We chose to run a directed storytelling study because this method is designed to quickly reveal the “consistent patterns in people’s experiences,” and create a starting point for the rest of our user research (Evenson, 2006). Directed storytelling is an exploratory research method in which a researcher asks a participant to lead them through stories which are related to the design objectives. This method was appropriate because we were able to gain insight into experiences that would be hard to observe directly.

During each session, we asked the participant to share stories about their communications and communities. In our study, we focused on four topics for storytelling: types of communities and members involved, communications within communities, uses of mobile technology, and personal perspectives on technology and communication.

We categorized our notes by communities, events/activities, personality traits, communication styles, usage of technology, and values.

The second part of the exploratory phase of our research was the survey. There were two main goals for conducting the survey. The first goal was to find a series of factors to systematically categorize our user base. This categorization would in turn assist with the selection of participants for additional phases of user research, including the contextual inquiry and the diary study. The second goal was to obtain concrete support that would drive design decisions after our research phase.

The design of the survey was inspired by findings from directed storytelling which gave rise to two primary research questions:how do we define communities and roles within communities and how does real-world context impact decisions for choosing a communication method?

We identified the communities that people described in the survey and categorized them into 4 types which are described below.

After conducting the exploratory phase of our research, we began our first observational research method—contextual inquiry. Contextual inquiry is a technique for gathering data from people as they work in their natural work environment. We chose this methodology because the data obtained will enable us to design a system that will fit into the user’s everyday life.

Through contextual inquiry, we learned how people currently communicate within their communities, what channels they use to communicate, and who in their community they communicate with. People and groups have established many communication methods which they think about subconsciously, so we were unable to capture this sort of data simply through interviews. It was also difficult to observe people while they performed communication-related tasks due to the often sporadic and ad hoc nature of communication. Contextual inquiry helped us to overcome the challenges of interviews and direct observation and gave us insight into the current processes and breakdowns within communities.

Due to the nature of our project, we had to tailor the contextual inquiry methodology to meet our needs. We used the survey results as a guide for participant selection. We distributed our participants across the 4 community types—close ties, peers, social groups, and interest groups.

Since our project involves people’s motivations, desires, emotions, and everyday experiences, we chose to conduct a diary study. This method was used to complement contextual inquiry because we were not able to completely capture these elements in our contextual inquiries, since these were more focused on user interactions within a single community.

Rather than leaving the diary entries completely open ended, we asked our participants to create posts which captured both personal emotions and interpersonal interactions.

We captured the data from the study in data logs which records cues that trigger recognition, including the following concrete aspects: object/event, people, place, and action (Lee & Dey, 2007). We also recorded the following abstract aspects: desires, personality, affect, and relationships. Finally, we captured the meaning of artifacts and interactions by recording usage, motivation, and user preferences. These aspects served as useful ways to capture and share important aspects of the user stories with other members of our team. They were also useful for understanding what sorts of activities people commonly engage in, and the desires and emotions that are involved. Capturing people’s relationships with artifacts was an important step for understanding current communication methods and preferences, which will factor into our future design work.

1. There is great complexity surrounding how groups of people communicate within and across groups. People are often involved in many groups at once, such as friends, family, coworkers, interest groups, and so forth. Within these groups, people talk about different things, also have various community roles and responsibilities, such as organizing team logistics, supporting close friends emotionally, etc. They switch between these roles rapidly and subconsciously. They also have intermingled desires that motivate community communication, such as wanting to strengthen and re-establish relationships, kill time, or receive recognition. The ways that they choose to interact with their groups are determined by a variety of factors and preferences.

2. Existing communication technology does not provide sufficient flexibility for supporting communication within groups.Currently people do this by carrying separate cell phones or using multiple e-mail accounts. This need for separation of communication suggests an opportunity for an improved device and interface convergence. However, since people are a part of more than one community, it creates an extra level of subtlety—if your coworker is also your friend, how do you filter the information that you receive from them on the weekend? On-the-fly coordination for such events is challenging and inefficient using current technology. People have developed innovative ways to work with current technology despite technical limitations. These workarounds are often cumbersome and inefficient.

3. Having too many choices for certain tools causes problems for users. For example, people have many different choices when maintaining an online calendar, such as Ovi, Google, iCal, Oracle, and Microsoft Outlook Calendar. This multitude of choices becomes a problem if they choose to organize their life with one of these tools and then join a group that uses another calendar system. Now, they will either have to use multiple calendars for the same purpose, or choose not to adopt the tool that the group uses. The resulting incomplete technology adoption challenges efficient group organization. A seamless integration of various tools is needed to facilitate group functions.