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(e.g., (Madge & Harrisson, 1939) and http://www.
massobs.org.uk/index.htm) but which potentially
allows a much wider and/or specialised audience
to be reached, which opens up enormous potential
for qualitative and quantitative research, not just
in the social sciences but in any domain in which
widespread information gathering could be useful.
who works in certain places but also browses the
web and watches YouTube whilst on the move
between locations. User D represents the other
end of the scale from User A: someone who is
constantly undertaking activities, no matter where
he/she is: this is typical of the Facebook addict,
or Twitterer. Of course, this figure is diagram-
matic, and the levels of activity can vary hugely—
and there are many profiles that can also be
added to this picture, but I feel it captures four
user stereotypes quite well: these can be charac-
terised as User A being the 'Modern Worker';
User B is 'Migratory'; User C is the 'Nomadic';
and User D is the 'Twitterer'.
PATTERNS OF MOBILE USE
The conceptualisation of mobile as being primarily
about the user and not the device has an impact on
how we design systems: instead of focusing our
attention on the physical constraints of the device,
we focus instead on the notion of user movement
and consider how we should design for that.
By examining the movement and computing
patterns of users, we can identify some common
patterns of 'mobile' usage, as shown in Figure 1.
User A represents a user who works at two
fixed locations (often, his/her office and home).
User B is what I have earlier termed 'migratory'—
such users move from place to place, which can
vary, and work when at those locations, but not
in between. User C has a much more sporadic
usage pattern, but this is much less related to his/
her current location: at certain places, he/she does
certain things, but is also involved in ongoing
activities for some of the time whilst on the move:
this may represent the usage pattern of someone
IMPLICATIONS FOR DESIGN
AND RESEARCH
Clearly, these users will have different require-
ments for their systems: offering full office-style
applications to Nomads and Twitterers is inap-
propriate, whereas the Modern Worker certainly
needs that. The need to design applications within
a wider social context is not new (Beale, 2008;
Cherns, 1976), but the economics of software de-
velopment have pushed organisations into porting
existing applications to the mobile device: whilst
these will work for certain users, it is becoming
clearer that the early adopters of the latest and most
powerful smartphone technologies are more likely
Figure 1. Diagrammatic patterns of 'mobile' use (shading under Users A and B is only to identify them)
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