Relify
Roger Andersson Reimer [roger.axx@gmail.com] Master s thesis in Interaction DesignIndex
Abstract 7
1 Introduction 9
2 Background 11
2.1 Mobile phones as personal and social devices 11
2.2 Mediating relationships through mobile technology 12
2.3 Representing relationships through mobile technology 15
2.4 Summary of background 17
3 Design exploration 19
3.1 User interviews 19
3.2 Findings from user interviews 20
3.3 Defining the initial design domain 22
3.4 Concept development 23
3.5 Early prototypes 26
3.6 Field evaluation of early prototypes 30
3.7 Findings in field evaluation 31
3.8 Summary of design exploration 32
4 Relify 35
4.1 Problem focus 35
4.2 Design process 35
4.3 The Relify concept 36
4.4 Personas 41
4.5 Scenarios 43
4.6 Use cases 44
4.7 Wireframes and user interface flows 44
4.8 Visual Design 46
5 Evaluating Relify 53
5.1 Procedure for pre-study evaluation 53
5.2 Findings in pre-study evaluation 53
5.3 Procedure for prototype evaluations 56
5.4 Findings in prototype evaluation 57
6 Discussion 63
6.1 Relify in perspective 63
6.2 Outcomes of Relify and its design implications 64
6.3 The past and the future of Relify 66
7 Conclusion 67
8 References 69
Acknowledgements
Many people deserve credit for making this project happen. My supervisors Jörn Messeter from Malmö University and Daniel Johansson from TAT, for helping me frame, direct and realize the project through helpful comments and guidance. Also many thanks to Hampus Jakobsson from TAT for excellent discussions and valuable insights on the world of mobile user interfaces. A big thank you to all the fellow thesis workers at TAT’s Gustav Adolf Torg office, who provided me with a superb working environment and helping brains whenever needed: James Haliburton, Phoebe Liu, Josef Grankvist, Luke Pedersen, Marcus Ericsson, Minna Gedin, Christoffer Hedin, John Eriksson, Vickey Kamlesh and Shoaib Ahmed. And of course, most important of them all, my dear wife Melissa for patience and supported when finally putting this thesis together.
This master thesis at Malmö University is done in collaboration with the mobile user interface company TAT - The Astonishing Tribe.
Abstract
Mobile phone’s offer enriched ways of communicating and have become devices with a very strong personal attachment for most users. While being personal communication devices, mobile phones displays limits with user interfaces more focused on features and distinct applications rather than providing rich interactions with a focus on people and communication between people.
The present project explores interaction design for the mobile phone as a more personal and social device. It’s key outcome is the Relify concept with it’s affiliated prototype. Relify is a mobile user interface where presentation of people and communication is influenced by the character of the relationships with the people involved. Relify creates a personalized and flexible way for users to gain access to both personal communication and web feeds from third party services within a seamless user interface.
This report describes the explorative design process leading to Relify, findings from field testing of it’s prototype and design themes identified during the work. The work concludes that Relify
demonstrates a personalized and fluent user interface with increased overview and a richer user experience. Among it’s experiential qualities is an increased sense of connection, that can excite communication between people. In summarizing the work, considerations and implications on designing mobile user interfaces are discussed against the experiences of this project.
1 Introduction
Mobile phones are pervasive communication devices that enable the social life of the wearer. Cheaper data plans and constant internet connectivity is now becoming more reality than fiction in mobile devices. With an increased connectivity, a richer variety of ways to stay in touch with and experience one’s social network is coming to life. Social networking services on mobile phones and wireless publishing of mobile phone photos to the internet are just a few examples that illustrate this trend.
As mobile phone’s have made a huge impact in becoming a social necessity and an always available personal communication tool, it begs the question - how is one’s relationships actually dealt with through one? Look at the market today, and you will find mobile phone interfaces with limited flexibility and standardized ways of presenting people and communication. Contacts and their actions are treated much the same, ordered by their alphabetical name or the clock time of a communication event. In reality, we as humans hold different relationships, communicate for a variety of reasons and share very different bonds and feelings towards the people we communicate with, something obviously not reflected in our mobile devices.
This project concerns designing a mobile interface in which relationships and different types of communication can be experienced in a more fluent and rewarding way. The key outcome of this work is the Relify concept with it’s affiliated prototype. Relify is a mobile user interface concept with a strong people centered interaction paradigm, where presentation of people and
communication is influenced by the character of the relationships with people involved. Relify creates a personalized and flexible way for users to gain access to both personal communication and web feeds from third party services within a seamless user interface. It furthermore offers means for smoothly focusing on different relationships across situations and enriched exploration of
communication and reflection around relationships. Field testing of the Relify prototype conclude that participants value the overview and fluency of Relify compared to their current mobile phone’s contact book and messaging applications.
The work reported in this thesis started out as an exploration in designing for the mobile phone as a social and personal device. During the design process, research on current user practices, concept development and iterative design development with sketching, prototyping and field evaluations finalized the direction of the work. In the second chapter, Background, a general overview of the mobile phone as a social and personal tool is presented. The third chapter, Design exploration, presents the early phase of the design process. Here, the outcomes of qualitative user interviews together with early concepts and prototype field tests is discussed. As the exploration frames the final concept for this thesis, the fourth chapter Relify follows. In this chapter, the design process and prototype development of the main concept is described. In chapter five, Evaluating Relify, field evaluation of the Relify prototype is presented. Chapter six, Discussion, summarizes the key findings and addresses important design qualities identified during the work. In chapter seven,
2 Background
This chapter outlines a background for examining and understanding mobile phones as personal communication devices. The direction of this work is framed by highlighting trends and directions within mobile communication technologies and by discussing observations, existing practices, products and recent design concepts throughout the chapter.
The chapter starts by discussing the broad tendencies and implications of mobile communication technologies we see today. It looks at a more personal communication culture on the rise and discusses the mobile phone’s role as an enabler of personal expression and communication within that shift. The chapter provides an overview of the new forms of social interactions and ways of contact that is made available through and supported by development in mobile communication - that in straightforward terms is about more data from more people at more occasions.
Working within an area more driven by industry than academia, there is a clear lack of up-to-date published research on the topics at hand. However, to reflect what some of the initial observations mean in practice, the chapter investigates and discusses recent mobile interface concepts that take issues of personalization into account. A common factor among the selected examples is that they demonstrate interesting or appealing design solutions to represent contacts and communication in a personal and social communication culture. The chapter is concluded with a discussion of the research and examples introduced within the chapter.
