genre. All these functions can be summarized by three key features—sharing, contacting, and collaborating (see Figure 3).

When designing a UI to support rich social communication, there can be a deliberate process for fashioning features, such as sharing, contacting, and collaborating [ 3]. This process is started by writing a sentence that describes a social behavior pattern. Sharing, for example, is characterized as a subject-verb-object construct. (Families share photos, or fans share music.) Similarly, constructs are made for other relevant social behavior patterns. (Friends exchange information about their whereabouts, or members create new videos.) To conclude, three core components (people, goal, and content— or actor, action, and objective) are coherently wedded together in order to visualize three key features of socializing (see Figure 4).

With these three constructs, UI for mobile community is conceptualized (see Figure 5). The top row sets up a community’s common goal. Sharing, contacting, and collaborating with people in the group who have something in common is automatically located in a second row, along with user actions dealing with the goal (features). Finally, content such as various multimedia objects and text are attached at the bottom.

Additional features necessary for community activity, such as schedule sharing and personal broadcasting, can be customized for various mobile devices. For example, an SMS thread in Figure 6 entitled “rolling paper” expresses tacit intention through messages collected from the participants. A group schedule-sharing application shows members’ schedule status from the community server, which encourages participation.

The infrastructure of a mobile community consists of hardware, software, an interface, and services that knit together everything. People working in the mobile device industry already understand the importance of user interface and interaction for complicated mobile services. We hope our approach contributes to this understanding and suggests ways of adding new and exciting features that encourage end-user adoption, without sacrificing ease-of-use.

Ultimately, all characteristics, including environment, people, objects, and processes, should be considered when tailoring a UI to the specific needs of a community. While the communication tools available for communities are often highly attrac-

• Figure 6. Actual screen shots of the implementation of the UI on a mobile device, which required us to modify the original “wireframe” due to specific requirements of the device; however, the key features are consistent with those described earlier.

 

tive, we must keep in mind that the tools should fit the community, not the other way around.

As we previously pointed out, mobile devices have been designed primarily for private communication for the past decade. Thus most mobile phone UIs are optimized for private (one-to-one) use. The role of a mobile device as a personal multimedia manager is now expanding into social media and connecting groups of people. These emerging applications ask us to develop features that support rich social communication, both within and across applications. We believe that our novel UI approach is capable of enabling rich interaction for groups of people who are forming and maintaining community.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Youngho Rhee is a
senior UX designer at SAIT (Samsung Advanced
Institute of Technology). His main research interests
are in the areas of context awareness, agents, and
social networking. He has been actively engaged in
numerous projects dealing with mobile Internet ser-
vice design and methodologies for subjective evaluation of mobile
applications. He holds a Ph.D. in industrial system engineering
from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is on the program
board for Human Interface and the Management of Information at
HCII (Human Computer Interaction Institute).

[ 3] Schulze, A. and Hoegl, M. “Organizational Knowledge Creation and the Generation of New Product Ideas: A Behavioral Approach.” Research Policy 37 (2008): 1742–1750.

Juyoun Lee is a UX designer at SAIT. Her main
research themes are pervasive computing, context
awareness, social networking, augmented reality,
and interactive media. Recently, she has been
working on service design and user behavior stud-
ies of mobile Internet services. She has a degree in
industrial design and computer science from Korea Advanced
Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).

November + December 2009

DOI: 10.1145/1620693.1620705
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/1100 $10.00