Participatory design (PD) is readily applied in HCI to address complex sociotechnical challenges. However, PD faces ethical and practical concerns when it comes to scaling, i.e., extending its depth, scope or span. We extend the current understandings of scaling PD by applying feminist care ethics through Joan Tronto’s framework of attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness and solidarity. Pursuing care when scaling participatory activities simultaneously requires acknowledging various backstage processes and the affective labour that typically remains invisible. Drawing from our experiences of diverse PD endeavours with migrant communities and a Finnish municipality, we use reflexive discussions to recognise 13 labours encountered while scaling our PD approaches with care in mind. We discuss how these introduce new costs and challenges and elaborate on their salience in PD work. Finally, we provide strategies for care-full scaling, which we define as primarily an affective, but also political process that requires continuous reflexivity.

Autonomous decision-making systems, particularly recommender systems, have received increasing attention concerning fairness, i.e., if all stakeholders affected by such a system are treated equally as a result of the recommendations. Existing approaches primarily focus on fairness between two stakeholders – consumers and providers or consumers and items – treating providers and items as the same entity. However, we argue for the treatment of providers and items as distinct stakeholders to offer more comprehensive models of fairness in recommender systems. To this end, we propose a fairness-aware recommender system, CIPFRS, designed to optimize fairness across all three key stakeholders: consumers, providers, and items. We examine consumer fairness regarding their level of interaction with the system; high and low-activity users should be treated equally. Further, all providers should have an equal opportunity for their products to be recommended. Finally, we propose an approach to implement item fairness in each provider’s inventory. We report an extensive evaluation of the proposed solution through three datasets, demonstrating that considering all three stakeholders yields improved recommendations while minimizing bias.

The emergence of Generative AI features in news applications may radically change news consumption and challenge journalistic practices. To explore the future potentials and risks of this understudied area, we created six design fictions depicting scenarios such as virtual companions delivering news summaries to the user, AI providing context to news topics, and content being transformed into other formats on demand. The fictions, discussed with a multi-disciplinary group of experts, enabled a critical examination of the diverse ethical, societal, and journalistic implications of AI shaping this everyday activity. The discussions raised several concerns, suggesting that such consumer-oriented AI applications can clash with journalistic values and processes. These include fears that neither consumers nor AI could successfully balance engagement, objectivity, and truth, leading to growing detachment from shared understanding. We offer critical insights into the potential long-term effects to guide design efforts in this emerging application area of GenAI.

Emotionally overheated social media discussions cause many harms both to the individuals participating in the discussion and to the wider society. To support emotion regulation in social media discussions, the strategy of affect labelling is explored. Two experiments were run to study the effects of emotion labels presented with social media messages on participants’ emotional responses to the messages. Altogether 84 participants read emotional social media messages presented without and with emotion labels (Experiment 1, N = 39), and without labels and with emotion / control labels (Experiment 2, N = 45) and rated their subjective emotional valence. Results show that the ratings of valence were significantly higher for the positive messages presented with label than for the messages presented as such without emotion label or presented with a control label. In addition, the results of the second experiment show that the negative social media messages were experienced as more negative when the messages were presented with an emotion label than without emotion label or with control label. The results suggest that affect labelling of social media messages is an ineffective strategy to down-regulate emotions but could be used to support and strengthen positive emotions.

Uncivil commenting on online news articles tends to harm journalists, news readers, and public discourse. Recent HCI research proposes that such behaviour could be mitigated by alerts (e.g. instructional pop-up notifications) to users while writing seemingly impolite messages. However, the design space of such alerts and the contextual factors influencing users’ perceptions of them remain largely unexplored. Informed by principles of behaviour design, we examined the impact of three factors on the perceived quality and expected effectiveness of alerts: the level of politeness of the comment that the alerted user was responding to and the form and amount of guidance in alert designs. We used a 2 × 2 × 3 factorial quasi-experiment, implemented as an international online survey (N = 248) targeting online news commenters. The results showed that the politeness of the recipient impacted how the comment was perceived but had no effect on the evaluation of the alert. Additionally, alerts with behavioural guidance were preferred over those without. As for effects of background variables, participants’ commenting frequency was not found to influence alert scoring. This study expands our understanding of the design space for user interface alerts and the contextual factors that influence their perceived quality.