2.1 Mobile phones as personal and social devices
Campbell and Park (2008) view development within mobile communication as demonstrating a shift towards a more personal communication culture. Although mobile communication share similarities with other types networked communication (such as the computer), they see that mobile phones in particular characterize the change, as these: “...are often worn on body, highly
individualized, and regarded as extensions of the self” (Campbell and Park, 2008).
Emotional and personal expressions
Mobile phones offer increased flexibility of communication, allowing for more situations where communication can take place. Mobile phones also tend to be characteristically stylish, following from being a uniquely individualized artifact. Compared to a shared landline phone, a mobile device is attached to a person rather to a fixed physical location - consequently viewed by many as an extension of the self (Campbell and Park, 2008).
The wearable nature of mobile phones also open up practices that further exemplifies their personal nature. Based on their cross-cultural study Chipchase et al. (2005), come to characterize the mobile phone as a “mobile essential”, an object of such a particular importance to people that it’s always carried with whilst leaving home, only paralleled by keys and wallet in vitality. In a study of phone covers collected from a recycling plant in Japan, Chipchase (2006) documented a wide variety of phone customizations, with stickers, logos and illustrations on the shells. Notably, in some of the modifications, the inside of the back cover was used as a shrine, containing personal information such as phone numbers or pictures. Changing the ring tone or modifying the shell demonstrate
Enriching communication
More than exhibiting new forms of personal expressivity, use of mobile devices enable new patterns of communication and contact among people. Campbell and Park also describe how an increasingly connected mode among peers enabled through features such as chatting and text messaging reflects a personalization of communication and how mobile devices strengthens personal bonds within social networks (Campbell and Park, 2008). This tendency is also reported on by Habuchi (2005) while researching mobile phone use among Japanese youth. The study reveals a “tele-cocooning” mode of mobile communication - a selective state with very constant and close contact among remote peers (Habuchi, 2005). In Campbell and Park’s (2008) account, this demonstrates a personalization of the communication network’s themselves.
Customizing, personalizing and adapting technology
Information technology may provide ways to alter an interface or device to more purposefully fit the user’s needs in various respects. Saffer (2006) makes a distinction between three means that a device may be changed to fit the actual user: customization, personalization and adaptation. Customization, according to Saffer, is the altering of an applications or objects appearance, for example through painting on the objects surface or the selection of an interface skin (or theme). Personalization then, is altering functionality of an object to better reflect the users choices, changing not only the surface but also how something works. This can typically be made through for example defining shortcut keystrokes. Adaptation happens without the users direct involvement, through the device initiating a change based on the patterns of how, where and when the device is used.
2.2 Mediating relationships through mobile technology
A movement towards a new type of communication culture, made possible through mobile technology was introduced in the previous section. This section highlights recent development within and thinking around communicative devices. It describes how new types of social interactions have emerged supported by mobile communication.
Through the last decade, there has been a growing interest in interactive technologies to support and mediate relationships over distance with intimate others (Vetere et al., 2005). While most of these approaches goes beyond the scope of the present work, their emergence and typical instances is nevertheless worth considering. Simplified, these technologies can be viewed as emerging along two broader streams, either as dedicated objects or service frameworks within other platforms. While these two tendencies themselves exhibit different means and ends in mediating relationships, they result in a sense of awareness of others and supports communication of small intimate acts in everyday situations (see Vetere et al., 2005, for an extensive description of technologies designed to mediate intimacy).
My account of dedicated objects is that they are designed for and geared towards a set of very certain relationships, such as between couples or family members. Being dedicated, they are also typically bound to specific places such as the home or the office, and generally not wearable and continuously connected. An influential example from this category is Strong and Gaver’s (1996) feather, which starts to float when a remote partner picks up an interconnected picture frame. A second example is Kaye’s (2004) Love Egg, a messaging system where an egg appears and starts rolling on a dish when an intimate message is left.
From SMS to Jaiku
While the previously mentioned examples exhibits a dependence to places and objects, mobile devices increasingly offer their own ways of mediating awareness and communication, typically manifested as what can be distinguished as service frameworks. Although the apparent limitations in message expressiveness and drawbacks in usability, SMS has become a massively popular service by offering straightforward qualities for communicating, and thus supporting connections between people. More recently, social networking services accessible through mobile devices that allow sharing of status information have appeared through for example Jaiku (Jaiku, 2008), Twitter (Twitter, 2008) and Facebook (Facebook, 2008). They all offer the same kind of basic feature of sharing awareness within a social network.
Jaiku and Twitter are commonly described as micro-blogs, providing their users with quickly accessible features for posting updates on the activities and whereabouts of oneself and displaying and commenting on other’s posts. The benefit of micro-blogs should be seen as a broadcast of personally related updates, providing insights to the current state of the writer and low threshold entry points to engage in niche conversations. While Facebook have a much larger set of features for social networking, one of it’s most prominent and commonly used features is the comparable status update functionality.
From text to streams of content
In Jaiku’s mobile phone application (Figure 1), the service merges with the phone’s contact book into a “live contact list” that not only shows contacts, but also indicates their latest status posts, availability and locations. Whereas the Twitter posts today are basically all about text, Jaiku may also automatically include feeds of content from third party sources (pictures, songs, links, blog updates and so forth) into the stream of published events. This integration aligns with the general tendency of traditional mediaconsumers becoming producers themselves. Jaiku hence combines it’s own platform of publishing and undertaking small conversations
with the features of a feed reader. Feed readers are typically used to reduce the effort of checking in and keeping updated with websites, creating a dedicated or personal flow of information from a combination of web sources. When subscribing to a feed, the feed reader checks for new content which is “pulled” into a united feed of all subscribed feeds. The content the feed reader retrieve is usually in the form of RSS formatted data, why they are interchangeably called RSS readers.
