Feature: The Usability of Eavesdropping

Steve Love, lecturer at Brunel University, is looking into the social aspects of behaviour involving mobile phones. Part of newly reorganised VIVID, the umbrella for Brunel's HCI research, Steve's work could not be much further from the original information visualisation research that named the unit. Steve is studying how people react to other people making calls in shared space. And he is finding some intriguing things.

Being just as curious about behaviour in social spaces – a relatively neglected area of research – I arrange to meet him in a quiet corner of a London café so he can share his findings.

He tells me of the initial study that grabbed his interest. He ran sessions that were ostensibly about website evaluation and used these to gauge people's responses to other people's calls. In each session, a subject was placed alongside another 'evaluator'. No sooner had the two people sat down in front of the computers and said hello, than Steve found himself 'obliged' to leave the room by the need to get a consent form. A video camera was left running.

At this point in each session, the other 'evaluator' got a call on his mobile phone and took it. Ostensibly, it was either a mate asking him to go down the pub that night, or his bank ringing to say that he had been 'knocked back for an overdraft'. In fact, it was Steve, who was following an agreed script with his plant – a professional actor – for precisely a minute.

Once Steve reappeared, the original subjects were asked whether they would mind continuing with the study, although the field of enquiry had changed to the matter of the phone call. (He'd checked it out with the British Psychology Society ethics committee before embarking.) Each agreed and an interview about their reaction to the call took place.

And a pattern emerged. In what Steve describes as a rather post-hoc and unscientific piece of analysis, he found that not only did people's reactions fall broadly into two groups (both in interview and caught on the video of the original call), but that the degree of introversion/extraversion individuals displayed, when tested, corresponded with their response.

Extraverts would merrily recount what they had heard and form (generally accurate) hypotheses on the nature of the call and the caller. Some also indulged in overt listening activities.

Introverts, on the other hand, talked about how awkward they felt at being present when someone else's private matters were being discussed and some were quite angry with the other 'evaluator' for having compromised them in this way. Their body language involved making themselves smaller and signalling that they were not listening.

It was a striking finding, following in a tradition of sociological research about the boundaries of public and private performance spaces. Exchanges on mobiles come out of a private context, yet are played out publicly, and often in close proximity to others. As Goffman, whom Steve cites as an influence, would have it: backstage business conducted in a frontstage environment. This affects different types of people differently.

In a bid to investigate the social aspects of others' responses further, Steve is now planning a study with two actors set in a café. One actor will take a call and the other, sat next to an ordinary member of the public, will ostentatiously react to it in different ways. Sometimes the behaviour will express disapproval, sometimes indifference. The unwitting participants will then be monitored to see if their reactions are consistently related to the second actor's in any way. In other words, what is the influence of other people's opinion on individuals in proximity to someone on the phone in a pubic place?

Steve hazards a guess that new social schemas are appearing to incorporate mobile phone use - people are writing new 'scripts' to deal with novel situations. 'It's too early to speculate on what those changes in schemas are, though we are seeing the effects, like mobile free areas in train carriages,' he says.

During transitions like this, new behaviours appear. For instance, some people get so embarrassed about their phone going off in a public place that they go to the toilet to answer it, he says. Eventually, some types of behaviour then disappear and others get normalised and cease to seem strange.

He is supplementing his more radical work on behaviour with interviews to explore the relationship between personality, social network and phone use. He is also hoping to put together a context-of-use matrix: a study of in which situations different groups of people would and would not use their phones.

And what might all this lead to? Apart from satisfying the curiosity of journalists and researchers, Steve points out that it has implications for speech services of all sorts. Will people be happy to use them and where?

By way of illustrating the changes that have taken place in the last few years to bring issues like these to such prominence, Steve relates two anecdotes. The first finds him on a train at the turn of the century in Edinburgh where a young woman is seemingly holding a conversation with him: 'Hello...' 'How was your day?...' It is only after he has continued to answer that he realises he is, for the first time, in the presence of someone using a hands-free system... It's happened to all of us at some point.

A week later and he is out with his sister in Glasgow when a man comes down the street talking to himself. 'Oh, it's only a hands-free set,' he reassures her. But no, as the man draws level with them he does indeed turn to them and start attempting to engage them with the disordered output of a distressed mind.

As Steve says, there are new schemas to be established. The judgement we use to evaluate social situations will stay slightly off-balance till those situations are no longer new. The challenge with phones is to keep up.

Steve and I part after a quick survey of the café we've been chatting in. A quiet moment and no one seems the least bit interested in what we're saying – but then we're holding our conversation face-to-face and perhaps that makes all the difference.

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