A variety of new kinds of consumer cameras that capture the full 360-degree surroundings in a single panorama photo or video has recently been introduced to the market. In addition to conventional viewing devices, such as smartphones and computers, the 360-degree photos and videos can also be viewed with a virtual reality headset for a more immersive experience. In this paper, we present a field study where 14 consumers used 360-degree cameras freely in their everyday lives for a period of four weeks. We describe the strategies that the participants applied to capture 360-degree content in different situations and discuss the opportunities, challenges, and limitations of using a 360-degree camera compared to conventional cameras. We identify four common practices of consumer 360-degree camera use: Panorama Capture, Experience Capture, Automatic Capture, and Document Capture. We also report on the participants' habits of viewing, sharing, editing, and managing consumer-captured 360-degree content.

This article describes the iterative design and user evaluation of a prototype, which enables collaborative music discovery by creating playlists and associating and expanding them with mood pictures. The concept was evaluated in two field trials by a total of 45 individual users, with both trials containing 30 users and 15 of the users attending both of the trials. The results from the two field trials are presented under three main themes: socially augmented music discovery, user-generated content enhancing music discovery and social usage patterns emerging from the usage of such a system. Users formed ways to facilitate social interaction and music discovery through the playlist content they shared. Social usage patterns reveal the social activities users performed with the service in the trials. The findings can be used as design implications for mood-based music service designers.

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.

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.

This paper studies the idea of using adaptive avatars for visualizing recent music listening, supporting music discovery, and encouraging social interaction. In the evaluated prototype the avatar responds to the user's music listening by changing its appearance by gaining new clothing and accessories to parts of the avatar. The gained items and parts match to the listened songs. The parts can be played as playlists and be sent to other users as visual recommendations. In a user study with 22 participants, the concept was found fun, interesting and said to provide new music listening experiences. Users were highly interested in the evolving avatar and seeing/listening to others' avatars. Users had several different avatar creation strategies that are very interesting for new music discovery. Users also listened to new types of music broadly using the avatars. Based on the results, the paper proposes design implications for using avatars in music discovery services.

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.

This paper describes a user evaluation study of automated creation of mobile video remixes in three different event contexts. The evaluation contributes to the design process of the Automatic Video Remixing System, deepening knowledge to wider usage context. The study was completed with 30 users in three different contexts: a sports event, a music concert and a doctoral dissertation. It was discovered that users are motivated to provide their material to the service when knowing they get an automatically created remix containing many capturers' content in return. Automatic video remixing was stated to ease the task of editing videos and to improve the quality of amateur videos. The study reveals requirements for pleasurable remix creation in different event contexts and details the user experience factors related to the content capturing, sharing, and viewing of captured content and the remixes. The results provide insights into media creation in small event-based groups.

This paper studies a MoodPic concept and a prototype implementation enabling collaborative creation of mood picture based musical play lists, evaluated qualitatively with 30 Finnish participants. In general, MoodPic was found to be a successful concept and stated to add novel experiences to music listening. Accessing music through mood pictures was highly appreciated and seen as a good way to discover new music over the genre boundaries and receive music recommendations from real users based on their mood picture interpretation. Sorting music based on mood pictures instead of genres was seen as an interesting and easy way to interact with music. Based on the interview results, this paper introduces several ideas for further improving the music listening experience using mood pictures as a basis for play lists. This paper summarizes the main findings and proposes an extensive set of generalized design implications to take into account when designing solutions for social music discovery.

This paper presents an outdoor gaming prototype for music discovery and its field-trial evaluation by 15 Finnish users. The implemented mobile prototype enables users to conquer physical areas from a map view by circulating them and assigning songs to dominate the areas. Music can then be consumed from these areas by other users using three different methods. Based on the results, the concept adds novel experiences to outdoor gaming and music discovery. Populating the world with music by competing in the game was seen as a motivating way to discover and share music. Outdoor exercising combined to discovering places conquered with new music were seen as important and interesting by all the users in the interviews. Users found the different music consumption options to be novel and useful. This paper proposes a set of general design drivers for music discovery in outdoor gaming and further development ideas for the concept.

Social activity is becoming a central contributor to user experience (UX) in many modern Web services. The motivations, norms and rules of online communities have been widely researched, however, social activity and its UX in modern Web services is a less studied area. We conducted a four-week-long field study with three Web services -- Facebook, Nokia Sports Tracker and Dopplr -- which all support social activity. The aim of this study was to identify the central drivers and hindrances of social UX, user experience of online social activity. Our results show that the main drivers of social UX include self-expression, reciprocity, learning and curiosity, whereas unsuitability of content and functionality, incompleteness of user networks and lack of trust and privacy are often experienced as hindrances for social UX. Our findings also reveal the pragmatic and hedonic nature of the drivers and hindrances. The results can be used to inform design and evaluation of social UX in Web services.