of mobile information needs

Published on 4/30/2010 in Diary and References. Closed Tags: , , .

T. Sohn, K. A. Li, W. G. Griswold, and J. D. Hollan, “A diary study of mobile information needs,” in CHI ’08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, (New York, NY, USA), pp. 433–442, ACM, 2008. [PDF]

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This paper present a user study of how and why information needs arise when the user is on the go. The study reports a diary study of 20 people over the course of two weeks. They examined the information needs the participants had and the strategies that they used to address these needs.They also focused on the contextual factors thar prompted each need and influenced how it was addressed.

The authors used a snipped technique which consists in sending a short SMS to capture the gist of the moment and a web diary to provide more structured information around that moment. At the end of the day participants logged into the website to answer six questions about their snippet:

1. Where were you?

2. What were you doing?

3. What was your information need?

4. I addressed the need (At the time, Later, Not at all)

5. If you attempted to address the need, how did you do so? If you didn’t make an attempt, why didn’t you?

6. Could you have addressed your need by looking at your personal data (e.g., email, calendar, web browsing history, chat history, or other)

Through the 421 generated entries they were able to define the following taxonomy: trivia needs (18.5%), prompted by conversations or location-specific artifacts; directions (13.3%); friend info (7.6%); business hours, phone numbers (7.1%); personal schedule (6.4%); movie times (2.4%); and travel related.

Participants indicated that 72% of their reported information needs were prompted by some contextual factor. The contextual prompting can be classified in four broad categories: Activity, Location, Time, and Conversation. Activities reflect what the person was doing at the time. Location is the place where the person was at and includes any additional artifacts at that specific location. Time is the time when the need arose, and conversation is any phone or in-person conversation the participant was involved in at the time. Some diary entries were related to multiple aspects of context, such as having a conversation with someone about artifacts at the current location.

Sohn_contextual-factors.jpg

Figure 5. Percentage of different contextual factors that prompted information needs

The study reports qualitative observations of the multitude of ingenious methods that people use to satisfy their information needs. Many needs were postponed or not addressed because of attentional cost orcontextual factors. The lack of mobile internet was not the only inibitor. The authors conclude that the device’s sensitivity to the task at hand, situational context, and the links between personal and public data holds promise to ease mobile information access.

Mobile end-user service adoption studies: A selective categorization

Published on 4/29/2010 in Diary and References. Closed Tags: , .

P. E. Pedersen, “Mobile end-user service adoption studies: A selective categorization,” in InterMedia Workshop on Mobility, (Oslo, Norway), November 20 2001. [PDF]

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This paper reviews about 10 years of research on the users’ adoption of mobile technology. The author defines a typology of perspectives in end-user adoption studies dividing them between 3 kinds: a. diffusion research; b. adoption research; and c. domestication research.

Diffusion studies of mobile end-user services focus on describing adoption at aggregate level. typically, these studies classify adopters as belonging to different segments, such as early adopters, early majority, late majority, laggards, and non-adopters. Adoption studies focus on describing and explaining adoption processes at the individual adopter level. Some descriptive studies focus on the decision process to adopt a new service, while others also investigate the attitudes towards using mobile services as use is habituated. Finally, domestication studies focus on studying service useand the consequences of use. However, these are not limited to individuals or aggregates but describe usage patterns of groups in society.

Pedersen_domestication-research.jpg

Welcome to the wireless world: problems using and understanding mobile telephony

Published on 4/29/2010 in Diary and References. Closed

Palen, L., and Salzman, M. (2001). Welcome to the wireless world: problems using and understanding mobile telephony. In Harper R. and Brown B. (eds.) The Wireless World. Springer Verlag, London. [PDF]

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An interesting ethnographical study of handset usability. Their data collection and analysis approaches were in the qualitative tradition of the social sciences. They conducted multiple in-depth and open interviews over the course of the 6 weeks immediately following service acquisition. To understand the context of use, the authors grounded our questions in information that subjects reported in voice mail diaries, a technique they adapted from a paper-based diary study approach (Rieman, 1993). To tie these observations to frequency of telephone use as a characteristic of communicative practice, they collected data on actual calling behavior.

As a result, they outlined four attributes of wireless telephony that articulate the sources of user confusion with the technology.

What we talk about when we talk about context

Published on 4/28/2010 in Diary and References. Closed

P. Dourish, “What we talk about when we talk about context,” Personal Ubiquitous Comput., vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 19–30, 2004. [PDF]

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An interesting conceptual article on the different theories about context. The author basically argues that we should avoid defining context as a status, a static entity (as in the positivist approach). Rather, the author argues that context could be defined within the interaction of agents in the communities of practices:

a. context is a relational property;
b. the scope of contextual properties are defined dynamically;
c. context is an occasioned property, relevant to particular settings, particular instances of actions, and particular parties to that actions;
d. context arises from the activity.

The central concern of context is with the question: how and why, in the course of their interactions, do people achieve and maintain a mutual understanding of the context for their actions?

The meaning of a technology, then, cannot be divorced from the ways that people have of using it. We see this in two points: a. people often find ways of using technology that are unexpected or unanticipated; b. even when technology conform to expectations, the meaning of the technology for those who use it depends on how generic features are particularized, how conventions emerge. The implications are well explained by Dourish:

the major design opportunity concerns not use of predefined context within a ubiquitous computing system, but rather how can ubiquitous computing support the process by which context is continually manifest, defined, negotiated, and shared? Ubiquitous computing technologies extend the reach of computation into the everyday world, and that world is one in which, through our everyday practice, we enact, sustain, and reproduce new forms of social meaning. The meaning itself may, by definition, be something that can never be removed from the social world and encoded in the technical. Nonetheless, though, technology plays a critical role in the evolution of meaning within communities of practice.

Rethinking pagerank

Published on 4/27/2010 in Diary. Closed

Interestingly in the last few months researchers started thinking about possible alternatives to Google’s pagerank algorithm. Given the rich information coming from trusted peers in social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, researchers started designing alternatives based on the links shared in these platforms as well:

- Facebook EdgeRank: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/22/facebook-edgerank/

- Twitter Tunkrank: http://thenoisychannel.com/2010/04/07/go-tunkrank/

Politica e Mafia

Published on 4/18/2010 in aphorisms. Closed

Politica e mafia sono due poteri che vivono sul controllo dello stesso territorio. O si fanno la guerra o si mettono d’accordo.

Paolo Borsellino