Action-oriented classification of families' information and communication actions: exploring mothers' viewpoints

Abstract

Action-oriented service and technology development begins with the idea that people use technologies to reach their action goals. Consequently, we should investigate user needs and how they can be satisfied, and adapt services and technologies to the natural course of actions. Here, we focus on family communication and investigate mobile communication service types for families. For this study 10 mothers were interviewed; we investigated the nature of their everyday information and communication needs and the different knowledge and information transfer actions that were discovered in their families. Qualitative analysis of these interviews was used to generate a taxonomy, which, in turn, can help in providing enhanced individual services and family-centred design models.

Keywords:

• action-oriented design
• ICT
• services
• use schemata
• user psychology

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Professor Lea Pulkkinen for her encouragement to put an emphasis on the perspectives of mothers in IS research and for her critical guidance at the initial phases of this research. Thanks are extended to Juha-Matti Latvala for the reflective comments about classification alternatives. We are also grateful for three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. Financial support for this study has been provided by TeliaSonera Oyj, a Nordic and Baltic region telecommunications company, and the Faculty of Information Technology of the University of Jyväskylä.

Notes

1. In some earlier texts, we have used the term ‘use scenario’ here, but in order to avoid confusions with Carroll's (2003) use scenarios we have adopted here the term schema and schemata instances, because the first refers to a more abstract level of information compared to use scenarios (e.g. Saariluoma 2004), while the second provides a pragmatic association to real, explicit data, also used here to validate the use-schemata construction.