I just finished the Bay CHI dinner tonight at Compadres. It was pretty good, I met several people who are interested in my research and met with 2 Microsoft people who are working on Windows Live Hotmail. Now, in the PARC auditorium waiting for the meeting to start. There lots of people here tonight in the auditorium, it's almost filled to capacity. There is also a podcast of the BayCHI meeting as well. There are 3 people presenting.
The first is Simeon J. Yates who is the director of the Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute in the Sheffield Hallam University, UK (s.yates AT shu.ac.uk) who is going to talk about A Device for Doing "Culture": Gender, Design and Use of the Mobile Phone.
Simeon J. Yates
A Device for Doing "Culture": Gender, Design and Use of the Mobile Phone
Starting Questions:
- why does academic social and cultural research have so limited an impact on the design and implementation of novel technologies and devices?
- why do academic social science and cultural studies colleagues still think novel technologies and devices are not of relevance to our subject?
- how do we explain gender differences in communication technology use?
Starting answers:
- need to focus on a clear and present cultural variable (such as gender)
- start with the mobile phone
Case with the mobile phone:
- mobile phone has a type form that resist from being changed
- huge cultural difference between how women and men talk
- gender as "performed" through "social practices" (Butler)
- we do gender when there is local context
- take culture into account by reading the history of its design and use
- culture gets lost to the technology
- did survey of young adults using SMS
- he showed the graph of average text message length, the largest is from woman to woman and the smallest is from man to man (dramatic drop, audience laughs)
- the text messages from man to man, are short, and abbreviated with a certain language
- emotional support most common in messages from women to women messages
- sarcasm most common in messages from men to women
Doing culture with the mobile
- there are certain rules and norms when to text or not during certain social situations, this generates mobile phone behaviour
- women and men engage in face work via the affordances of the phone
- women and men can articulate complex uses of the mobile phone in face and interaction management
- people use the mobile phone for face management and interaction management
- the device itself is gendered (different colours of the mobile phones, clamshell vs. not clamshell)
- how do you redesign a device for a social context when the device changes the nature of the context and culture it is used in?
- in Britain, people do a lot of texting because it is cheaper to text than voice
The conversation mechanism is dependent on the type of device.
Scott Jenson
PDAs Are Not Equal to Phones
- we have had disasters of trying to take the web and technology and bring them to cell phones
- we need to be more reflective of what has failed
- phones are hot, web is hot, so phones + web must be even hotter (audience laughs)
- he is giving a real life example of finding a movie from the WAP browser on the mobile phone, but so difficult to make it work
- you are stuck in this UI loop because can't find what you are looking for
- it took him 21 screens and 12 minutes and 15 seconds to find the movie and when it's playing
- execution and vision are very far apart
- it seems so obvious for the design, but it doesn't show up in the design process
- it is very painful to develop and show design on the mobile phone
- he's presenting his slides on the mobile phone!
- it's hard to reinvent the wheel each time, we've tried to put a lot of desktop metaphor thinking into designing the UI of the mobile phone
- interaction on the phone is completely different, not just that the screen is smaller
Study of Nokia phones
- button count (not including the keypad) went down from 10 to 8, 6, and then 4
- then around 1998, the button count increased due to data and the web because trying to make desktop work on the mobile phone
- phone UI has more menus than the application!
- game designers get the UI metaphor
- 1 button games are coming
- game designers are embracing the limitations of the phone
MMS trouble
- SMS was fairly clean
- MMS is not even close to the cleanness of SMS
- for MMS, it is so easy to fall into the trap of unfeatures in adding one thing, this creates a domino effect and can get into a loop in which the next step can't be completed without finishing the previous step (eg. can't send until you have the recipient before, the send is greyed out)
Mobile banking
- it was considered the mobile "killer app"
- just because it is possible, it does not mean that people want it
Concrete examples
- Google Maps on the phone, it was a straight port from Google Maps on the desktop to the phone
- the behaviours change on the phone because have to scroll and then zoom in
- huge debate between ease of learning and ease of use, because have to change the learning behaviour
- but after learn the behaviour, then can become easy to use
Zooming web pages is a difficult more complicated case.
Browsing a web on a phone
- it has to be specific phone information
- what about transcoding of content to be dependent on the type of the device and the network? I wanted to ask that question but there was no time.
ZoneTag: Putting Your Photos in Context
Mor Naaman
Yahoo! Research Berkeley
- how would we create/store, find, share, discover the photos?
- ZoneTag research web site
- use cameraphones because they are programmable, context-aware and network-connected
-current mobile experience: it is difficult to share and find
- tag/categorize/annotate your photos from your phone, gives tag suggestions
- use location to infer context and tags
- tags come from you, your contacts, various datasets, customized streams
- if you want to participate in the ZoneTag research and upload your photo with the cell ID and share with others, you can register
- ZoneTag can also take annotations from RSS feeds and links
- ah, so this is what Yahoo is doing and how they are incorporating Flickr and del.icio.us
- tagging is the means, not the goal
- Mor talked about how he took photos from the Where2.0 conference (related to Web2.0 metaphor) in San Jose that talked about mapping and local search
- mor AT yahoo-inc DOT com
- this tagging of photos seems very similar to a mobile photo tagging application from Mobisys 2004 called Metadata Creation System for Mobile Images
It was certainly a great meeting, out of all the meetings that I've gone to like Canada PUG, this was the most well attended, with very interesting questions that were asked from the audience. There will be a podcast of this meeting afterwards. Kudos to the people that organized this meeting, it was great and very professional and fun! I will certainly make BayCHI a monthly event while I'm here at PARC for the summer. Plus, at the dinner, I made lots of new friends and explained about my PhD research and what I'm doing at PARC, and had very interesting conversations.
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