Source orientation and persuasion in multi-device and multi-context interactions
At the Social Media Workshop, Katarina Segerståhl presented her on-going work on what she has termed extended information services or distributed user experiences — human-computer interactions that span multiple and heterogeneous devices (Segerståhl & Oinas-Kukkonen 2007). As a central example, she studies a persuasive technology service for planning, logging, reviewing, and motivating exercise: these parts of the experience are distributed across the user’s PC, mobile phone, and heart rate monitor.
In one interesting observation, Segerståhl notes that the specific user interfaces on one device can be helpful mental images even when a different device is in use: participants reported picturing their workout plan as it appeared on their laptop and using it to guide their actions during their workout, during which the obvious, physically present interface with the service was the heart rate monitor, not the earlier planning visualization. Her second focus is how to make these user experiences coherent, with clear practical applications in usability and user experience design (e.g., how can designers make the interfaces both appropriately consistent and differentiated?).
In this post, I want to connect this very interesting and relevant work with some other research at the historical and theoretical center of persuasive technology: source orientation in human-computer interaction. First, I’ll relate source orientation to the history and intellectual context of persuasive technology. Then I’ll consider how multi-device and multi-context interactions complicate source orientation.
Source orientation, social responses, and persuasive technology
As an incoming Ph.D. student at Stanford University, B.J. Fogg already had the goal of improving generalizable knowledge about how interactive technologies can change attitudes and behaviors by design. His previous graduate studies in rhetoric and literary criticism had given him understanding of one family of academic approaches to persuasion. And in running a newspaper and consulting on many document design (Schriver 1997) projects, the challenges and opportunities of designing for persuasion were to him clearly both practical and intellectually exciting.
The ongoing research of Profs. Clifford Nass and Byron Reeves attracted Fogg to Stanford to investigate just this. Nass and Reeves were studying people’s mindless social responses to information and communication technologies. Cliff Nass’s research program — called Computers as (or are) Social Actors (CASA) — was obviously relevant: if people treat computers socially, this “opens the door for computers to apply […] social influence” to change attitudes and behaviors (Fogg 2002, p. 90). While clearly working within this program, Fogg focused on showing behavioral evidence of these responses (e.g., Fogg & Nass 1997): both because of the reliability of these measures and the standing of behavior change as a goal of practitioners.
Source orientation is central to the CASA research program — and the larger program Nass shared with Reeves. Underlying people’s mindless social responses to communication technologies is the fact that they often orient towards a proximal source rather than a distal one — even when under reflective consideration this does not make sense: people treat the box in front of them (a computer) as the source of information, rather than a (spatially and temporally) distant programmer or content creator. That is, their source orientation may not match the most relevant common cause of the the information. This means that features of the proximal source unduly influence e.g. the credibility of information presented or the effectiveness of attempts at behavior change.
For example, people will reciprocate with a particular computer if it is helpful, but not the same model running the same program right next to it (Fogg & Nass 1997, Moon 2000). Rather than orienting to the more distal program (or programmer), they orient to the box.1
Multiple devices, Internet services, and unstable context
These source orientation effects have been repeatedly demonstrated by controlled laboratory experiments (for reviews, see Nass & Moon 2000, Sundar & Nass 2000), but this research has largely focused on interactions that do not involve multiple devices, Internet services, or use in changing contexts. How is source orientation different in human-computer interactions that have these features?
This question is of increasing practical importance because these interactions now make up a large part of our interactions with computers. If we want to describe, predict, and design for how people use computers everyday — checking their Facebook feed on their laptop and mobile phone, installing Google Desktop Search and dialing into Google 411, or taking photos with their Nokia phone and uploading them to Nokia’s Ovi Share — then we should test, extend, and/or modify our understanding of source orientation. So this topic matters for major corporations and their closely guarded brands.
So why should we expect that multiple devices, Internet services, and changing contexts of use will matter so much for source orientation? After having explained the theory and evidence above, this may already be somewhat clear, so I offer some suggestive questions.
- If much of the experience (e.g. brand, visual style, on-screen agent) is consistent across these changes, how much will the effects of characteristics of the proximal source — the devices and contexts — be reduced?
- What happens when the proximal device could be mindfully treated as a source (e.g., it makes its own contribution to the interaction), but so does a distance source (e.g., a server)? This could be especially interesting with different branding combination between the two (e.g., the device and service are both from Apple, or the device is from HTC and service is from Google).
