Should I call now? understanding what context is considered when deciding whether to initiate remote communication via mobile devices

Abstract

Requests for communication via mobile devices can be disruptive to the current task or social situation. To reduce the frequency of disruptive requests, one promising approach is to provide callers with cues of a receiver's context through an awareness display, allowing informed decisions of when to call. Existing displays typically provide cues based on what can be readily sensed, which may not match what is needed during the call decision process. In this paper, we report results of a four week diary study of mobile phone usage, where users recorded what context information they considered when making a call, and what information they wished others had considered when receiving a call. Our results were distilled into lessons that can be used to improve the design of awareness displays for mobile devices, e.g., show frequency of a receiver's recent communication and distance from a receiver to her phone. We discuss technologies that can enable cues indicated in these lessons to be realized within awareness displays, as well as discuss limitations of such displays and issues of privacy. INTRODUCTIONThe rapid proliferation of mobile communication devices such as cell phones has enabled ubiquitous communication among family, friends, and colleagues. This has obvious benefits, but receiving requests for communication at inopportune moments can be very disruptive to the current task [33] or social situation [2,33]. To identify suitable moments for initiating communication, callers must be able to balance their need for communication with the receivers' need to remain engaged in the task or social situation. Existing mechanisms for maintaining this balance include allowing receivers to choose among many notification modalities such as ring tones and ring styles (e.g., audio, vibrate, silent) or by leveraging the caller-id function. However, these mechanisms are receiver-oriented -the receiver is forced to decide whether or not to accept a call in advance without knowing the caller's purpose. Enabling callers to push more context information (e.g., text messages indicating purpose) to the receiver offers one possible solution, as it would allow a receiver to make a more informed decision of whether to accept the call. However, the explicit effort required by the caller (entering the message) and imposed on the receiver (reading and interpreting the message) may outweigh any increase in the receiver's ability to moderate incoming calls.A promising alternative is to develop communication-oriented awareness displays that provide a caller with cues of the receiver's context (e.g., see [13,18,21,34]), allowing the caller to make a more informed decision of whether now is an appropriate time to call. A compelling benefit of this approach is that it maintains the balance in effort between caller and receiver in the call initiation process. For example, a caller can consult the awareness display to decide whether to initiate the request, while a receiver may use notification modalities or caller-id to decide whether ...

From spaces to places

“…; the latter defined by the subjective meaning that these acquire within the realm of sociocultural functions, relationships and interactions. We propose that, because of its characteristics, the concept of place can be used more appropriately than others [13][14][15][16] to describe mobile privacy.…”

Communicating in a Ubicomp World: Interaction Rules for Guiding Design of Mobile Interfaces

“…Such recency cues could enhance the perceived freshness or timeliness of the communicated event [38] and thereby determine how the content of the communication is perceived. Studies have attempted to identify contextual information that is important for influencing users' interaction with others through ubicomp [11,30]. De Guzman and colleagues studied types of contextual information that people use for deciding whether to initiate a call through mobile phones [11].…”

“…Studies have attempted to identify contextual information that is important for influencing users' interaction with others through ubicomp [11,30]. De Guzman and colleagues studied types of contextual information that people use for deciding whether to initiate a call through mobile phones [11]. Their results showed that activity information (e.g., what activities receivers are doing at that time) was used most often to gauge one's availability to accept calls.…”

A context-aware cost of interruption model for mobile devices

“…The motivation came from the fact that interruptions, regardless of time, place or situation, are detrimental to both personal and socioeconomic environment [3,10,11,13,19,25,28]. Whether an interruption is beneficial or harmful depends on the contexts the user is surrounded by.…”