Paper Reading #6: Studying and Tackling Temporal Challenges in Moblie HCI

Comment 1: http://angel-at-chi.blogspot.com/2011/02/paper-reading-6-studying-and-tackling.html
Comment 2: http://csce436-nabors.blogspot.com/2011/02/reading-6-studying-and-tackling.html

Studying and Tackling Temporal Challenges in Moblie HCI

Joel E. Fischer
2010 HCI Doctoral Consortium

In the article the author was studying the psychology behind mobile interruptions and how they play a part in everyday life. The author stated that as mobile networks become larger and mobile devices are covering a wider variety of different functions that people are becoming more aware of the interruptions that they create, but this also leads to being more bothered by them. He did point out that after studies, much of what the annoyance came in two forms: bad timing, or message content. If the person was expecting a reply and waiting for it they were a lot less annoyed that if they were in the middle of a task requiring focus. They also were less bothered by good news or unexpected surprises (It’s a girl!!). The studies also showed that there was a good solution for good times to interrupt people in concentration as they said there is a period of brain rests between tasks when people were much more receptive to incoming information, however to track something like this would require attaching electrodes to the subjects head. They decided to come up with new kinds of tests and a new supplementary system for message sending that will analyze two things and provide new utility. First, the test was used to collect quantitative and qualitative data where each interruption is documented and the user tells what they were doing and how much the interruption bothered them. The second then is a new kind of text messaging screen that allowed the user to select from five levels of severity of the message. They would be able to pick whether the message is an emergency and needs to deliver right away which would give an additional message notification, to regular messages that would only deliver themselves after the user got off a call or the phone had not been used in a certain amount of time. The author called for a lot more testing and more psychological data to be extracted before trying a more complex system.

I think this article is interesting not only for its content and the psychological implications that were done with it but also because I can understand where the study comes from as I am being texted and email during this and some are very distracting and some are not. I think that more than anything it is who is texting me than the actual context of the message. Obviously there are certain kinds of messages that I always want to receive and some I never want to receive but there is definitely emotions attached to who is sending a message and when. I also agree with the idea that for something like this to work I would not want to have to attaché electrodes to my head in order to determine when I am receptive of a text message. I do however think that if there was a good way to tell when I would be receptive or if my phone would have a system of pattern matching where I could tell it what kinds of messages I am willing to receive at the time then it would have some good implications behind it. My only other concern with this kind of system is that in order for the phone to collect this kind of qualitative data it might require some kind of third party device attached to the phone. If this was the case we would need to consider power management because one of the biggest issues we face with mobile devices is their limited battery life. I think that this is a great study and one of my favorites so far, I am interested to see results on this and wonder if I will be able to get some kind of device that would do this in the near future.