The problem with this way of collecting information is that the amount of subscribed content can be overwhelming. Many feed readers hence offer features for searching, tagging and categorizing content, but they are rarely geared towards filtering of information based on the people behind the published content. Jaiku, as described above, together with for FriendFeed (FriendFeed, 2008) stand out as two examples where content is connected to a particular person and can be filtered
The already mentioned social networking service Facebook also offers various ways of filtering updates from contacts within the service. It’s possible to filter contacts by who recently updated status, by self-defined groups of contacts, by regional and work-related networks as well as by relationship characteristics (such as, how you got to know someone). This way of filtering in Facebook is mainly geared towards finding people rather than getting a dynamic overview of what they’ve been up to. When filtering, only the basic contact profile with picture, name and status is presented, rather than a history of someone’s recent activities (which is only retrieved for a certain person when navigating to that persons profile page).
Social groupings for awareness information
With increasing amounts of personally produced content made available, such content provides an additional source of communication and awareness that contributes to maintaining and building relationships. But, how is different information relevant and useful in practice? The research of Neustaedter et al. (2006) identifies three different social categories for awareness information: home inhabitants, intimate socials, and extended socials. In their categorization, home inhabitants are people with whom one lives, such as significant others and family members. Participants in their study expressed a strong need to have a daily awareness of their home inhabitants. The group of intimate socials are people with a close personal relationship. Participants expressed a similarly strong desire for awareness of members in this group. The extended socials represent people with whom one has more casual relationships. Within this group, closeness between individuals varied which consequently indicate differences in the desired frequency of continuous awareness
information, depending on the people involved (Neustaedter et al., 2006). Figure 2 depicts the awareness spectrum of Neustaedter et al. (2006).
Figure 2: Awareness spectrum across different social proximity groups - home inhabitants, intimate socials and extended socials. Adopted from Neustader et al. (2006).
Neustaedter et al. (2006) further describe how the need of awareness differs between these groups on different kinds of awareness information. For instance, participants request less level of detail on location and activity information from the extended socials group, favoring knowledge about major events (such as changing jobs or getting married) happening to people in this group. For intimate socials, participants expressed an interest in knowing about past or upcoming activities, rather than information on the actual current activities, to maintain a level of shared personal knowledge.
2.3 Representing relationships through mobile technology
In the previous section, new practices and means of communication developing within the mobile realm was presented. At the same time does the list and grid menu based interfaces dominate the world of mobile handsets. Such interaction paradigms in turn influences the way we view and do communication on mobile devices - people are made into entries in a list and represented and interacted with accordingly. Sergio (2006) reflects on design concepts for mobile interfaces with alternative spatial metaphors, whose representations he believe can incidentally turn themselves
“...into tools of self-reflection, subtle indications of our communication patterns that can make us more aware of who we contact the most and who instead gets forgotten” (Sergio, 2006).
In the light of such concerns, this section looks at the alternate interface paradigms for presenting contacts and communication in a more personal and social communication culture. These examples provides inspiration not only for visual presentation. They also explore new interaction models and new ways to look at and personalize communication on mobile phones.
My Social Fabric
The concept My Social Fabric (Blyth, 2005) is a strong example of an alternate interface metaphor for maintaining contacts and presenting more than traditional mobile phone contact list information. Instead of a typical list based contact book, contacts are represented with animated human figures as avatars of friends, acquaintances and relatives (Figure 3). Mutual communication patterns in turn affect the behavior and poses of the avatars. For instance, an avatar of someone which you have a continuously frequent communication with will take a more active pose in the visual representation - and in that way signify a special relationship.
While this concept exhibits an appealing way of
self-organizing and representing contacts, its scope is restricted to replace the way the contact book looks and what it contains. It does not address or support any way to present communication in relation to its visual representation of people, making it much a stand alone application for amusement and reflection rather than an actually useful and integrated communication tool.
Uni.me
Uni.me (Amorim, 2006) is a another mobile phone concept in which contacts are presented as abstract figures in a visual space (Figure 4). At the center of the screen is an illuminated “active area”, that is lighter compared to other parts of the screen. Contacts can occupy the active area due to being in a nearby context or having presence (i.e. being online, thus available for communication). The size of different figures are dependent on the frequency of contact, and by clicking
By filtering the view with different search criteria’s such as names or tags, a contact may also move into the active area when it corresponds to the search string. Uni.me has an interesting and fresh take on many aspects of mobile communication. It explicitly shows a degree of relevance of contacts, by presenting frequency of contact as well as availability and non-availability for communication. The concept also offers an alternative flow for enabling communication - by interacting on the figures in the visual space directly, and then being presented with specific actions possible. Uni.me suggests an interesting approach on how to represent a user’s relationship with her contacts and how to support reflections around these. It is also more reliant on search, and gives a clear distinction between different contacts by visual and spatial organization.
However, the abstract presentation also has it’s drawbacks. It’s very impractical for navigation since it does not clearly show who someone is. This type of representation is most appropriate for
catching a sense of the present.
Play
The Play concept (Actface, 2007) is a mobile phone interface built around using a city metaphor. In the pixel styled interface phone status and events is
displayed as happenings within the city (Figure 5). For instance, battery life is shown itself due to how
energetic the city’s inhabitants are, the time of day is shown by the lightness of the display and network connectivity is presented by road traffic. Incoming communication is shown by a major event happening within the city, for example by an explosion or alike. As its name implies, this concept takes a very playful twist on the way a interface looks and behaves. It’s a very good example of what extreme personalization may become, and would work very well within certain
target groups where the style, fun and aesthetics is appreciated. Naturally, its not a viable interface paradigm for everyone. A major concern though, is that is basically a upgraded idle-screen, and that the overall experience of the phone is not very well detailed within the concept.
Social Pond
Social Pond is a mobile user interface concept from TAT - The
Astonishing Tribe with rich 3D graphics and a social networking focus (TAT, 2008a).
In Social Pond, different kinds of communication events are brought together and presented using the metaphor of a pond. Vivid visual effects creates a realistic sense of a water world, and the whole interface is very rich in visual feedback. Every photo or text message also has it’s content previewed. The pond is also a seamless interface where contacts, communication and media functions can be accessed as parts of the same space.
