Announcing Activity: Design and Evaluation of an Intentionally Enriched Awareness Service

ABSTRACT

We introduce and explore the notion of “intentionally enriched awareness.” Intentional enrichment refers to the process of actively engaging users in the awareness process by enabling them to express intentions. We explore this concept designing and evaluating the AnyBiff system, which allows users to freely create, share, and use a variety of biff applications. Biffs are simple representation of predefined activities. Users can select biffs to indicate that they are engaged in an activity. AnyBiff was deployed in two different organizations as part of a user-centered design process. We report on the results of the trial, which allowed us to gain insights into the potential of the AnyBiff prototype and the underlying biff concept to implement intentionally enriched awareness. Our findings show that intentional disclosure mechanisms in the form of biffs were successfully used in both fields of application. Users actively engaged in the design of a large variety of biffs and explored many different uses of the concept. The study revealed a whole host of issues with regard to intentionally enriched awareness, which give valuable insight into the conception and design of future applications in this area.

Notes

¹A number of terminologies have been suggested to describe the role of the actor and perceiver (e.g., sender–receiver, actor–observer, informer–informant), all of them defining the balance between the two roles in slightly different ways. We continue to use the terms actor and perceiver for the remainder of the article

²Implemented by a notification service

³Context-aware computing approaches commonly use representations of context that are predefined by the designer of the system. Greenberg (2001) critiqued this notion of context as lacking flexibility and transparency. In contrast, allowing a user to externalize internal perceptions is a dynamic process that is based on the needs of individual users.

⁴Although the use of Java and Eclipse / SWT assured a great level of platform independent, platform-dependant issues remain in the SWT framework. Our use of different resources to integrate with the respective platform is a workaround that addresses these issues.

⁵These biffs are documented in the in-between awareness category in Figure 7.

Acknowledgements. This research was partly conducted within the Australasian CRC for Interaction Design, which is established and supported under the Australian Government's Cooperative Research Centres Programme.

Authors' Present Addresses. Markus Rittenbruch, School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. Stephen Viller, School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]. Tim Mansfield, Institute for Interactive Media & Learning, University of Technology Sydney, Level 27, Tower Building, ity Campus, Broadway NSW 2007, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].

HCI Editorial Record. First manuscript received December 5, 2005. Revisions received April 18, 2006, September 11, 2006 and September 23, 2006. Accepted by Panos Markopoulos, Boris de Ruyter, and Wendy Mackay. Final manuscript received October 6, 2006. —Editor