ContextContacts: re-designing SmartPhone's contact book to support mobile awareness and collaboration

  • Authors:

  • Antti Oulasvirta;Mika Raento;Sauli Tiitta

  • Affiliations:

  • Helsinki Institute for Information Technology;Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and University of Helsinki;University of Helsinki

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices & services
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Acontextuality of the mobile phone often leads to a caller's uncertainty over a callee's current state, which in turn often hampers mobile collaboration. We are interested in re-designing a Smartphone's contact book to provide cues of the current situations of others. ContextContacts presents several meaningful, automatically communicated situation cues of trusted others. Its interaction design follows social psychological findings on how people make social attributions based on impoverished cues, on how self-disclosure of cues is progressively and interactionally managed, and on how mobility affects interaction through cues. We argue how our design choices support mobile communication decisions and group coordinations by promoting awareness. As a result, the design is very minimal and integrated, in an "unremarkable" manner, to previously learned usage patterns with the phone. First laboratory and field evaluations indicate important boundary conditions for and promising avenues toward more useful and enjoyable mobile awareness applications.