The Social Pond is a very inspirational concept where the interface
Figure 5: Play concept
metaphor is brought to life through a brilliant visual presentation and cool effects. However, it is somewhat limited in scope, and is mainly designed for demonstration of such graphics. While the visual presentation and means of navigation is elegant for flicking through a limited number of events or photos, it’s not a very compelling for everyday use. When larger amounts of events or contacts needs to be dealt with, as it lacks quick and effective ways for navigation, that could be resolved with for example the possibility to filter.
myFaves
While the previously mentioned examples are concepts and prototypes, myFaves is a feature currently
available in some of T-mobile’s phones (T-mobile, 2008). myFaves is a dedicated part of the interface where the user can customize up to five personal “favorites” for quick access. These favorites are typically people that you would like to find quickly, to for example initiate a call, send a text message or share a photo (Figure 7). Favorites are personalized with photos and personal ring tones.
This product shows that the industry has picked up on the need of more personalized interfaces, and it recognizes that some contacts may matter more than other. The myFaves also becomes part of a unlimited call program, which means that the user can call them for free.
An elegant and effective way for a user to specify special numbers, compared to writing them down on paper and sending them to the customer service - which has typically been the case.
2.4 Summary of background
This chapter has discussed insights into how mobile phones offer specific qualities making them personal communication devices. Compared to earlier communication tools, the mobile phone is more clearly associated with it’s owner. Thinking and behaving around the mobile phone is subsequently different to other types of communication devices, as described for instance in the research of Campbell and Park (2008). Chipchase (2006) presents an example of how this takes effect among users, when reporting on different customizations that make phones more individual, and appropriate for its owners. These examples only concern customizing the physical look of phones, which is not surprising given that today’s interfaces are designed to allow for
personalization to any larger degree. From an interaction design perspective there is a great
potential in designing new kinds of interfaces for mobile phones, which much more flexibly allow the user to affect both interface behavior and looks.
In today’s mobile interfaces we find a strong emphasis on features and distinct applications. As more services are becoming available in mobile phones, new and diverse ways of communicating and sharing information is starting to appear as additional applications. With new features comes a much greater complexity of usage if not designed wisely. In this respect, we need to considering the focus on people and relationships that communication has, when we design interfaces that are to
designed to be fruitful and appropriate. Research from Neustaedter et al. (2006) implies that people pay different attention to people based on the mutual relationship, and in turn people are not
interested in the same kind of awareness of everyone. Strong and Gaver’s (1996) feather and Kaye’s (2004) Love Egg demonstrates that interesting and relevant information is not necessarily literal, but can be of other forms mediating a general awareness of others.
The examples of alternate interface paradigms illustrates some approaches where the designer’s emphasis has been to create new and often more suitable types of interfaces. In a much more diversified market, personalization may be taken to more extreme positions than we’ve previously seen, which the Play concept (Actface, 2007) clearly suggests. Several of the examples also experiment with different forms of representing interface details and different interaction flows. While the traditional way of for example accessing contacts has been a hierarchical tree navigation structure inherited from desktop computers, My Social Fabric (Blyth, 2005) presents contacts as avatars. Consequently, a much different kind of interaction for making a call follows, which is more inspiring and adequate for the actual task. Similar to My Social Fabric, the Uni.me concept
(Amorim, 2006) demonstrates how alternate representations can allow for new types of information to become part of the contact list. In these two concepts, frequency of contact is inherent in the contact’s visual appearance. It’s doubtful that this and many other kinds of information could be provided in text, due to limited screen space. Moreover, a more interesting and less explicit visual representation may appropriate in cases where the information is not very exact, and can
3 Design Exploration
The previous chapter has presented a picture how mobile phones have transformed our
communication and introduced design challenges that lie ahead. Considering these observations, the present project aims to explore interaction design for the mobile phone as a more personal and people focused device. While this intent acts as a starting point, the design process reflects an exploratory approach where the framing and of the project becomes defined by means of the exploration.
This chapter presents the exploratory phase of this project. The exploration starts with qualitative interviews that influence the development of several early concepts. Three promising concepts are elaborated as quick prototypes, which are then evaluated in a subsequent field test. The chapter is concluded with a summary of the design exploration, describing how the project becomes focused on designing a mobile interface where relationships are to be experienced in a more rewarding way.
3.1 User Interviews
To capture a richer understanding of how people view and use mobile phones, a round of qualitative user interviews were carried out with potential target users. The semi-structured interviews aimed to investigate what qualities participants associate to objects they hold as personally significant, as well as own usage of and practices with mobile phones.
Videos of mobile phone concepts were used as probes for discussion. These probes were selected among design concepts that clearly demonstrated interesting adaptable and dynamic design qualities for a mobile interface and they were all publicly available on the internet. The probes are are shown in Figure 8, 9 and 10.
Figure 8: My Social Fabric
In My Social Fabric, phone book contacts are represented as avatars based on human figures. Communication patterns affects the behavior and poses of the avatars.
Figure 9: Rhythm
This concept shows a dynamic interface with rich visual details, and user actions affect the visual appearance. For example, key presses creates the effect of ink floating in water.
Figure 10: Nokia 888
The conceptual Nokia 88 is a phone which flexibly changes between different forms. It may be changed by the user as well as it changes its own appearance at phone events such as
incoming calls.
The interviews combined single person and group interviews. In total, the user interviews included 18 participants, with interview sessions lasting between 40 - 60 minutes. While the target
single person interviews included four participants, two males and two females, ages ranging from 27 to 30 years old. These participants are both working and studying. One group interview session included three interaction design students, two males and one female, ages ranging from 24 to 40 years old. The second group interview included eleven upper secondary school students in a Media and Design-program, aged between 17 and 18 years old. The school group consists of six males and five females. Table 1 gives an overview of the participant groups in the study.
Table 1: Summary of participant groups in interview study
Group Type of interview
Participant group Age range No. of
participants
1 Single person interview
Workers and university students
27-30 years old 4
(2 males, 2 females) 2 Group interview Interaction design students
on university level
24-40 years old 3
(2 males, 1 female) 3 Group interview Upper secondary school
students
17-18 years old 11 (6 males, 5 females)
3.2 Findings from user interviews
This section highlights the principal findings from the user interviews. The material is organized into five sections, each covering one major theme. Themes range from qualities that participants associate with personally important objects to practices of and attitudes on mobile phone usage. The findings are not extensively analyzed, but rather considered as rendering useful and inspirational input to the design process as a whole.
Qualities of personally significant objects
The kind of objects participants pick as being personally significant and of special importance varies, as are the rationale for choosing them. However, there are some objects and some types of associations that stand out.
