We will organise a workshop at NordiCHI later this year in Gothenburg, Sweden. The workshop is called Mobile Wellbeing and is to be focused around mental wellbeing and use and design of mobile technology. The workshop is organised by me, John Rooksby (UK), Alexandra Weilenmann (SE), Thomas Hillman (SE), Pål Dobrin (SE), and Juan Ye (UK). If you are interested in the workshop theme, consider writing a position paper and join us in Gothenburg on October 23. The deadline for position papers is August 25.

You should visit the workshop website for more information, but at the workshop we aim to discuss the following three questions:

• In what ways do mobile technologies affect mental wellbeing?
• How can mobile technologies be designed to support and improve mental wellbeing and to mitigate negative effects?
• What strategies and practices can be developed for using mobile technology in ways that do not harm and instead support improvement of our wellbeing?

See you in Göteborg!

Last week I went to San Jose for a week to attend CHI. Among other things I got to present my note Forget-me-not: History-less Mobile Messaging. This note received an Honorable Mention which is given to the top 5% papers and notes at the conference.

The paper is based on work done by a group of level 3 students. The group project was to design, build, and study a mobile text messaging app without history. This is what they did and turned into the app forget-me-not. The student project lasted a year, and throughout the project the students received first best presentation at the intermediate project presentations at half-time, and finally they received best L3 project in Computing Science in the school. I could not be prouder of these students. Topping that up with also being able to turn the work into a paper receiving an honorable mention surely is the cherry on the cake!

The final paper discuss mobile text messaging and the role of messaging history. To do that we study what happens with mobile text messaging when there is no history. By interviewing 10 participants after using the app for 2 weeks, we gain insights into how they perceive the app, and how they perceive messaging through it. We found that messaging requires effort, but allows users to be relaxed about what they write. History turns out to be useful in the ability to "scroll up" to see the past messages which allows for distractions. Not having history instead makes it more engaging. It is also discussed how not having history allows for sending messaging you don't want to have on record, such as bank details, or planning a secret birthday party. Read the whole paper, where we discuss the design of the app, and discuss the method of deliberately removing history to study history.

One of my summer interns, Ivaylo Lafchiev, is working on an interesting project over the summer, looking at the effect delays might have on mobile phone use. He has developed an Android app that introduces a delay when the phone is unlocked. The effect is that the user will have to wait for a short while (seconds) before the phone becomes available to them. The idea is to vary the duration of the delay to see if we can notice any effects on the overall usage of the device (for instance is the amount of time spent on the phone altered).

The app is now ready to be used in an experiment. The app is available on the app store, and the hope is that the app will attract a few users who will keep it installed for at least a few weeks. This is extremely risky. Why would anyone keep an app that makes it harder to use the phone? The hope here is that people do want to become more conscious about their phone use, and therefore are willing to participate in this experiment. The question however then is in what way the data will be biased by participants already wanting to change their phone use? We are trying to mitigate this bias (and investigating it) by first setting the delay to a short time, and after some time, we'll change the duration of the delay remotely to see if we can stop a difference in phone behaviour. By comparing the use before and after the delay change, and by changing the delay differently for different users, we hope to gather evidence as to whether this will have an effect or not.

I've made two personal observations from having the app installed myself. First, each time I unlock the phone, it serves as a reminder that I'm now about to use my phone. This might seem like a weird thing as the fact that I'm using the phone should be a reminder itself. However, I tend to use the phone when ever I have nothing else todo: waiting for the subway or waiting in line at Starbucks for instance. With the delay, I'm reminded, and then given a short time to contemplate whether I actually want to use the phone or if I should just take a few seconds to do nothing. The longer the duration, the more annoying the app is, but it also makes me more aware of my phone use. When the duration is long enough (more than 3 seconds or so) I start to think before using my phone, even before I take it out of the pocket. All of a sudden I'm reminded that I will have to wait a few seconds before the phone becomes available, and I choose often not to subject myself to it because the thing I was supposed to do with the phone was pointless anyway.

I'm looking forward to see what happens with this experiment. Is anyone going to download the app and install it? Is anyone going to keep it installed for long enough for us to collect data on their behaviour? Only time will tell. But until then, I will be more conscious and mindful of my phone use – until Ivaylo makes the duration so long that I will uninstall the app and go back to mindlessly fill every void of my life with mobile phone use.

You can find more information about the project, and download the app, here.

Last week I was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award from the college. The award was given for my teaching activities within the school , including: the development of a set of tutorials given to students and staff across levels, supervising undergraduate and postgraduate students, and contributions to undergraduate courses.

This morning I presented a paper at CHI entitled Pass The Ball: Enforced Turn-Taking in Activity Tracking. See the abstract below

We have developed a mobile application called Pass The Ball that enables users to track, reflect on, and discuss physical activity with others. We followed an iterative design process, trialling a first version of the app with 20 people and a second version with 31. The trials were conducted in the wild, on users’ own devices. The second version of the app enforced a turn-taking system that meant only one member of a group of users could track their activity at any one time. This constrained tracking at the individual level, but more successfully led users to communicate and interact with each other. We discuss the second trial with reference to two concepts: socialrelatedness and individual-competence. We discuss six key lessons from the trial, and identify two high-level design implications: attend to “practices” of tracking; and look within and beyond “collaboration” and “competition” in the design of activity trackers.