txt 4 l8r: lowering the burden for diary studies under mobile conditions

ABSTRACT

We present and evaluate a new technique for performing diary studies under mobile or active conditions. Diary studies play an important role as a means for ecologically valid participant data capture. Unfortunately, when participants are asked to capture data while mobile or active, they are often unwilling or unable to invest time in thorough, reflective entries. Ultimately, this leads to lowered entry quality and quantity. The technique presented here suggests the capture of only small snippets of information in the field. These snippets then serve as prompts for participants when completing full diary entries at a convenient time. We describe how this system automates collection of snippets via text (SMS), picture (MMS) and voicemail messages and later presents these snippets for full entry elicitation. We then present results from a preliminary evaluation of this technique.

REFERENCES

• 1: Carter, S. and J. Mankoff. Momento: Early Stage Prototyping and Evaluation for Mobile Applications. In Proceedings of CHI: ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2007.
• 2: Scott Carter , Jennifer Mankoff, When participants do the capturing: the role of media in diary studies, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, Oregon, USA [doi>10.1145/1054972.1055098]
• 3: Sunny Consolvo , Miriam Walker, Using the Experience Sampling Method to Evaluate Ubicomp Applications, IEEE Pervasive Computing, v.2 n.2, p.24-31, April 2003 [doi>10.1109/MPRV.2003.1203750]
• 4: Leysia Palen , Marilyn Salzman, Voice-mail diary studies for naturalistic data capture under mobile conditions, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587092]
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• 6: John Rieman, The diary study: a workplace-oriented research tool to guide laboratory efforts, Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.321-326, April 24-29, 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/169059.169255]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
diary study, field work, mobile computing, mobile data capture, text messaging