The most common object, stated by 8 of the 18 participants is their own computer, stated as personally significant for three main reasons:
1. It stores and carries personal content.
2. It allows communication with several different services.
3. It enables other devices and is a hub for other technical equipment that is also important. Other objects of technical nature are also selected by the participants, of which wearable MP3-players and mobile phones are the most commonly mentioned (picked by 3 participants each). Reasons for picking MP3-players are mainly the fact that it’s content reflects the personal taste in music listening, while the mobile phones qualities relates to the way that it allows communicating with others.
While participants mention digital products, several participants also choose objects of a different nature. Guitar, camera and floor hockey stick is mentioned by one participant each. These kind of objects were chosen based on both reflecting an activity that the participant liked, and that they allowed self-expression in various forms. Calendar and wallets were mentioned as things used for organizing the daily life.
A last interesting category of objects consists of things chosen less based on functionality but more due to a personal significance or a special relation with the owner. Among these objects were an amulet, small hand mirror, coffee cup and a lip moisturizer.
While some of these objects have features and qualities that might not fit directly into a mobile communication device, they exemplify what creates strong connections between people and their objects. These examples highlight that objects are viewed as having personally significant qualities based on:
1. What actions they allow (for example camera, mobile phone) 2. What they store and contain (for example calendar, MP3-player)
3. What emotional associations they carry (for example amulet, coffee cup).
Social use and sharing
Not surprisingly, participants consider their mobile phone as an important communication tool, or as one participant put it, “A lifeline for social things”. Many participants explain the benefit of their mobile phone in that it’s an efficient way of coordinating social events. One participant reported how he would go through his phone book when making up plans for a Friday night, and out of the phone book he would know who he should get in touch with.
Some participants describe using mobile devices to capture photos for later sharing on social networking sites such as Flickr and Facebook. Approaches in both capturing and sharing varies among the participants. One of the participants expressed that he shared practically everything he captured, whereas other participants described they were more selective in their process to be able to notify people on a more personal basis. The intent with sharing photos was to create a support and reference for later conversations.
Storage of memories
Several participants report that they store special messages and conversations. Such storage covers both communication with their partner, but also people that are geographically distant and they don’t meet or communicate with that often. Several participants describe the frustration when switching phone and loosing past SMS communication. In such situations, some participants
reported on saving special messages by writing them down on paper or on the computer. From these reports, it’s not surprising that “good storage space” on a phone is mentioned as a highly desired feature by many participants. One participant makes her need for storage on the device itself even more explicit, in wanting to keep and see her photos on the phone rather than on the computer, as they “belong on the phone”. This can be seen as that these photos have a connection to the device itself, as the device relates more to the context of capturing more than another device or screen would.
Contacts and communication patterns
Whereas participants in the study estimate they have between 50 - 100 contacts in their phone books, they report that they will normally communicate frequently only with small number of those - approximately 10% of the total amount of contacts during a common week.
One participant described how her brother uses descriptive names such as “that angry guy” rather than peoples actual names in his phone book. This partly came from the fact in his native language, Taiwanese, characters don’t have a meaningful internal order as they have Latin languages. This way of organizing can also be seen as adding a more reflective layer in the phone book, providing a special touch to incoming calls and similar.
Noteworthy is also the diverse attitudes towards the My Social Fabric concept (Figure 8). Many of the younger participants saw it as adding to much additional effort, or they were unclear about how it would actually work. Older participants were generally positive towards the idea of visual
overview of contacts, and saw the concept as a useful means for making own connections between people.
Appearance and emotional qualities
The physical appearance of a mobile phone is recognized as very important by many participants, while others mainly see the features of the phone as important.
Many participants express preference for the Rhythm concept (Figure 9), in that they view the dynamic visualizations desirable to make their phone more personal and alive. One participant mentions that she uses a similar skin in her MSN Messenger. While looking the visual effects of the skin, she will be more relaxed in conversations, for example when waiting for replies. She wished for something similar on her phone, where a similar need would occur when she for example was really eager to get a reply to a message or when waiting for a call. Another participant particularly expressed appreciation of how the Nokia 888 concept (Figure 10) displays incoming calls with more of a feeling to it. Compared to his own mobile phones visual representations, the Nokia 888 concept: “...really displays a call rather than technical information” according to the participant.
3.3 Defining the initial design domain
Considering the user interviews and by surveying existing concepts, products and user practices the project was framed towards a design domain addressing the two following qualities:
1. Mobile devices as a carriers of personal content which reflect past communication, events and personal memories.
2. The social nature of mobile devices, in supporting relationships and creating touch points for communication and sharing of experiences.
3.4 Concept development
Starting from the chosen design domain, a large set of concepts were ideated and sketched through. Upon further examination, seven of these ideas were iterated upon as tentative concepts. These concepts are described chronologically below.
Peripheral Context Cues
This concept concerns ambient and context
dependent retrieval of information stored on a mobile device, in order to support enriched reflection about friends and relationships.
During everyday use of the mobile phone, Peripheral Context Cues are continuously created according to for example incoming and outgoing communication, people you meet and places you visit.
Cues are visualized as “water bubbles”, appearing on top of the interface. These cues represent various content stored on the device and the user can interact with the bubbles to open the content that the cue represents. This way, cues act as entry points to discover past communication with people on the basis of the current context. (Figure 11).
Figure 11: Personal Context Cues
Photo Bursts
Photo Bursts builds on the observation that content has a relation to places, people and other content from the same occasion. Often, such as at an event, on a trip or when documenting a project more than one photo is captured - these photos share a
connection.
This concept suggest a mobile interface (or application) where these connections are made explicit by organizing photos into “bursts”. A burst would mean a collection of photos captured at a specific location close in time. Mutual friends that take photos at the same occasion may contribute collectively to a collaborative burst and share each others photos (Figure 12).
Contact Symphony
The Contact Symphony concept is an ongoing visualization of relationships on a mobile phone’s idle screen. It shows a continuous stream where contacts and communication is displayed by fading in and out over the screen, to give a sense of history to the communication that has taken place.
The appearance and disappearance of items is
matched with pleasant visual effects. Effects, content and people that is presented may be personalized by the user. The concept intends to give a live feeling and more interesting appearance to the idle screen (Figure 13).
