Framing the Context of Use for Mobile HCI

Introduction

Mobile computing has emerged a specific research focus within human-computer interaction (HCI) and has gone beyond conventional desktop computing environments during the last ten years. In this change, interest in studying contexts of use has dramatically increased. Still, context of use is not the focus of interaction research, but it is something framing, surrounding and influencing the interaction between users and mobile computers. For designers, it is appealing to know the contextual characteristics that can be taken into account in effectively supporting user’s actions. For user experience researchers, it is desirable to understand the features or properties of usage context influencing an experience. For modern mobile usability practitioners, conducting experiments on the field settings, it is important to understand and report the relevant contextual conditions as a necessary part of evaluation. However, when exploring and understanding what context of use is about, researchers and practitioners face a variety of definitions, frameworks and models (e.g., Bradley & Dunlop, 2005; Cheverts et al., 2000, 2001; Dey, 2001; Dourish, 2001).

There are multiple ways to approach and categorize context of use. Understanding context is one of the main aims of ethnographical research (Dourish, 2001, 2004; O’Hara et al., 2006, 2007), whereas research into context-awareness targets the modeling of features (Cheverts et al., 2000, 2001; Dey, 2001), and usability or user-experience researchers see context of use as a part of a holistic picture of experience (see e.g., Hassenzahl & Tractinsky, 2006; Roto, 2006). Recently Bradley and Dunlop (2005) presented a prominent multidisciplinary model of context by combining theories from the fields of linguistics, computer science and psychology. According to their model, context of use is characterised by task, physical, social and temporal components of context. Furthermore, similar categorisations have been presented not only in the mobile HCI (Roto, 2006; Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila & Ruuska, 2000) and mobile work contexts (Wigelius & Väätäjä, 2009) but also in consumer studies (Belk, 1975). Besides these, technical, application or domain contexts have also been underlined as relevant factors for human-computer interaction (ISO 13407, 1999; Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila & Ruuska, 2000). While previous works provide a good base for viewing characteristics of usage context, their perspective is limited for mobile HCI.