SANDRA JEPPESEN, LAKEHEAD UNIVERSITY ORILLIA, MEDIA STUDIES https://doi.org/10.65968/HXKA1477 Arguably the best media coverage of the student strike in Montreal is coming from an unexpected source – CUTV, or what is now called Community-University TV (formerly Concordia University TV). Live…
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Outside the Laboratory: Mobile Methods and the User Experience — Introduction [1]
By Barbara Crow, Benjamin Poppinga and Kim Sawchuk
The articles included in this issue of wi are the outcome of our participation in this stimulating conference: the First International Workshop on Observing the Mobile User Experience which was held in in Rekyjavik, Iceland (Fall, 2010).
Experiences from the Use of an Eye-Tracking System in the Wild
By Liisa Kuparinen
Examples of situations where the use of an eye-tracking system would be useful are when there is a need to get information about the most important objects used in navigation or to identify which objects in traffic a driver of a car notices or misses.
Unsupervised User Observation in the App Store: Experiences with the Sensor-based Evaluation of a Mobile Pedestrian Navigation Application
By Benjamin Poppinga, Martin Pielot, Niels Henze, and Susanne Boll
To observe the mobile user experience various observation techniques exist. For field studies ethnographic observation techniques, like shadowing, are often used. In shadowing, an experimenter follows a participant and takes notes on the observed behaviour. Shadowing is known to be highly situated [3, 5]. However, this technique does not scale very well. Additionally, because of its obtrusiveness, it could change the observed participant’s behaviour.
To overcome the disadvantages of low scalability and high obtrusiveness, new observation methods are being developed. In theory, passive automated logging through sensors seems to reach the same “situatedness”, while being scalable and unobtrusive [3, 5]. In practice logging has rarely been applied to mobile observation during the last years. One reason for this might be that suitable data sources, e.g. sensors, were not available on a common mobile device. However, the extension of smart phones through external sensors showed that sensors are able to infer users’ everyday situations [2].
Observing the Context of Use of a Media Player on Mobile Phones using Embedded and Virtual Sensors
By By Jakob Eg Larsen, Michael Kai Petersen, Nima Zandi, and Rasmus Handler
Mobile phones have become ubiquitous and an integrated part of our everyday life. In the last couple of years smart phones have received increased attention as application stores (e.g. Apple App Store, Android Market, and Nokia Ovi Store) have enabled easy distribution of mobile applications. New smart phone features and sensors have enabled a wide range of novel mobile applications, especially within games and media consumption domains. In the area of music applications a number of different mobile applications have been created. One example is mobile applications for the Internet radio Last.fm, which enable recommendation of music similar to the user’s favorites based on social networking features. MoodAgent is an example of an application that enables the user to navigate a music collection in terms of mood, rhythm, and style of the music.
Mobile User Experience Beyond the Laboratory: Towards a Methodology for QoE-QoS Evaluation in Natural User Environments (A Position Paper)
By Katarzyna Wac and Anind K. Dey
The growing availability of diverse interactive mobile applications, envisaged to assist us in different domains of our daily life, make their perceived quality of experience (QoE) increasingly critical to their acceptance. Comments such as, “If it’s slow, I won’t give my credit card number” indicates the QoE expectations of a typical mobile commerce application user [1]. These expectations can be different given the user’s previous experiences with an application or an application’s criticality to the user’s task at hand. To date, the evaluation of QoE has been mainly conducted with qualitative methods that focus on an applications’ usability [2]. These studies are typically conducted within a limited time span in controlled laboratory environments, conditions that do not resemble users’ natural daily environments. The results of such evaluations may help to discover the mobile application’s serious and immediate usability issues in a design, but they may not help to uncover issues that are relevant to real life situations in the world outside the lab.
Understanding Touch Screen Mobile Phone Users by Taxonomy of Experience (ToE)
By Wen-Chia Wang, Mark Young, Steve Love, and Ian Coxon
User experience is one of the most important elements of mobile phone design and in recent decades has received increased attention in the HCI community. The user experience should include considerations of the usefulness and usability of a product (Alben, 1996; Shedroff, n.d.), the ‘user’s internal state, the context, and the user’s perceptions of the product’ (Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila, Roto, & Hassenzahl, 2008, p.1).
Interactions With and Through Mobile Phones: What About the Elderly Population?
By Dr. Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol
Age plays a role in the adoption and uses of mobile telephony. This evidence has been discussed since the first stages of popularization of this technology (see for instance, Ling, 2002; Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Qiu, & Sey, 2006). Furthermore, as we have argued elsewhere, there is a general trend “toward the general diffusion of mobile communication within the whole population, with age continuing to specify the type of use rather than the use itself” (Castells et al., 2006, p. 41).
Into the Grey Zone: Seniors, Cell Phones and Milieus That Matter
By Kim Sawchuk and Barbara Crow
Within the burgeoning literature on the everyday and innovative uses of cell phones and mobile technologies, there is a concentration of detailed statistical or ethnographic data on those who are young or middle-aged (Ito, 2005; Caronia and Caron, 2004; Thulin & Vilhelmson, 2007). With the exception of a handful of articles (Wong, Thwaites, & Khong, 2008; Lee, 2008), much less attention, scholarly or otherwise, is paid to those who are fifty-five and over: this demographic constitutes a ‘grey zone’ literally and metaphorically (Harris-Decima, 2008). Our research on ‘Seniors and Cells’ rectifies this absence and is intended to contribute, productively, to the discussion of the intertwining dimensions of age, technology, and the everyday practices of citizenship by differentiating between ‘shades of grey’: we highlight what they do, and try to make sense of it in their terms, rather than comparing seniors with more ‘active’ user-groups.