Part 2: Living with Mobiles

Chapter List

Chapter 4: Indian Needs-Cultural End-User Research in Mombai

Chapter 5: Usability Meets Sociology for Richer Consumer Studies

Mass manufacturing organizations tend to be fragmented by functions and by the professional backgrounds of people working in them. Each fragment has its own kind of user orientation. Ergonomics, marketing research, quality engineering, and other disciplines have long traditions of locating a user, using all their gauges on that individual, and then pushing their findings into the design fray. For user interface designers, user orientation is usability. Usability has been defined in a very broad and inclusive manner as 'the quality of use in context.'¹ However, the practice has focused heavily on task-centered thinking. If a given user accomplishes a given task quickly and without mistakes, the product is usable. Understanding the user is in effect understanding how that person performs the relevant tasks. What particularly characterizes the discipline is just how detailed this understanding has to be. The tasks to be evaluated are deconstructed into the smallest pieces imaginable.

The other end of the spectrum-where the user, the product, and the usage itself are construed as parts in a bigger picture-has been less usability-engineered. However, that is exactly where we are starting to find our biggest usability problems. The basic solutions of UI styles and processes have matured. We know our menus and softkeys pretty well, but we constantly face problems in understanding why people browse those menus, or why they don't. The 'why' is, of course, a user interface design issue, but the answer lies beyond the reach of cognitive task centered usability and the associated user conception. Thus, we have identified a need to widen the scope of designers' user understanding. There are several reasons why a broader take on user motivations has become increasingly relevant, especially for the mobile communication industry.

The obvious reason for breaking through the inherent limits of task-centered usability is underlined in each and every paper written about mobile user interface design; the user has stepped out from a lonely control room or an air-conditioned office into the public space where she (or he) wanders around the physical world and encounters the people living in it. And that really makes a difference. In a bus, in bed, on the beach, while baking with her hands covered in dough, when riding a bike or driving a car, alone, in the midst of an intimate discussion, among customers, in a snowstorm, when still very young, after she's grown old-the list never ends. All these conditions have design implications calling for contextual knowledge about the user and her communications.

Mobile phones have already been domesticated, that is, have become an integral part of the consumers' everyday life. Using the technology cannot be separated from living the rest of their lives and put under a microscope like an isolated object. The ubiquitous presence of communication technology makes it more appropriate to think of people as relating to mobiles than as operating them.

When observing people relating to an artifact, task centrality stops being the only or even the dominant point of view explaining the relationship. For clothes, personality and fashionableness go with-or before-practicality. Houses are not primarily efficient living machines, but cozy and intimate environments. Watches are jewelry that happen to tell time; cars are lifestyle in addition to transportation. Correspondingly, living with mobile communication technology introduces a diversity of subjective, emotive, and expressive criteria. Users have to feel that their lifestyles and preferences are in harmony with the products they keep around. The user needs to be seen as a subject consuming technologies.

Mobile phones and mobile communication technology have been hyped a lot. It has been easy to get the idea that 3G, WAP, Bluetooth, and the rest will change the world overnight. The actual solutions implemented have improved a lot and given the user real value, but (no surprise here) not at the pace of expectations. Consumers' expectations toward mobile communication technologies are constructed from their own exposures, past experience, and future promises. There is the users' firsthand experience with 2-year-old cell phones having none of the features hyped. There is a lot of excited talk about mobile Internet, natural-language speech recognition, third-generation networks, and fast wireless connections. There is a tradition of computing associated with respect, skill, and professionalism, and another associated with plug-and-play, idiotproof consumer durables. There are techies crazy about all novelties, and luddites who insist on hating it all. A consumer cannot evaluate a product and its features solely on the basis of practical utility. New solutions are introduced with fancy names and seductive descriptions. How to position a new feature? Which tradition would be the most appropriate reference for fostering understanding of a product? With which tradition do I identify myself? Products launched by the mobile industry are now positioned into a structure of values and references. The socially constructed meaning of a product influences or even determines how it will be accepted by the audience.

Mobile phones are tools and toys. If I call because I need a taxi, the phone is an instrument to get something done; my interaction is extrinsically motivated. If I write a text message to my friend, because I want to think about her for a while, to devote some of my time to her, the writing is intrinsically motivated. I don't mind that the correct punctuation is difficult to enter, as I enjoy polishing the message. I play snake because I am hooked. There is no need for a motivation of any kind-interaction as such is so engaging that it keeps me pressing the keys. The very same product, even the very same feature in it, can be used in different situations for very different reasons. We need to understand the range of motivations a user may have. Our image of the user needs to be widened to include motives, customs, and apparently even addictions.

Communication is a prerequisite for social behavior. Without communication there would be no societies, no cultures. Spoken face to face, language is the primary means of human interaction. Then there are artifacts based on language, and capable of enhancing the power of language. When we design these tools, we come close to the basic principles of how societies and cultures function. Designing for our compatriots is efficient because we have a complete understanding of the cultural codes without taking any specific actions. We can just start focusing on the task-specific issues. Designing for people who seem exotic to us is hard because we cannot take any codes or interpretation frameworks for granted. We need to step back and look at the whole culture to be able to evaluate the relevance of even our task-level questions, much less the right solutions. Cultural end-user studies are the way to attain global user interface design.

Besides the discipline-specific challenges described above, there is, of course, the generic core design challenge-designers of new technologies have never seen the world for which they are designing. The very existence of novel technologies changes the situation in which they are used, and the use changes the products. So understanding users means understanding how they change as the society around them changes in general, and specifically how they change through interaction with the products that we introduce.

To sum up, a mobile phone user is

• An information processing unit accomplishing tasks

• An actor in varying physical and social contexts

• A consumer with a lifestyle

• An interpreter of socially constructed meanings

• A locus of different motivations

• A member of a culture

• An object and an initiator of continuous change

Obviously discussing user needs-and we still use the word 'need'-is no longer solely a matter of addressing the practical and functional demands related to accomplishing a specific task. Nor do we use the word 'need' to refer to the difference between a subject's present state of being and the target state, as some marketing theories do. For us, user need is any relationship between a person and her context that may have an influence on the design of products and services. The relationship may be physical, behavioral, motivational, or driven by values, interpretations, and cultural codes.

We can't say that we understand our users perfectly. That would be impossible. We have, however, recognized the imperative for comprehensive user understanding, and taken steps to improve our sensitivity to end-user needs. Organizational changes have been made to encourage cooperation between marketing research, usability research, contextual user studies, and sociological consumer analysis.

In Chapter 5, Riitta Nieminen-Sundell and Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila describe the link between communication technologies, the social change they are engendering, and the new research and development approaches that change demands, discussing the manner in which sociological research tradition can equip product development organizations with appropriate tools.

We have also gathered plentiful experience about contextual design. A case study from India by Katja Konkka (Chapter 4) scopes out the results that can be collected by such cultural end-user research. It is astonishing to see how different kinds of issues which all are relevant to mobile communication can be exposed by a single research approach.