Abstract AI-based applications are increasingly used in knowledge-intensive expert work, which has led to a discussion regarding their trustworthiness, i.e., to which degree these applications are ethical and reliable. While trust in technology is an important aspect of using and accepting novel information systems, little is known about domain experts’ trust in machine learning systems in their work. To provide a real-life, empirical perspective on the topic, this study reports findings from an interview study of accounting practitioners’ (N = 9) trust in intelligent automation in their work. The findings underline the holistic nature of trust, suggesting that contextual and social aspects, such as participatory design practices, shape domain experts’ trust in intelligent automation. For instance, the participants emphasize their contribution to product development and open communication with the system developers. In addition, the findings shed light on the characteristics of domain experts as technology users, such as the necessity of situation-specific expert knowledge when evaluating the systems’ reliability. Thus, our findings suggest that trust in intelligent automation manifests at different levels, both in human-AI interaction and interpersonal communication and collaboration. This research contributes to the existing literature on trust in technology, especially AI-powered applications, by providing insights into trust in intelligent automation in expert work.

While HCI literature offers general frameworks for understanding user-centred quality, specific application areas may call for more detailed contextualisation of it. This paper focuses on socio-technical context of online news commenting by investigating speculative UI interventions intended to influence users’ emotions and social behaviour. To understand the aspects of quality that matter to users in such UI interventions, we conducted an international online survey (N = 439) and qualitatively analysed respondents’ first impressions of eight different design proposals. The findings describe contextually relevant socio-technical viewpoints and offer actionable considerations for design. For example, the findings imply that designers should be mindful of possible unintentional misuse that may result from the UI reinforcing specific emotional states or affording stigmatisation of individual users. The study advances understanding of which aspects of quality should be considered when designing and deploying UI interventions for digital media services and evaluating them with potential end-users.

Abstract The practices of organizational talent acquisition are rapidly transforming as a result of the proliferation of information systems that support decision-making, ranging from applicant tracking systems to recruitment chatbots. As part of human resource management (HRM), talent acquisition covers recruitment and team-assembly activities and is allegedly in dire need for digital aid. We analyze the pitfalls and tensions of digitalization in this area through a lens that builds on the interdisciplinary literature related to digital ethics. Using three relevant landmark papers, we analyzed qualitative data from 47 interviews of HRM professionals in Finland, including team-assembly facilitators and recruitment experts. The analysis highlights 14 potential tensions and pitfalls, such as the tension between requesting detailed data versus respecting privacy and the pitfall of unequal treatment across application channels. We identify that the values of autonomy, fairness and utility are often especially at risk of being compromised. We discuss the tendency of the binary considerations related to human and automated decision making, and the reasons for the incompatibility between current digital systems and organizations’ needs for talent acquisition.

Abstract Organizations’ hiring processes are increasingly shaped by various digital tools and e-recruitment systems. However, there is little understanding of the recruiters’ needs for and expectations towards new systems. This paper investigates recruitment chatbots as an emergent form of e-recruitment, offering a low-threshold channel for recruiter-applicant interaction. The rapid spread of chatbots and the casual nature of their user interfaces raise questions about the perceived benefits, risks, and suitable roles in this sensitive application area. To this end, we conducted 13 semi-structured interviews, including 11 interviews with people who are utilizing recruitment chatbots and two people from companies that are developing recruitment chatbots. The findings provide a qualitative account of their expectations and motivations, early experiences, and perceived opportunities regarding the current and future use of chatbots in recruitment. While chatbots answer the need for attracting new candidates, they have also introduced new challenges and work tasks for the recruiters. The paper offers considerations that can help to redesign recruitment bots from the recruiter’s viewpoint.