Figure 13: Contact Symphony
Relationship Wheel
This concept presents an alternative way of organizing a mobile phone contact book. Contacts are presented in the shape of a wheel, in which they are grouped according to self defined categories such as “Family”, “Friends” and so forth. The user can filter the view for a specific category to zoom in on a specific part of his social network. Contacts in the wheel appear in different sizes, colors etc. to display for example the current availability of the contact (Figure 14).
Figure 14: Relationship Wheel
Stage
The Stage concept concerns a timeline visualization of mobile phone events. Instead of a traditional horizontal list, messages are placed as previews on navigable timeline which can be filtered according to different categories of contacts (Figure 15).
Hazed Communication
Hazed Communication is a visually oriented presentation of communication and contacts, that replaces the inbox and contact list of a mobile phone. After being retrieved or sent, events are placed in a “space” that is continuously updating as time floats by. When events are new, they’re strong and clearly visible. As time passes, the items are hazed out and are no longer visible until deliberate action to retrieve them are taken.
The presentation has three corresponding parts: a communication view - showing all communication; a people view - showing communication by
individuals; and a “shrine” - for deliberate storage of special messages giving them a special placement (Figure 16).
Figure 16: Hazed Communication
Express Together
This concept aims to create a direct but ambient way of communicating. By using physical gestures as input a user can send a continuously updated stream of abstract visual output to another persons device, which creates a feeling of presence and a playful way of saying “Hi”.
To send a visual signal, the user can tap, tilt and move his own device, with a resulting output in the form of wave patterns on the other parties screen (Figure 17). When two persons engage in the activity of playing around with the signal, they can create a interesting and playful visualization together.
3.5 Early prototypes
Following from the concept development, three concepts were selected for further iteration. The selection was made based on the authors judgement, both from the perceived potential of the concepts as well as with a rationale to be able to explore as different ideas as possible through a quick phase of detailing and lo-fi prototyping. The selected concepts were Peripheral Context Cues, Presence Bursts and Hazed Communication. These were chosen as they exhibited the most
promising values and as they provided qualities that in one way or another had been highlighted as promising during the user interviews.
The three selected concepts were elaborated and refined through sketching, storyboards and simple prototypes in Adobe Flash Lite. Adobe Flash Lite is a simplified version of the popular web
authoring tool Adobe Flash for mobile phones and other portable devices. It was used due to allowing a fast development of interactive prototypes running on a regular mobile handset, in this case a Nokia N73. Due to performance issues, the graphical richness naturally became restricted making the prototypes very low fidelity in their appearance. The following section describes the refined concepts and their respective prototypes.
Peripheral Context Cues
Peripheral Context Cues amplifies the mobile interface with cues to the personal content stored on the device. Cues offer a contextual and serendipitous retrieval and rediscovery of content such as
photos, videos, text communication and music as an addition to the regular ways of accessing and navigating content on the device.
A cue is a subtle link to already stored content on the mobile device, including both incoming and outgoing content. Cues are changing and appropriated due to contextual factors. The cues that are visible at a certain time is based on patterns of recent communication patterns, used features and physical location depending on what application or part of the interface the user is currently using. Cues stays “on top” of the interface, but are subtle in appearance and then not necessarily in the focus of attention. While always present, they are not always meant to be interacted with - rather to provide associations that may be looked into when desired. A scenario explaining retrieval of cues is displayed in Figure 18 above.
Prototype of Peripheral Context Cues
The prototype demonstrates Peripheral Context Cues placed on a phones idle screen and in a photo browsing application. When accessing the idle screen in the prototype, predefined cues are
animated and gradually placed on top of the interface. The user may select (and view) the cues (with the center soft key) as well as navigate between cues with the arrow keys. Figure 19 and 20 shows screenshots from the interactive prototype.
Figure 19: Idle screen in the Peripheral Context Cues prototype
Figure 20: Opening cue in the Peripheral Context Cues prototype
Presence Bursts
This concept is an elaborated version of the Photo Bursts concept. In Presence Bursts, all kinds of phone events are organized as “bursts” with respect to the current status message of the user. The concept uses the basic idea of status sharing that is available in several services nowadays, and uses this status message as metadata for organizing the produced and consumed content and regular phone events.
Prototype of Presence Bursts
The prototype demonstrates a simple status system together with some of the most common phone functions (calling, messaging and taking photos). In the prototype, the user can write own status messages and view recent (predefined) status messages from a couple of friends. From the main menu, the user may also take photos, make calls and send messages to a set of predefined contacts. The main menu also has a “View events” feature, in which actions made in the above mentioned photo taking, calling and messaging functions are organized by the personal status message when they were initiated. When the user changes his status on the main screen, the new status becomes available and is navigable when accessing “View events”, thus becoming a container for the things the user does in other parts of the phone. Screenshots of the prototype are shown in Figure 21 and 22.
Figure 21: Idle screen in the Presence Bursts prototype.
Figure 22: Main menu in the Presence Bursts prototype.
Hazed Communication
Hazed Communication is a visual presentation of communication events and contacts. When being retrieved or sent, communication is placed in a “space” that is continuously updating as time floats by. When events are recent, they’re strong and clearly visible. As time passes, the events are hazed out and are no longer visible until deliberate action to retrieve them are taken.
The presentation has three corresponding parts:
•
A communication view - showing allcommunication.
Figure 23: Mockups of the Hazed Communication concept
•
A people view - showing communication by individuals.•
A shrine view - for deliberate storage of special events giving them a special placement.The concept is aimed to be a repurposed and more dynamic idle screen and a designated feature for browsing contacts (the “phone book”) as well as communication (various “logs” and folders in standard mobile phones). Figure 23 shows early screen mockups of the concept.
Communication events are presented through a contacts profile picture, and the most recent events are placed in the bottom of the screen and are visually strong. Navigating upwards, there are “older” (less-recent) items that have started to fade out and are shrinking in size. The
Communication view treats all types as communication as similar, mixing various formats (calls, messages, photos, video , etc.). The People view presents all contacts in a space organized by recency. It also has the possibility to give contacts a “sticky” position, meaning they have a stable positioning in the space. The Shrine view offers a storage for special items from various contacts. The concept aims at giving more active relationships a higher probability of being displayed and reachable. It also offers means for organizing, with stickiness for particular people and a shrine for special communication events. At the core of the concept is also the idea of having hazed events, creating a mode where communication is not simply “on” or “off” but has a longevity that is shown in a nonintrusive manner.
