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Work or leisure? Designing a user-centered approach for researching activity “in the wild”

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Abstract

Mobile devices have conquered nearly all parts of the daily life. These devices support their owners in specific situations, both at work and in leisure contexts, and therefore make it increasingly difficult to keep work and private life separated. Examining the practices around the use of mobile technology has become a topic of some interest as issues around “work–life balance” emerge. Although the field of HCI provides different approaches for capturing people’s activities in situ, we will show that an additional value can be obtained from a consideration of the “situated” view of contextuality, one which incorporates concerns of privacy and which identifies the reasons people might have for long-term user participation in this kind of study. Despite the undoubted sophistication of existing platforms, the issue of how to provide for dynamic adjustment to meet emerging research questions over time remains challenging. In this paper, we examine how one might approach the design of an observation environment that includes methods for understanding the way of how users reason about research, based upon the context they find themselves in. We have developed a research framework called “PartS,” which captures in situ information about the individual as well as his/her (work/personal) context and offers functionality for collaborative discussions about the information collected. Based on its evaluation, we outline six lessons that need to be considered when designing a study for capturing the subjective context and related activities from an individual user’s as well as a researcher’s perspective.

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Acknowledgments

We like to thank our students Simon Scholl as well as Tino Hilbert for their valuable support in the phase of the prototype’s conception as well as implementation.

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  1. University of Siegen, Institute for Information Systems, Kohlbettstr. 15, 57072, Siegen, Germany

    Thomas Ludwig, Julian Dax, Volkmar Pipek & Dave Randall

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  1. Thomas Ludwig
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Correspondence to Thomas Ludwig.

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Ludwig, T., Dax, J., Pipek, V. et al. Work or leisure? Designing a user-centered approach for researching activity “in the wild”. Pers Ubiquit Comput 20, 487–515 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-016-0935-7

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