This week at SXSW (pronounced South by Southwest) Jared Benson, Executive Creative Director at Punchcut, will lead a conversation titled “Mobile Manners: Mobile Presence and the Undefined Etiquette.”
Left to our own devices, what happens to our manners? Jared will lead a discussion among user experience design practitioners in discussing the profound effects the always-on mobile lifestyle is having on the way we interact with people and the world. In the same old contexts, we have a whole new set of choices: Do I really have to take this? Should I just put my headphones in and pretend I can’t hear them? Instead of calling mom back, can I text her? The cues and standards for how we communicate on our devices in the presence of others are just beginning to be defined. For the most part, individuals - not social norms - are deciding what is appropriate.
This conversation will cover what the UE design community can do to empower the user and alleviate the fear that we are becoming isolated by our technologies. Punchcut will facilitate a discussion on contextual considerations, the formality of various mediums, and the demands of emerging ideas like mobile presence.
Join the conversation at SXSW on Sunday March 9th at 5pm in Ballroom E.
Listen to the podcast here:
mobile_etiquette.mp3
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Today at the EuroIA Summit, Barcelona, we will discuss insights from the Punchcut-funded mobile social networking study.
The poster lists the chief insights and provides a visualization of the users ages and their behaviors (text messaging, IM, email, photo sharing, blogging, commenting both using desktop apps and mobile devices).
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Social networking and user-generated content are, without a doubt, hot topics in the mobile sector right now. The marriage of social networking and mobile phones seems logical: our mobile phones are always with us and keep us connected to our networks all day, every day. We currently use our mobile phones to create and share content to a limited degree, and as our devices become more and more sophisticated the kinds of user-generated content we create and the means by which we share them will only increase. In anticipation of this wave, Web-based social networking sites like MySpace are moving into mobile hoping to increase their reach and popularity, while the ranks of startups are swelling with developers of wireless social networks or tools that facilitate mobile social networking. 3’s See Me TV in the UK has already shown that that video created and consumed on the mobile phone can be a popular proposition.
Despite the growing numbers of players in the mobile social networking space, questions abound about what constitutes a successful mobile social networking experience. What form will social networks take in the mobile context? How will desktop-based and mobile social networks co-exist, or will they? As a San Francisco-based interface strategy, design and development consultancy with a specialization in mobile, we at Punchcut spend a great deal of time pondering these questions and envisioning future-forward solutions for our clients. In order to inform our design efforts, we recently conducted a qualitative study of the social networking behaviors of 11 young adults living in the San Francisco Bay area. The purpose of the study was to gain an understanding of why young, socially connected individuals engage in social networking behaviors and how the use of a mobile device supports and fosters these behaviors.
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My mobile lets me reach others and be reached anywhere I go. But I’m not satisfied. I want to know whether the people I’m trying to reach are reachable. I want to let people know when I’m not reachable, and what form of communication I prefer when they’re trying to reach me.
Mobile presence is coming to a phone near you. The following is my quick list of 10 go-to attributes for an effective mobile presence system:
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New technologies create new contexts of use. So when the folks behind Odeo invented Twitter, my new context-of-use became receiving and managing dozens of text messages a day while friends constantly update their statuses.
I want to stay connected to my friends, but do I need to know every minute detail of each of their days ad nauseum? It reminds me of the dawn of blogs, where fledgling bloggers felt their lives were so important that everyone needed to know what they had for breakfast.
Let’s look at Instant Messenger. At a glance, I can immediately see who’s available and who’s not available by the colored dot next to their name. If my friends decide that the world needs to know more about their day, they have the option to include an optional status message.
Updating your status is relatively quick and easy. With one click, I can pick from a list of status messages I’ve created and my status is quietly updated across those buddy lists in which I appear.
Note: Quietly.
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