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User experience of communication before and during rendezvous: interim results

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Abstract

This paper reports on a diary study of rendezvousing as performed by university students. The study compares students’ experience of communication before and during rendezvous. During rendezvous, students rated several aspects of the experience of communication lower than before rendezvous. This impairment of experience is attributed to the cumulative effects of the following aspects of the context of use: noise, multiple task performance, conflict with social norms, incomplete network coverage, time pressure and conflict with preferred life paths. User performance goals for context-aware communication systems are discussed.

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Notes

  1. Elsewhere, the term “user experience” sometimes refers to user knowledge and to the quality of activities that occur around use, such as unpacking and storing the product.

  2. One participant did not state whether they owned a mobile phone or not. Some participants did not have access to a fixed-line phone.

  3. The difference for convenience is not significant, but extremely close to significance (“borderline“). The full study may confirm whether convenience is impaired by being “mobile,” or not.

  4. This table is not a finding of the study, but additional information to support discussion of the study’s finding. Further studies, perhaps using a method similar to Hudson et al. [23] or systematic content analysis of the diaries collected here, are needed to conclusively identify the factors that brought about the impairment of user experience in “mobile” contexts reported here.

  5. For some aspects of experience, high ratings are desirable, for other aspects, low ratings are desirable.

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  1. School of Computing and Information Systems, Kingston University, Kingston Upon Thames, London, UK

    Martin Colbert

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Correspondence to Martin Colbert.

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Colbert, M. User experience of communication before and during rendezvous: interim results. Pers Ubiquit Comput 9, 134–141 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-004-0318-3

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