- What if the visual style or manifestation of the distal source varies substantially with the device used, perhaps taking on a style consistent with the device? This can already happen with SMS-based services, mobile Java applications, and voice agents that help you access distant media and services.
References
- This actually is subject to a good deal of cross-cultural variation. Similar experiments with Japanese — rather than American — participants show reciprocity to groups of computers, rather than just individuals (Katagiri et al.) [↩]
Producing, consuming, annotating (Social Mobile Media Workshop, Stanford University)
Today I’m attending the Social Mobile Media Workshop at Stanford University. It’s organized by researchers from Stanford’s HStar, Tampere University of Technology, and the Naval Postgraduate School. What follows is some still jagged thoughts that were prompted by the presentation this morning, rather than a straightforward account of the presentations.1
A big theme of the workshop this morning has been transitions among production and consumption — and the critical role of annotations and context-awareness in enabling many of the user experiences discussed. In many ways, this workshop took me back to thinking about mobile media sharing, which was at the center of a good deal of my previous work. At Yahoo! Research Berkeley we were informed by Marc Davis’s vision of enabling “the billions of daily media consumers to become daily media producers.” With ZoneTag we used context-awareness, sociality, and simplicity to influence people to create, annotate, and share photos from their mobile phones (Ahern et al. 2006, 2007).
Enabling and encouraging these behaviors (for all media types) remains a major goal for designers of participatory media; and this was explicit at several points throughout the workshop (e.g., in Teppo Raisanen’s broad presentation on persuasive technology). This morning there was discussion about the technical requirements for consuming, capturing, and sending media. Cases that traditionally seem to strictly structure and separate production and consumption may be (1) in need of revision and increased flexibility or (2) actually already involve production and consumption together through existing tools. Media production to be part of a two-way communication, it must be consumed, whether by peers or the traditional producers.
As an example of the first case, Sarah Lewis (Stanford) highlighted the importance of making distance learning experiences reciprocal, rather than enforcing an asymmetry in what media types can be shared by different participants. In a past distance learning situation focused on the African ecosystem, it was frustrating that video was only shared from the participants at Stanford to participants at African colleges — leaving the latter to respond only via text. A prototype system, Mobltz, she and her colleagues have built is designed to change this, supporting the creation of channels of media from multiple people (which also reminded me of Kyte.tv).
As an example of the second case, Timo Koskinenen (Nokia) presented a trial of mobile media capture tools for professional journalists. In this case the work flow of what is, in the end, a media production practice, involves also consumption in the form of review of one’s own materials and other journalists, as they edit, consider what new media to capture.
Throughout the sessions themselves and conversations with participants during breaks and lunch, having good annotations continued to come up as a requirement for many of the services discussed. While I think our ZoneTag work (and the free suggested tags Web service API it provides) made a good contribution in this area, as has a wide array of other work (e.g., von Ahn & Dabbish 2004, licensed in Google Image Labeler), there is still a lot of progress to make, especially in bringing this work to market and making it something that further services can build on.
References
Ahern, S., Davis, M., Eckles, D., King, S., Naaman, M., Nair, R., et al. (2006). ZoneTag: Designing Context-Aware Mobile Media Capture. In Adjunct Proc. Ubicomp (pp. 357-366).
Ahern, S., Eckles, D., Good, N. S., King, S., Naaman, M., & Nair, R. (2007). Over-exposed?: privacy patterns and considerations in online and mobile photo sharing. In Proc. CHI 2007 (pp. 357-366). ACM Press.
Ahn, L. V., & Dabbish, L. (2004). Labeling images with a computer game. In Proc. CHI 2004 (pp. 319-326).
- Blogging something at this level of roughness is still new for me… [↩]
Using a Wizard of Oz technique in mobile service design: probing with realistic motivations
As I’ve blogged before, I spoke at the Texting 4 Health conference on the topic of research methods for mobile messaging. One method I covered was an interesting use of Wizard of Oz techniques for designing mobile services. I’ve since started getting some of this material in writing for the Texting 4 Health book. Here is a taste of that material, minus the health-specific focus and examples.
