Le blog de Pascal Magnenat

When I call a friend on his mobile, I tend to ignore his current occupation: is he busy in a meeting? sharing a fine meal in a restaurant with his beloved? purchasing new shoes at Prada or simply taking a nap? Of course, I can make assumptions like it’s 10 a.m., he should be at work; but such assumptions are uncertain as they are not based on actual and reliable facts.

The lack of shared context often impacts negatively on mobile collaboration; this can be noted in the high tendency to relate location or situation at the beginning of a phone call (where are you? are you busy?) as
well as in the high proportion (30 to 70% depending on the panels) of failed communication attempts.

3 researchers from the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology have again been putting some thought into a smartphone addressbook to answer the need to contextualize communications.

Concretely they have developed a new addressbook called ContextContacts for Nokia series 60 smartphones; this application displays 6 cues regarding the actual situations of your contacts beside their contact names:

1. Current location: this information is based on GSM cell IDs. The automatic description provided by the mobile network operator (e.g Geneva, Centre) can fortunately be overridden by a more meaningful description for the user (e.g. work or home);
2. Time spent at the current location
3. User-selected alarm profile: this concerns the status of the mobile phone loudspeaker and vibrator (on/off) together with the profile label (e.g. General, Meeting, Silent, Outdoor)
4. Phone manipulated recently: a hand icon turns from gray to red if the phone has been or is being used
5. Number of unknown Bluetooth phones nearby
6. Number of Bluetooth phones nearby that correspond to entries in the addressbook of the correspondent

Here are 2 screenshots of the ContextContacts user interface: the first shows the contact list and the second displays a detailed view of the current status of a specific user.

Contact list

Contact status details

The researchers are running a field trial with a group of 5 people working together. After the first month of use, results are promising; the group has complained mainly about the poor accuracy of the positioning (which is not a ContextContacts issue).

The presentation I attended last week at the mobileHCI 2005 conference convinced me. I hope that ContextContacts will replace Nokia’s current standard addressbook soon.

The software is available under the GNU/GPL licence at http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/group/context/.

Sources: 7th International conference on human computer interaction with mobile devices and services; ContextContacts: Re-Designing SmartPhone’s Contact book to Support Mobile Awareness and Collaboration, Antti Oulasvirta, Mika Raento et Sauli Tiitta, Helsinki Institute for Information Technology & Department of Computer Science, University of Helsinki, in Proceedings of the conference, p. 167-174