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phone, rendering Bluetooth interaction
functionality useless.
•
Interaction does not fit into everyday life,
and the benefit is too small
- We found
that only a very small number of users
continued to use systems after the ini-
tial novelty of a new deployment waned.
When users were questioned about this
they often had simply forgotten that fea-
tures existed or how to use them (a very
common example was users forgetting the
phone number required to 'text' a message
to their display). Additionally, many users
felt that they didn't have time to interact
with systems (especially in the workplace
scenarios of Hermes, Hermes II and iDis-
plays) and, perhaps most importantly, that
they felt it was too much effort to interact
with a system. In these cases, making rela-
tively trivial changes to reduce the effort
required to achieve a task, e.g. setting a
message on a door display, resulted in sig-
nificant increases in usage. It transpired
that often users disabled Bluetooth on their
mobile phones for power and security rea-
sons. The process of taking out a phone,
enabling Bluetooth and starting interaction
takes at least one minute, and users com-
mented it was too much effort for the ben-
efit. Even for the MobiDiC coupons, in in-
terviews many people stated that they took
the photo to try it, but then did not go to the
shop because the benefit was too small. We
would argue that the key reasons for lack
of continued use are related to the cost/ef-
fort required for interaction being too high
and the perceived benefit of interaction
being too low. However, through the use
of iteration and user-centred design tech-
niques (such as those applied in Hermes)
we did find it possible to lower the cost of
use sufficiently to encourage adoption. In
the Hermes system we also found it crucial
for users to build up trust in the reliability
of a system in order to encourage adoption,
when users experienced failure when at-
tempting to interact this proved especially
damaging.
Mobile phone based interaction may be es-
chewed if the same function is available via simpler
means. Fore example, for the Wray display, web
upload was much more popular than Bluetooth,
as was the iDisplays RSS feed than the mobile
application.
Additionally, enjoyment seemed to be per-
ceived as a higher benefit than monetary incen-
tives. The value of accessing historical photo-
graphs on the Wray Photo Display was cited as
valuable numerous times in user feedback. The
MobiDiC Coupons were however often not per-
ceived as a big benefit.
The number of uses does not translate directly
to usefulness: The Hermes SMS feature was used
very seldom, but interviews have shown that in
the cases where it has been used it was perceived
as very useful and unique.
The Importance of Appropriate
and Timely Feedback
Users of the Hermes SMS feature who encountered
reliability problems asked for greater feedback.
With the Hermes Photo Display, photos uploaded
via Bluetooth were queued for display and con-
sequently users whose photos were not shown
immediately became frustrated (Cheverst, et al.,
2005). Similarly, users who posted content to the
iDisplays often walked directly to the displays to
check, although a screenshot was presented at the
web interface.
The Importance of Social Context
and Representation of Self
Interviews revealed that people were only con-
cerned about items that contained photos of people,
which they did not want to appear distorted. The
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