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Just like the famous Wizard of Oz, one can simulate something impressive with a just a humble person behind the curtain — and use this simulation to inform design decisions. When using a Wizard of Oz technique to study a prototype, a human “wizard” carries out functions that, in a deployed application or service, would be handled by a computer. This can allow evaluating a design without fully building what can be expensive back-end parts of the system (Kelley 1984). The technique is often used in recognition-based interfaces, but it also has traditional applications to identifying usability problems and carrying out experiments in which the interaction is systematically manipulated.
Wizard of Oz techniques are well suited to prototyping mobile services, especially those using mobile messaging (SMS, MMS, voice messaging). When participants send a request, a wizard reads or listens to it and chooses the appropriate response, or just creates it on-the-fly. Since all user actions in mobile messaging are discrete messages and (depending on the application) the user can often tolerate a short delay, a few part-time wizards, such as you and a colleague, can manage a short field trial. As you’ll see, this can be used for purposes beyond many traditional uses of a Wizard of Oz.
Probing photo consumption needs with realistic motivations
One use for this technique in designing a mobile messaging service is a bit like a diary study. In designing an online and mobile photography service, we wanted to better understand what photos people wanted to view and what prompted these desires.1 Instead of just making diary entries, participants actually made voice requests to the system for photos – and received a mobile message with photos fitting the request in return. We didn’t need to first build a robust system that could do this; a few of us served as wizards, listening to the request, doing a couple manual searches, and choosing which photos to return on demand. Though this can be done with a normal voice call, we used a mobile client application that also recorded contextual information not available via a normal voice call (e.g. location), so that participants could make context-aware requests as they saw fit (e.g. “I want too see photos of this park”)
In this case, we didn’t plan to (specifically) create a voice-based photo search system; instead, like a diary study, this technique served as a probe to understand what we should build. As a probe it provided realistic motivations for submitting requests, as the request would actually be fulfilled. This design research, in additional to other interviews and a usability study, informed our creation of Zurfer, a mobile application that supports exploring and conversing around personalized, location-aware channels of photos.
It is great if the Wizard of Oz prototype is quite similar to what you later build, but it can yield valuable insights even if not. Sometimes it is precisely these insights that can lead you to substantially change your design.
This study design can apply in designing many mobile services. As in our photos study, participants can be interviewed about the trigger for the requests (why did they want that media or information) and how satisfied they were with the (human-created) responses.2
- This study was designed and executed at Yahoo! Research Berkeley by Shane Ahern, Nathan Good, Simon King, Mor Naaman, Rahul Nair, and myself. [↩]
- Participants were informed that their requests would be seen by our research staff. Anonymization and strict limits of who the wizards are is necessary to protect participants’ privacy. Even if participants are not informed that a wizard is creating the responses until they are debriefed after the experiment, participants can nonetheless be notified that their responses are being reviewed by the research team. [↩]
Texting 4 Health conference in review
As I blogged already, I attended and spoke at the first Texting 4 Health conference at Stanford University last week. You can see my presentation slides at SlideShare here, and the program, with links to the slides for most speakers is here.
The conference was very interesting, and there was quite the mix of participants — both speakers and others. There were medical school faculty, business people, people from NGOs and foundations, technologists, representatives of government agencies and centers, futurists, and social scientists. Everyone had something to learn — I know I did. This also made it somewhat difficult as a speaker because it is hard to know how best to reach, inform, and hold the interest of such a diverse audience: what is common ground with some is entirely new territory with others.
I think my favorite session was “Changing Health Behavior via SMS”. The methods used by the panelists to evaluate their interventions were both interesting to reflect on and good tools for persuading me of the importance and effectiveness of their work. One of my reflections was about what factors to vary in doing experiments on health interventions: there is (reasonable) focus on having a no-SMS control condition, and there are very few studies with manipulations of dimensions more fine-grained. Of course, the field is young and I understand how important true controls are in medical domains, but I think that real progress in understanding mobile messaging and designing effective interventions will require looking at more subtle and theoretically valuable manipulations.
You can see other posts about the conference here and here. And the conference Web site is also starting a blog to watch in the future.
Texting 4 Health
On February 29th I’m speaking at Texting 4 Health, a conference at Stanford University about using mobile messaging for health interventions and research. I’ll be talking about mobile messaging research methods I’ve used to study mobile persuasive technology. Like Mobile Persuasion 2007, it will feature a fast-paced, single-track program with time to meet and talk with participants from health, technology, policy, and research communities.