Lecture 2 - Context

Question 1

What is context?

Answer 1

The situation in which the device is being used.

Question 2

Is context highly variable for mobile devices?

Answer 2

Yes, for mobile devices it changes all the time due to their portability. Since they’re always with us too, they’re bound to experiance a lot of different situations.

Question 3

Examples of context?

Answer 3

• location
• enviroment (light , sound, weather , business , is something socially acceptable in this setting etc.)
• motion (running,walking etc.)
• connectivity (e.g. celluar, wifi , poor conectivity due to being in a rural area)
• situational demands (e.g. holding other items) -> with these there is usually a problem with providing input, perceiving output or both

Question 4

What is the most common context for context aware mobile devices?

Answer 4

Most likely location

Question 5

What is the context here?

“A fast-food delivery company wants to create a smartphone
application to help its delivery employees collect orders from
restaurants then deliver them to customers, while traveling by
bicycle.”

Answer 5

• motion, as the person is moving
• situational demands, as person has to control the bike and maintain safety, meaning they have to have their hands on handlebars at all times and avoid using any devices. The person would however be walking at the start and end of the trip, which could be considered.
• enviroment , as the person might be travelling through busy loud areas. Also there might be vibration with the bike due to potholes in the road.Depending on time it might also be too bright, sunny or dark while travelling. Weather would be another enviromental feature to consider, for example raining.
• connectivity , in rural areas there might be no signal
• Due to the demands of the delivery the person may not have free hands, wear gloves and have their device in their pocket, all 3 limiting interaction

Question 6

What is situational impairment?

Answer 6

when the context restricts a person’s ability to interacting with a device

Question 7

Example of situational impairment?

Answer 7

While running phone might open random apps, due to water drops falling on the screen, as this is not the intended function it limits the interaction with the user

Question 8

When thinking about context what else do we need to think about?

Answer 8

How the user provides input in such situation and how they will perceive the output. Are these limited?

Question 9

What is the property of context-awareness for a device?

Answer 9

It means the device is able to infer context

Question 10

When there is situational impairment then…

Answer 10

the user is said to be situationally impaired

Question 11

What might arise from certain contexts?

Answer 11

Situational impairment.

Question 12

What is context-aware computing?

Answer 12

context-aware computing, we now have the means of considering the situation of use not only in the design process,
but in real time while the device is in use

Question 13

Are humans good at perceiving context?

Answer 13

Yes, we perceive context to determine how we act, even when we are not conciously aware. We as humans have a shared understanding on how to act in situations (although this might be dependant on culture etc.)

Question 14

Example of social (human) perception of context? - person on phone

Answer 14

E.g., walk into a room with the intention of speaking to someone:
* You hear them speaking, but see nobody else in the room;
* You infer that they’re probably in a phone conversation;
* You decide to wait until they’re finished or acknowledge you, before
you say something

Question 15

Context is what type of feedback loop?

Answer 15

Closed-Loop social interaction system.

Question 16

What is the loop of considering context for a human?

Answer 16

• Human perceives sensory information;
• Human combines sensory inputs with prior knowledge;
• Human infers the current context and identifies appropriate behaviour;
• Human makes a decision about how to (inter)act in that setting

Question 17

What are the 2 area of research in relation to context?

Answer 17

1. detecting and embedding context in information systems (how to detect context , what is relevant to the content , how do we store and retrieve context)
2. Using context to improve UIs (how can we infer context in real time , what context is relevant to the users’ tasks , how should UIs respond , what can we infer about the current situation)

Question 18

How can mobile devices infer context?

Answer 18

Via sensors

Question 19

Why do we infer context?

Answer 19

To make users’ life easier / improve interaction and potentially implement new features.

At the moment we mainly use context to display context relevant information and adapt UIs

Question 20

What context was used in the BBC weather app?

Answer 20

• orientation (change presentation based on the way phone is being held)
• location (display weather for correct place)
• time (display weather for the correct time)

Question 21

What context was used in Google Maps?

Answer 21

• location to recommend nearby restuarants
• location history to highlight places you have been to before
• time to suggest what places are open right now or at a chosen time

In this example we use prior knowledge to improve recommendations based on what the user has previously done

Question 22

What do we mainly improve when incorporating context into mobile devices and their apps?

Answer 22

We improve the quality of life, saving overall user effort.

Question 23

Context is:

Answer 23

• potentially bad for privacy
• often difficult to infer
• mutli-faceted, as many modalities are fused together

Question 24

Should context-aware devices consider prior knowledge?

Answer 24

Most definitely
- can prior situations improve user experiance
- what can we learn from previous experiances

Question 25

What are interaction modalities?

Answer 25

Different ways to interact with a device e.g. touch, audio, visual (eye)

We need to consider all interaction modalities i.e. all senses and capabilities of the user and device. Consider these in different context

Question 26

What are the benefits of Context Awareness?

Answer 26

• Reduce interaction time by taking actions on a user’s behalf;
• Allow users to focus on completing their task;
• Expose users to new opportunities (e.g., new nearby coffee shop);
• Overcome situational impairments (e.g., increase screen brightness);
• Create elegant but efficient UIs (e.g., reduce irrelevant information);
• Improve situational awareness (e.g., when walking/cycling/driving);

this is not an exhaustive list!

Question 27

What are the drawbacks of context awareness?

Answer 27

• frustrating if incorrect context is inferred
• could be a privacy concern and might make user sceptical towards device
• potentially complex , as many sensors might have to work together to infer certain context
• information gathered could be ambigous (is is dark because phone is in the pocket or its nighttime)
• quality of information may vary (e.g. incorrect gps location due to poor conectivity)

Question 28

Why is ambigous data bad?

Answer 28

It’s difficult to make an inference from the ambiguous information

Question 29

What might ambigous data cause?

Answer 29

Poor context inference can lead to inappropriate actions:
* e.g., presenting irrelevant content
* e.g., acting in undesired ways
Inappropriate context awareness can frustrate users:
* e.g., difficult to undo unintended actions
* e.g., uncertainty about why things aren’t working as expected

Question 30

Is it a good idea to provide uncertainity feedback?

Answer 30

Yes, use it as an interaction resource. It helps users discover what is happening and why. Being transparent is good for the users, as she/he can act on it and can help collect feedback to improve our context-awareness or how we handle the context (change in interaction or content).

Question 31

Best example of providing uncertainity feedback (resource for the user to see or interact with)?

Answer 31

Location representation. We may see a radius around our location denoting how accurate the data the device has right now is.

Question 32

Is situational impairment positive or negative?

Answer 32

Negative,as it stops or limits the interaction the user can have with the device due to certain situations.

Question 33

Context sensing / awareness is prone to…

Answer 33

uncertainity, which can have negative feedback for usability. However good uncertainity feedback can mitigate this.

Question 34

Computing devices can have…

Answer 34

context awareness aka. context sensing