Abstract An online experiment investigated the perceived effects of a user interface (UI) intervention aiming to support online news commenters' emotion regulation. By describing the comment's tone to the user, the expected effect was activation of the implicit emotion regulation process of affect labeling (i.e. naming emotions). The perceived emotion- and behavior-related effects of the labeling intervention were investigated using the experimental vignette methodology. Participants read a vignette describing the behavior of an uncivil commenter and assessed the commenter's probable responses to the labeling intervention or a control intervention shown in the UI. The results showed that, when compared to a control condition, the labeling intervention was assessed to evoke positive emotions and to result in mitigation of uncivil behavior. This suggests that UI solutions that support emotion regulation are a promising approach to reducing uncivil comments that users might afterward regret, and hence potentially improving the quality of online discussions.

On digital media services, uncivil commenting is a persistent issue causing negative emotional reactions. One enabler for such problematic behavior is the user interface, conditioning, and structuring text-based communication online. However, the specific roles and influences of UIs are little understood, which calls for critical analysis of the current UI solutions as well as speculative exploration of alternative designs. This paper reports a research-through-design study on the problematic phenomenon regarding uncivil and inconsiderate commenting on online news, envisioning unconventional solutions with a critical voice. We unpack this problem area and outline critical perspectives to possible solutions by describing and analyzing four designs that propose to support emotion regulation by facilitating self-reflection. The design choices are further discussed in respect to interviews of ten news media experts. The findings are reflected against the question of how can critique meaningfully manifest in this challenging problem area.

Abstract The team composition of a project team is an essential determinant of the success of innovation projects that aim to produce novel solution ideas. Team assembly is essentially complex and sensitive decision-making, yet little supported by information technology (IT). In order to design appropriate digital tools for team assembly, and team formation more broadly, we call for profoundly understanding the practices and principles of matchmakers who manually assemble teams in specific contexts. This paper reports interviews with 13 expert matchmakers who are regularly assembling multidisciplinary innovation teams in various organizational environments in Finland. Based on qualitative analysis of their experiences, we provide insights into their established practices and principles in team assembly. We conceptualize and describe common tactical approaches on different typical levels of team assembly, including arranging approaches like “key-skills-first”, “generalist-first” and “topic-interest-first”, and balancing approaches like “equally-skilled-teams” and “high-expertise-teams”. The reported empirical insights can help to design IT systems that support team assembly according to different tactics.

Collocated interaction has received growing interest in both academic research and the design of information and communication technological applications. An emergent research topic within this area relates to technological enhancement of social interaction. Various envisioned systems aim beyond simply enabling interaction, to actively enhance—i.e., improve the quality or extent of—social interaction between collocated people. However, there is little understanding of the optimal design solutions and roles of technology considering this goal. This literature review outlines the landscape of design explorations in this emergent research topic. We contribute an in-depth study of 92 publications that present relevant solutions or prototypes, analyzing their focus areas, design objectives, and design and evaluation approaches. To contribute with a new theoretical perspective, we identify various roles of technology relevant for enhancement, representing three abstract categories: facilitating, inviting and encouraging. This review helps researchers to describe, analyze, and position relevant prior research and identify gaps in scientific knowledge.

Collaboration and social networking are increasingly important for academics, yet identifying relevant collaborators requires remarkable effort. While there are various networking services optimized for seeking similarities between the users, the scholarly motive of producing new knowledge calls for assistance in identifying people with complementary qualities. However, there is little empirical understanding of how academics perceive relevance, complementarity, and diversity of individuals in their profession and how these concepts can be optimally embedded in social matching systems. This paper aims to support the development of diversity-enhancing people recommender systems by exploring senior researchers’ perceptions of recommended other scholars at different levels on a similar–different continuum. To conduct the study, we built a recommender system based on topic modeling of scholars’ publications in the DBLP computer science bibliography. A study of 18 senior researchers comprised a controlled experiment and semi-structured interviewing, focusing on their subjective perceptions regarding relevance, similarity, and familiarity of the given recommendations, as well as participants’ readiness to interact with the recommended people. The study implies that the homophily bias (behavioral tendency to select similar others) is strong despite the recognized need for complementarity. While the experiment indicated consistent and significant differences between the perceived relevance of most similar vs. other levels, the interview results imply that the evaluation of the relevance of people recommendations is complex and multifaceted. Despite the inherent bias in selection, the participants could identify highly interesting collaboration opportunities on all levels of similarity.

