Interpreting and Acting on Mobile Awareness Cues

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. Antti Oulasvirta is a cognitive scientist with an interest in the psychology of mobile interaction; he is a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT. Renaud Petit is a computer scientist with an interest in software for context-aware mobile services; he is a researcher in the From Data to Knowledge