الرئيسية
MERRY CHRISTMASS:santa: In this page we will explore the topic of the Mobile Context and People-Centric Mobile Computing.
The mobile handset is, by its own nature, a social artifact; an object made, and used by people to connect with people. This is the reason why the next big development in mobility and mobile services involves social software in some form or fashion, to enable better ways to find, communicate and share with friends and family, to learn about nearby places, to consume information, all while on the go. It is about the freedom to find and consume information, and connect, interact, communicate, and share with others…
Successful mobile applications are the ones that are great at delivering a great mobile user experience. A great mobile experience is one that keeps the user engaged, is visually appealing, is well organized, and provides clear flows and ways of accomplishing the tasks at hand. A rich mobile user experience leverages that mobile context. The user’s mobile context can be defined as the set of and the intersection between facts, events, circumstances, and information that surrounds the (mobile) user at a given point in time
ELEMENTS OF THE MOBILE CONTEXT
- Positioning: spatial / location information, and related (surroundings)
- Point in time Time
- Presence and related status (online, offline, available, busy, etc)
- Handset status and capabilities (capabilities of my handset vs. other handset capabilities)
- Personal context (User Preferences, calm behavior)
- Information Genre, Descriptor tags, allows for categorization and context-based processing
- Social context
- Is represented by Sets and their Intersections (relationships)
- The social context is a very important element of the mobile context and the user experience; it is what defines people-centric mobile computing. The social context consists of the person’s social circle or context, and related attributes and actions. The elements of the Social Context include:
The friends and family — the augmented or live address book - The relationship distance or degrees of separation
- Social information such as events (calendar, location, other)
- Inbound/Outbound social media channels
- Social actions — find friends/family, meet, invite/introduce, share content
- Represented by a graph
The Effects of the Mobile Context
Leveraging the mobile context has a positive effect on the mobile user experience. As described above, the mobile context is defined as
“The user’s mobile context can be defined as the set of and the intersection between facts, events, circumstances, and information that surrounds the (mobile) user at a given point in time.”- But what are the benefits (positive effects) of the mobile context in the user experience? The list below describes some of these effects:
- Informative
- Timely
- Accurate information (accuracy)
- Useful information (relevant)
- Connected (to friends and family, and other)
- Dynamic (always changing)
- Adaptive (to current circumstances)
- Transformational (promotes behavioral changes)
The above characteristics define a framework (or the elements of a model) for the effects of the mobile context. The above list should grow as more elements for this model are ‘discovered’.
One thing I would like to mention is that one of the beauties of the mobile context is that can be applied differently (yet similarly), to different circumstances or “verticals”. It is up to the reader to go over such mental exercise.
Learning about the Mobile Context
How to learn about context it all depends on the ability to access such context information; some is found locally, while other is found remotely, or both.
Pushing “context learning” to the edge, this is, to the handset itself or closer to the handset, is the preferred way. But the truth is that it is irrelevant from the user’s perspective, except (potentially) for privacy and cost of operation (such as data plans, per message costs) considerations. For some centralizing such personal/private information can be cause of paranoia; I refer to this as the Google effect — The goal is to find the right balance between local and remote access to such context information, for the purposes of privacy, security, operational cost, computational cost, and latency…
One thing I would like to mention is that one of the beauties of the mobile context is that can be applied differently (yet similarly), to different circumstances or “verticals”. It is up to the reader to go over such mental exercise.
Learning about the Mobile Context
How to learn about context it all depends on the ability to access such context information; some is found locally, while other is found remotely, or both.
Pushing “context learning” to the edge, this is, to the handset itself or closer to the handset, is the preferred way. But the truth is that it is irrelevant from the user’s perspective, except (potentially) for privacy and cost of operation (such as data plans, per message costs) considerations. For some centralizing such personal/private information can be cause of paranoia; I refer to this as the Google effect — The goal is to find the right balance between local and remote access to such context information, for the purposes of privacy, security, operational cost, computational cost, and latency…