Although the composition of individuals can strongly affect the success of professional collaboration, organizations often struggle with their so-called social matching decisions. For example, when recruiting new people to an organization, the decision-making is often reduced to intuitively matching individuals based on vague descriptions of projects or positions. The role of technology in recruiting is typically confined to gathering and presenting simple candidate profiles. We argue that many issues in recruitment boil down to lack of understanding the process of decision-making from social matching perspective, covering aspects like identification of relevant selection criteria and choice of the most suitable candidate. To better understand the appropriate roles of information technology (IT) in this domain, we interviewed 21 expert matchmakers, such as HR specialists and headhunters. Based on qualitative analysis of their experiences, we provide a bottom-up framework of the decision-making stages in recruitment, focusing on the pertinent challenges from the perspective of social matching. The findings indicate that, particularly, the epistemic asymmetry between the recruiter and candidates regarding the expected qualities calls for deliberation throughout the decision-making process. Matchmakers also struggle between contradictory ideals of agility and holistic decision-making. Based on the findings and relevant literature, we propose six roles that IT could play in social matching decisions in recruitment.

Grandparents and grandchildren that live apart often rely on communication technologies, such as messengers, video conferencing, and phone calls for maintaining relationships. While some of these systems are challenging for grandparents, others are less engaging for children. To facilitate communication, we developed StoryBox, a tangible device that allows sharing photos, tangible artifacts, and audio recordings of everyday life. We conducted a preliminary study with two families to identify design issues, and further refine the prototype. Subsequently, we conducted a field study with four families for up to four weeks to better understand real-world use and examine inter-generational connectedness. We found that StoryBox was accessible, simple, and helped bridge the technological gap between grandparents and grandchildren. Children communicated asynchronously in a playful and idiosyncratic manner, and grandparents shared past family memories. We provide insights on how to ease communication between different generations, engage them in sharing activities, and strengthen family relationships.

This workshop will discuss how different multimedia applications and interaction techniques have been employed to support public sociality---from collocated interactions to social awareness and feeling of community. Participants will discuss recent work and join hands-on design activities to envision new ways for potential users to discover and learn how to use ubiquitous technologies for opportunistic social interactions.

Pokémon GO, a location-based mobile game with millions of users, offers an opportunity to study how mobile technology can encourage collocated social interaction between people. Despite being predominantly a single-player game, Pokémon GO has been discussed to induce a variety of social interactions between the players. We conducted a qualitative online survey to gain insight on collocated interactions and encounters that take place around the game, and to understand how they relate to the game design. Our analysis shows that the game design promotes encounters between players, the idle time during the game allows various forms of social interaction to take place, and further, the players gain various benefits from exchanging information with each other. Based on the findings, we present design implications for the design of mobile applications or games aiming to encourage collocated social interaction.

In collaboration between strangers, group formation and familiarization often take a lot of time. To facilitate this, icebreaking activities are commonly utilized, aiming at a positive and relaxing social atmosphere. To explore how interactive technology could serve as a tool in such social activity, we developed Who's Next, a multiplayer quiz-based mobile game intended to break the ice in a group of strangers. The design utilizes the information asymmetry between people, aiming to encourage joint activity between them. We conducted six evaluation sessions where four to six participants in each played the game together and were interviewed. Who's Next was found to be a promising support for icebreaking. It was considered to offer a comfortable way of sharing information about oneself and getting to know newly-met strangers. We conclude that interactive technology could successfully support the facilitator role in encouraging interaction and creating a relaxed atmosphere between strangers.

Many activities that have traditionally been performed with different dedicated physical artifacts are now done with personal mobile devices. Consequently, the privacy of mobile interfaces has hampered social observability and chances for serendipitous interactions. For example, reading an electronic newspaper with a mobile device does not allow the surrounding people to be similarly aware of the reader's activity as traditional newspapers. Social displays are additional displays on mobile devices providing the surrounding people with light-weight cues about the activities of the device user. We implemented a prototype that reveals the user's current active application and presents its name on an e-ink display on the backside of a mobile device. We conducted a ten-day field trial with 13 participants using the prototype. The results show that the prototype was able to increase awareness of users' mobile activities and occasionally triggered interactions with others, without significantly violating the sense of privacy.