Prototype of Hazed Communication
The prototype consists of a navigable visual space for the three distinct parts “Communication”, “People” and “Shrine”. Within each of these parts, predefined content may be browsed and viewed. Navigation in the space is done by the up and down arrow keys, whereas left and right arrow keys and center soft key is used for making selections. In the People screen, a contact may also be selected and placed in a Sticky position. This prototype has more refined visuals and transitions than the previous prototypes, trying to convey a feeling for the visual metaphor. Screen shots of the prototype is shown in Figure 24 and 25.
3.6 Field evaluation of early prototypes
To explore and generate user input on the qualities of the concepts, a field evaluation with the three prototypes was undertaken. The field evaluation was based on the co-operative evaluation method (Monk et al., 1993), but the procedure was adjusted to the conditions of the present evaluation, aiming to investigate the three diverse concepts and their potentials through the restricted prototypes, with a procedure as described below.
A total of 18 participants were recruited for individual and group evaluations. The participants were selected upon having similar characteristics as the initial interview study group - being relatively young and expected to be generally more interested in and early to adopt new services and features within the mobile domain. 13 of the 18 participants in the field evaluation also participated in the interview study, whereas 5 participants were new to the project. Ages for participants ranged between 17 to 45 years old, 11 participants were males and 7 females.
Three evaluation sessions were conducted as single person evaluations. These participants were presented with all three prototypes in sessions lasting around 40 minutes in total. Three sessions included pairs with two participants in each, and focused on two of the three concepts in each evaluation session (approximately 25 minutes per session). Three group evaluations were conducted with three participants in each session. Due to limitations in the availability of this group, these session lasted 20 minutes each. For this reason, as the “Hazed Communication” concept already appeared as the most fruitful for further development these three sessions were geared towards this concept only. Table 2 below gives an overview of the participant setup in the evaluations.
Table 2: Setup of participant groups in field evaluation of early prototypes
Group Type of
evaluation
Scope of evaluation Participant profile No. of sessions/
participants
1 Individual
evaluations
3 prototypes Workers and university students 3 sessions (3 participants in total) 2 Group evaluations
2 prototypes Interaction design students on university level 3 sessions (6 participants in total) 3 Group evaluations
1 prototype Upper secondary school students
3 sessions
(9 participants in total)
During the evaluation sessions, the participants were at first introduced to the background of the evaluation and its general outline. The participants were then introduced to one concept at a time, with a short verbal description of the concept. After each introduction, the participants were handed the concept’s prototype running on a Nokia N73 phone, and asked to do a free exploration of the prototype and its features. If the participants had problems with using or understanding the prototype, they were free to ask questions. The author also provided assistance to facilitate the participants to explore as much of the included features as possible. After trying each prototype, a semi-structured discussion of the associated concept followed. This discussion concerned the general understanding and feelings toward the concept, its desirability, positive and negative
attitudes as well as potential changes that would improve the concepts, according to a question template. Examples of questions include:
1. What do you think about this idea?
2. Would you like to have a service like this on your own phone? 3. Is there anything you find particularly good?
4. Is there anything you find particularly bad? 5. Is there anything you would like to change? 6. Is there anything you find is missing?
3.7 Findings in field evaluation
This section provides a summary of user responses to the three prototyped concepts as described above.
Peripheral Context Cues
Participants find the concept interesting and would like to try it more in the future. Some
participants mention the value of making all types of content available as cues. Also, they would see the concept as beneficial for handling reminders in general. The applicability of using cues to reveal past communication itself seems to rely both on how one relates to the person behind the cue, and how well the cues are created.
This is illustrated by the following quotes:
“It needs to be highly relevant, otherwise you would look at it as spam”. (Male, 20’s) “I would get bored if it’s totally random”. (Male, 20’s)
Presence Bursts
Sharing presence information as such seems interesting to most participants, and while some participants are mainly interested in the status of others there are some that consider keeping track of the own status as beneficial. The participants that finds the concept most interesting, mentions that it makes retrieval of earlier content easier and supports their own understanding of the content:
“Good way of tagging, that’s the way you remember things”. (Male, 30’s)
While another participant hopes:
“...to find some connections that I didn’t expect before”. (Male, 20’s)
At the same time, one participants make a point that the nuances and irony that some people take use of in status messages would make it hard to use for searching and browsing.
Hazed Communication
Participants are generally positive towards the concept. There are many suggestions of changes and additions, but having a people centered organization and a shrine for storing special messages is commonly well accepted:
“I feel that the address book and inbox are separated as it currently is in my phone”. (Female, 20’s) The possibility to deliberately see things related to a particular person is viewed as useful, and also
Moreover, one participant made clear that:
“Not all contacts are equally important, I would like to handle that”. (Male, 20’s)
The same participant saw the visual space as a way of creating an own organization. In general, visual retrieval is also well appreciated, and seemed to offer both useful and emotional values, as expressed by these two participants:
“A major advantage in the possibility to group things on your own”. (Male, 40’s) “It’s cool, ‘vibrant’. Fun and new.” (Female, 20’s)
3.8 Summary of design exploration
In this design exploration, the project has been approached with a broad and pragmatic stance to examine the potentials and challenges within the area of study. Through user interviews, sketching, prototyping and evaluations with users a deepened understanding of the field has emerged, which guides the direction of the final concept.
There are interesting outcomes from the exploration that are not explicitly part of the later process, but which nonetheless point to important implications within the domain. The first user interviews points to several interesting practices, needs and attitudes among users, which are worth considering when design mobile products and services of various kinds. For instance, the interviews highlight that when asked to choose an object of personal importance, participants pick a wide range of different things of different usages. But the pattern is that these objects in one way or another carry special qualities to the individual. Cameras are mentioned due to their ability to take photographs, an activity of importance to many participants. Calendars and MP3-players are mentioned as they allow storage of important things, while an amulet provides one of the participants with a reminder of a strong emotional connection with another person.
Considering how we can design for good user experiences of mobile device, it may be evident that a neat interaction with its features is crucial. But these answers also imply that allowing users to maintain and experience personal content and connections to other people in a rewarding way needs to be considered important qualities that can strengthen the emotional appeal of a device.Such reflections influence the early concepts described within this chapter.
