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Mobile Interaction Research @ Mobile Muse

Submitted by Jean Hébert on November 6, 2006 - 1:03pm.
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We've been involved in some fieldwork and focus groups over the past week, looking at user experience in interactive mobile applications. We're specifically looking for opportunities for user-generated content in a media-rich mobile communicative sphere.


It's too early to post any conclusions about our work (our report won't be available until December, as we have a few more focus groups left to do, plus coding and analysis of our data, and so forth), but I have a few preliminary observations and interpretations - to which I invite my collaborators and colleagues to add theirs. Here goes:

  • many mobile phone users have a difficult time envisioning future mobile applications
  • users resist the idea of mobile phones as public communication tools
  • as much as the use of mobiles in public invents new social conflicts (the annoying person talking loudly on their phone on the bus), it also transforms and amplifies existing complaints in urban public spaces (traffic, crowding, noise), which will lead to new coping strategies (use of headsets, tendencies for keeping greater physical distances between people)

There are a number of issues that these observations raise. One of these, that I'm particularly interested in, goes as follows. To what extent is "user-generated content" dependent on a "user-generated platform"? In other words, does an open space for user content depend on user contributions to the infrastructure that supports that content? How open must a mobile application be to keep people interested, knowing that the success of any app depends on the continual addition of new features (something, arguably, guaranteed by an active open development community)? Is there a correlation between technical openness and cultural openness?


Another issue I see that my observations imply is that a likely future scenario for the adoption of media rich mobile apps may involve first an intensification of private messaging (MMS, SMS) services prior to the development of more public (one-to-many or many-to-many) forms of communication. The more private messaging one does, the greater the need becomes to make that communication more efficient, right? Maybe.


And also - if mobile use amplifies problems of crowding and noise, what strategies will urban dwellers evolve to deal with their environments? Can this process of adaptation to a transformed public media ecology be documented? How?


That's as far as I'm going to go with it at this phase of our research. But I think I've raised a few questions about which the readers of and contributors to this blog will have something to say. Anyone?