Mobile phones have become common tools for photography. Despite the fact that photos are social artifacts, mobile phones afford the act of photo taking only as an individual activity. Photo taking that involves more than one photographer has been envisioned to create positive outcomes and experiences. We implemented this vision with mobile camera phones, exploring how this would influence photo taking practices and experiences. We conducted a user study where altogether 22 participants (11 pairs) were using a novel mobile photography method based on asymmetrical interaction abilities, comparing that with two traditional methods. We present the collaborative practices emerged in different photography methods and report user experience findings particularly with regard to enforced collaboration in mobile photo taking. The results highlight benefits and positive experiences in collaborative photo taking. We discuss lessons learned and point out design implications that come into play when designing for mobile collocated collaboration.

This paper presents the design and concept evaluation of Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application that uses gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions to encourage interaction between people who are regularly within a close proximity of each other. The application aims to break the current norm of matching and introducing people based on similar interests or commonalities. We conducted focus groups to evaluate the application concept. We report findings of the user study contributing to the understanding of the potential and challenges of gamified proximity-based social applications.

Encouraging social interaction between collocated strangers has become an increasingly popular topic in Computer Supported Collaborative Work research and interaction design. The research aims to foster more social interaction between collocated people to, e.g., produce positive new encounters and increase social awareness. To address these social goals, we developed Next2You, a proximity-based social mobile application. Its design builds on the principles of gamification, progressive disclosure and light-weight interactions. This paper summarizes the novelties in the design and implementation of Next2You.

As people possess increasing numbers of information devices, situations where several devices are combined and used together have become more common. We present a user study on people's current practices in combining multiple information devices in their everyday lives, ranging from pragmatic tasks to leisure activities. Based on diaries and interviews of 14 participants, we characterize the usage practices of the most common devices, including smartphones, computers, tablets, and home media centers. We analyze 123 real-life multi-device use cases and identify the main usage patterns, including Sequential Use, Resource Lending, Related Parallel Use, and Unrelated Parallel Use. We discuss the practical challenges of using several information devices together. Finally, we identify three levels of decisions that determine which devices are used in a particular situation, including acquiring, making available, and selecting the devices for use.

Activities that have traditionally been performed with tangible artifacts, e.g. reading the newspaper and browsing printed photos, have increasingly moved to mobile devices. This has made it harder for the surrounding people to become aware of the activities a person is performing with the device. As a result, the possibilities for serendipitous social interactions between the user and the collocated people have diminished. We introduce social displays, additional displays on mobile devices providing social cues about the activities of device user's activities for surrounding people. We conducted five focus groups with in total 23 participants, each discussing four scenarios and co-designing the presentation of cues on the display. The results suggest that the display has potential to break the private bubble of mobile device activities, as well as to provide tickets-to-talk to enhance social interaction, especially between acquaintances. We discuss social opportunities and challenges as well as possible design directions for social displays.

As people increasingly own multiple mobile and portable devices (such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops), situations where several devices are used together have become more common. A frequent problem in such situations is how to move virtual visual objects (such as content items or application windows) between device displays. We present a comparative evaluation of three methods for moving objects between personal mobile devices: Tray, Transfer Mode, and Device Touch. The participants' preferences of the methods in different real-life scenarios were found to strongly depend on the task and the context of use, making the design of a single optimal cross-display object movement method a challenging task. We identify several clusters of contextual factors that influenced the users' preferences. We also report more detailed differences in efficiency, novelty, learnability, physical device handling, and task completion strategies between the three methods included in the evaluation.