Many of the early concepts rely on the observation that sharing and keeping content is an important activity. Furthermore, these concepts also explore interface solutions in which communication and information is experienced in a more subtle or dynamic way. From a programming viewpoint, an event may be on or off - but from a design perspective enhancing nuances between various events can lead to a richer experience.
Two of the prototypes, Peripheral Context Cues and Hazed Communication address some of the qualities discussed above. In Peripheral Context Cues, mundane activities triggers a recollection of past events, which are not necessarily always relevant but may nonetheless be of great enjoyment from time to time. Since the cues are not forced upon the user, they are to be experienced in an own phase and can in that way become more appealing and create interesting discoveries or reflections.
Hazed Communication presents communication and people with a different temporal longevity. Communication doesn’t simply get out of the way after being read, but stays visible as a reminder of the present status of things, eventually fading away. This prototype is designed with a seamless interface that doesn’t make a hard distinction between various forms of content. It is viewed as particularly appealing among the participants in the evaluation, which substantially influences the further direction and framing of the final concept described in the following chapter.
4 Relify
The reported design exploration provides the grounding and direction for the project. Through the exploration several design ideas, a greater knowledge on end user preferences and an awareness of opportunities within the design domain have been attained. In this section the resulting main concept Relify is presented, together with a description of it’s design work and the focus.
4.1 Problem focus
While this project initial focus was broadly put on personalizing the mobile user experience, findings and experiences during concept development, prototyping and field testing generates a foundation for a more narrow scope.
During the exploration, it’s become apparent that phone books in mobile handsets offer limited flexibility and diversity. Phone books in mobile phones typically presenting all types of contacts the same, regardless of who they are or how communication with someone looks. In addition, both communication and contacts are accessed in isolation from each other and presented according to time and alphabetical name rather than relevancy or preference at the time. Influenced mainly by the qualities found in the Hazed Communication concept, the problem focus for the main concept is targeted towards a mobile interface for a more personalized and people centered presentation of communication and contacts. Aimed towards a user group of relatively young and frequent mobile and internet users, the project hence focuses on designing a mobile interface with the following characteristics:
•
Provide a personalized and fluent interface for interacting and staying updated with friends.•
Present communication and people according to relationships and social patterns.•
Create ways for smoothly handling a shift of focus in what people and which communication is relevant at the time, to allow the user to handle different needs for various situations.•
Enhance exploration and reflection around relationships, as a ground for further social interaction.•
Take use of existing online services for an enriched picture of one’s relationships, combining direct communication with for example the shared photos, status updates and music listening of contacts.4.2 Design process
As described above, basic qualities found in the Hazed Communication is the starting point for detailing the main concept. When continuing the design process, personas of target users were developed based on findings from the field studies and field evaluations. Together with
conceptualizing and sketching through the main concept, scenarios and important use cases was defined, in turn guiding the development of wireframes and user interface flows for the concept. After finishing the wireframes and user interface flows, a visual design language was developed followed by a prototyping phase where the main concept was realized as a working prototype running on a regular Nokia N82 phone.
4.3 The Relify concept
Relify is a personalized and fluent mobile interface to support friends in staying updated and interacting with each other. In Relify, communication and contacts are presented in a visual overview that is organized by the relationships and social patterns with the people involved. Relify’s communication view combines typical mobile phone communication (such as text messages) and RSS feeds from third party internet services that relate to one’s contacts. Relify is available directly on the phone’s idle screen, and allows a personalized means of presenting and accessing a more relevant and wider set of information and updates about friends across the range of situations one engages in.
The reminder of the following section describes the core concept of Relify. In subsequent sections further scenarios of usage and user interface flows describe the interaction with and structure of Relify.
Figure 26: Screen from Communication view in Relify
Personalized overview of relevant communication
In Relify, all types of communication is presented in a common overview, the Communication view, where they are represented as event icons placed in a navigable visual space.
Relify is based on an open structure that lets the user to herself define what type of communication is included for each particular contact. The Communication view can combine typical (personal) mobile phone communication such as calls and text messages, with content of more public character that reflect friends activities on third party online services such as Jaiku, YouTube and Flickr. Online content is retrieved as RSS feeds from the respective service. By using Relify to subscribe to the feeds of contacts on various services, friends content is automatically pulled into the communication view when it’s published online. This allows for example Jaiku status updates,
photos from Flickr and video’s that friends found interesting on YouTube to be presented together with their calls and messages in the shared view. What an actual RSS feed includes varies across services and the feeds chosen for subscription. While some feeds will mainly include uploading new personal content, other feeds may also include activities such as rating, commenting and expressing like or dislike to the content someone viewed on a service.
Status updates on services such as Jaiku, Facebook or Twitter.
Typical event icons for RSS feeds
Content preview Profile picture Direction
Source
Videos uploaded, hearted or rated on services such as YouTube.
Music scrobbled, tagged or hearted on services such as Last.fm. Photos uploaded, hearted
or rated on services such as Flickr or Facebook.
Text messages Calls Photos Videos Songs Typical event icons for private & direct communication
Photos Videos Music
Status updates
VISUAL OVERVIEW OF COMMUNICATION EVENT ICONS
Figure 27: Explaining Relifys visual overview and event icons
Figure 27 shows a schematic illustration of Relify’s Communication view and typical examples of event icons that are shown in it’s overview. An event icon for communication combines a preview its content, a profile picture of the other person involved and an event symbol which shows the direction of the communication, and if applicable, the third party service that the communication came from.
Organizing people in networks
In Relify, contacts are grouped in self-defined networks, and the strength of a network controls how communication and people from the network is presented and organized. This means that the
current state of a relationship is represented by the strength for the network a person belongs to. The network strength also acts as a user initiated selection of the current preferences, and across
situations in the long run. Whereas each network has a basic strength setting, it can easily be changed and appropriated to what’s important at the moment, to accommodate across different priorities. For example, this can mean lowering the strength of a network of “work contacts” when being off from work, or raising the strength of a “friend network” to really pay attention to it at another occasion.
Networks are self-defined and created by grouping people that share some kind of meaningful common characteristic. The user creates the amount and kinds of networks he wants to have, and these are not shared or visible to others. Each contact may belong only to one network, and while you don’t place strengths on individual contacts, the system may adopt the strength for an
individual according to the amount of communication with individuals. Figure 28 shows the
