Rethinking Activity Awareness: The Design, Evaluation & Implication of Integrating Activity Awareness into Mobile Messaging

TL;DR

This paper introduces ActAware, a mobile messaging app that leverages improved activity recognition technology to enhance user awareness, reduce privacy concerns, and inform design recommendations for better activity-aware communication.

Contribution

The study designs and evaluates ActAware, integrating advanced activity recognition into mobile messaging, and explores user behaviors and privacy perceptions related to activity awareness.

Findings

Users can infer chat interruptions and plan communication.

Activity awareness reduces privacy concerns compared to other context info.

Design recommendations improve activity-aware messaging experiences.

Abstract

Nowadays, different types of context information are integrated into mobile messaging to increase expressiveness and awareness, including mobile device setting, location, activity, and heart rate. Due to low recognition accuracy, sometimes users cannot accurately infer others' status through activity awareness. Recently, activity recognition technology has advanced. However, the user behaviors of activity awareness with improved technology have not been studied. In this study, we design ActAware, a mobile instant messaging application that integrates activity awareness based on improved activity recognition technology, i.e., improved recognition accuracy and the addition of activity transition notification. We conduct a field study to explore user behaviors and found that activity awareness allows users to speculate on the reasons for chat interruption, plan communication, speculate on whether the chat partner is departing/arriving, and deepen the understanding of living patterns. Compared with disclosing other types of context information, users have fewer privacy concerns about disclosing activity information in ActAware. Based on these findings, we provide design recommendations for mobile messaging to better support activity awareness.