Eating is not only one of the most fundamental human needs but also among the most regular activities. Acquiring food, preparing meals, and socializing around food are deeply rooted in all human cultures. In this paper we show how food can not only serve to satisfy hunger but also become a new display technology. Through food augmentation, a dinner could communicate its ingredients, convey messages, or provide instructions such as the recipe of a meal. We show how to augment a large range of food with laser. We conducted a series of focus groups to gather people's first impressions and derive a broad range of meaningful augmentation scenarios. We discuss the perceived benefits, opportunities, and concerns. Additionally, we evaluated a number of scenarios through an online survey. The most readily accepted augmentation scenarios include adding practical information, increasing awareness about the food, and augmenting food items with a natural skin.

This paper presents a scenario-based user study of mobile application concepts that would encourage interaction between people within close proximity. The scenarios demonstrate three themes of digital tickets-to-talk: informing who and what are around, augmenting self-expression, and online interaction encouraging physical interaction. Our interview study explored the opportunities and challenges of such applications in developing into further face-to-face interactions between strangers. Tickets that are related to activities that convey a solid intention that would lead to practical collaboration, such as playing sports or studying together, have the best potential to advance to meaningful face-to-face interaction. Augmenting self-expression and online interaction encouraging physical interaction were found to have potential to create curiosity but seen less credible by our 42 interview participants to motivate face-to-face interaction between strangers. We conclude by discussing the potential of each theme of ticket-to-talk based on our findings as well as related literature.

Social Devices (SDs) are mobile devices that are proactive in social settings and aim to encourage social interaction between co-located people. We conducted a study of people's reactions to SDs with an audio-based interface on a semi-functional prototype. Based on a Wizard-of-Oz simulation, two SDs proactively started talking to each other and to the participants, with an aim to involve the participants to the conversation. We present the resulted social interactions and reactions as well as the participants' opinions about speech-based proactive SDs. Overall, SDs created a collaborative social situation and triggered a broad variety of social interactions, ranging from grounding to lengthy conversations. Meanwhile, the novelty of the technology and its rather dominant social role often shifted the participants' attention from each other to the devices, thus hindering social interaction. We conclude with a discussion of the benefits and drawbacks of audio-based interaction and the social proactivity of technology.

Mobile navigation services are becoming more than merely digital maps; many of them include imagery from the street level. The user can benefit from enriching the 2D-map-based navigation with panoramic imagery from the citizen's perspective, hence gaining an authentic view of the frequent landmarks that urban environments include. In this paper we describe the user-centered design of a mobile street-imagery-based navigation service supporting navigation and exploration of unfamiliar cities. The service was evaluated with a field trial using tourists as participants. The participants used the service freely for the pedestrian navigation tasks that were relevant to them during the trial period. This approach shed light on issues that have not been raised by previous studies on image-based navigation, which have relied on more formal test tasks. The study confirmed that the images help with detecting the destination or assessing the atmosphere of a remote location but brought into focus the real world challenges related to downloading times and positioning accuracy.

Over the last few years, mobile applications demonstrating Augmented Reality (AR) - such as Layar, Junaio and Google Goggles - have been introduced to consumers. We conducted an online survey to explore the user experience (UX) of early stage mobile AR applications available in the market in spring 2011, covering both location-based AR browsers and image recognition AR applications for object-based interaction. We identify various types of experiences such applications have evoked by qualitatively analyzing 84 users' narratives of their most satisfying and unsatisfying experiences. The results highlight, for example, experiences of awareness of surroundings, empowerment, positive surprise, amazement and fascination from the novelty value, as well as some examples of immersion and social connectivity. The analysis indicates that the applications have not yet reached their potential in evoking a multifaceted user experience that is characteristic especially to AR. This work helps in understanding the experiential design potential in mobile AR and points out UX issues to further focus on in design.

Social Devices are smart phones that interact with each other in order to proactively trigger interaction between co-located users. Social Devices promote proxemic interactions between people and can act as enablers of users' social contacts. Various modalities are used to support natural interactions between users and Social Devices. We present an explorative study of spatial gestures that could support interactions with Social Devices. Our aim was to find out what kind of gestures users would like to use for different types of actions. Ten pairs participated in a laboratory study in which they went through three scenarios of Social Devices. The participants were asked to generate gestures that they would find suitable for user actions within the scenarios. In this paper, we present the found gesture types and their fit to various user actions. Our results show that Scan, Swing, Nod and Turn the screen down are potential spatial gestures for intuitive use of Social Devices. User feedback about their preferences of using spatial gestures indicates issues of social acceptance.

Augmented reality (AR) as an emerging technology in the mobile computing domain is becoming mature enough to engender publicly available applications for end users. Various commercial applications have recently been emerging in the mobile consumer domain at an increasing pace — Layar, Junaio, Google Goggles, and Wikitude are perhaps the most prominent ones. However, the research community lacks an understanding of how well such timely applications have been accepted, what kind of user experiences they have evoked, and what the users perceive as the weaknesses of the various applications overall. During the spring of 2011 we conducted an online survey to study the overall acceptance and user experience of the mobile AR-like consumer applications currently existing on the market. This paper reports the first analyses of the qualitative and quantitative survey data of 90 respondents. We highlight an extensive set of user-oriented issues to be considered in developing the applications further, as well as in directing future user research in AR. The results indicate that the experiences have been inconsistent: generally positive evaluations are overshadowed by mentions of applications' pragmatic uselessness in everyday life and technical unreliability, as well as excessive or limited and irrelevant content.

The sense of touch has been shown to convey emotive information and nuances in face-to-face interpersonal communication, but its applications in mobile communication technologies are still limited. One of the challenges for such new communication medium is the interpretation of tactile messages. This paper presents a study with an early prototype of a mobile tactile device. Twenty novice participants interpreted four messages consisting of a four-channel vibrotactile stimulus, complemented with three cumulative textual cues regarding 1) the communication setting, 2) sender, and 3) situation. The subjective interpretations were assessed with four semantic differential scales, and the reasoning behind the interpretations was inquired by interviewing. The findings show that the intensity and, to some degree, the friendliness of the message could be identified from the tactile-only message. However, to correctly interpret the degree of formality or emotionality in the message, also contextual cues were needed.

With advanced sensor technologies and tools for content creation, current mobile devices possess features for providing information services based on user's location. There are several services for geographically pinned user-generated content focusing on providing information to users in unfamiliar locations. However, information needs regarding location-based content services in the familiar everyday context have so far been quite little researched. Our research entailed a 12-day user study where nine participants kept a diary, in which they reported needs for annotations of locations they had come across in various day-to-day situations. Based on our results, we present design implications for annotation services, taking into account the user needs in various daily situations. The results show that the services should support flexible controls of the visibility of annotations, notifications about selected annotations within the vicinity, and easy remote annotations. In addition, the system should support collective and living annotations that can be contributed by several users.

The haptic modality -- the sense of touch -- is utilized very limitedly in current human-computer interaction. Especially in mobile communication, the haptic modality could provide a means for richer multimodal and emotional communication between users over distance. Haptic user interface prototypes have been developed but their user experience has not been studied extensively. We conducted seven focus group sessions to study users' expectations for user experience of haptic interaction, specifically focusing on mobile communication. The paper presents the user experience factors that were regarded by potential users as salient in haptic interaction: subjective quality of the haptic stimuli, privacy, intimacy and spontaneity. Also the possibilities, restrictions and suitability of the haptic mobile communication are discussed. Most appropriate use cases for haptic communication were found to be conveying emotions and binary information. As the main conclusion, we present design guidelines for haptic mobile communication that were drawn up based on the findings.

Digital media content can contain items that are very personal and valuable for their owner. Such items can form life memories, such as media collages from happy events or recordings of the first steps of one's children. Memories can be evoked and created "anytime, anyplace", and thus mobility is a key factor in managing them. Even though related systems for sharing photographs exist, users' needs for managing personal content have not been investigated specifically from the viewpoint of life memories. This paper describes our empirical research on users' needs for sharing the digital representations of their life memories. As the main contribution, we present design guidelines for services for sharing digital life memories. Furthermore, we present a mobile service prototype which was designed based on the guidelines. Our research shows that the creation, sharing, managing and viewing of digital life memories is highly based on meaningful real-life events.