Pink, Waterproof and Scented: Designing Mobile Technology for Women

Pink, Waterproof and Scented: Designing Mobile Technology for Women
Karen E. Fisher, Tammara Combs Turner, and Carol F. Landry

Dr. Fisher presented the work that she had completed during her sabbatical at Microsoft Research, working with the Community Technologies Group on DEVI, a proposed mobile device intended to assist women with shopping activities.

The motivation behind the DEVI project is to produce technology targeted at women’s needs and women’s work. Dr. Fisher noted that women are a traditionally underserved population when it comes to technology design, as a large amount of information technology has been designed for men and for business and gaming activities. The DEVI project’s goal is to produce the ultimate “go-to” device for women.

This work draws from the IBEC group’s prior studies of how women use information in their everyday lives. The research team considered the wide range of roles that women play in their everyday lives. For this project, the group focused on the role of “family shopper”. Women may benefit from technology that integrates this role with their other roles, while supporting their social and affective needs.

The study

In order to better understand the work of shopping, the research team conducted interviews with 14 women and accompanied these women on a one hour shopping expedition. These women ranged from high school students to retirees. Each women scored highly on a “like to shop” measurement scale. Four of the women in the group asked to be interviewed in pairs, including two lifelong friends who had shopped together for many years. Dr. Fisher was initially resistant to the idea, but decided that working with dyads might provide another view of the social aspects of shopping.

The study uncovered a number of interesting themes related to shopping strategies, lending and borrowing, managing information, and social practices. Whether shopping for themselves or others, shopping is inherently a social activity. Women shop to connect with others, to make themselves happy, and as a way to find downtime. Shopping is a collaborative activity and is often intergenerational, providing family members with an opportunity to share information and shopping strategies. Shoppers may talk to one another throughout the shopping activity, either in person or over the phone. The researchers identified a number of skills related to shopping that might be taught or learned, including finding deals and learning social norms. Shopping strategies may also be thought of as information problem solving strategies.

This work led to several theoretical models. The research team produced a model of shopping needs based on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Shopping needs ranged from essential or basic shopping tasks to gift-giving and serendipitous shopping trips.

The research team also produced a life-stages model that describes the benefits and barriers to shopping throughout the lifespan. This model consists of three  stages.

1. Young

• Are excited by shopping opportunities (“shopportunities”)
• Limited in the amount of money that they can spend

2. Prime

• Overwhelmed by the number of available shopportunities
• Feel need to stay organized

3. Mature

• Experience decrease in ties and local events
• Want to stay connected with friends and family
• May be difficult to shop for family members, who may live in a different place and may have unknown style preferences

Design recommendations

Participants in the study were asked to answer the “magic wand question”: if the participant could have any kind of device to help out with shopping, what features would it have?

The research group identified three general classes of needs related to shopping and technology: information needs, communication needs, and needs related to the physical characteristics of technology.

1. Information needs

• Provide access to:
  • Contacts
  • Calendar (with integrated sales)
  • Diaries
  • Lists
  • Closet inventory (self and friends)
  • Location information
  • Women’s health calendar
• Search functions
• Device training and help
• Finance (how much to spend)

2. Communication needs

• Integrate with messaging systems
• Feedback from friends or the public when trying things on
• Ability to look back at past outfits
• Discussion groups
• Linking with others for impromptu shopping trips

3. Physical needs

• Device characteristics
  • Small
  • Easy to use
  • Bright color
  • Indestructible
  • Scented
• Integrate features
  • Mirror
  • Tape measure
  • Record and replay scents
  • Panic button
  • Pedometer
  • Gaming

In addition to all of these requests, the women strongly desired a device that was simple and integrated. Most people today carry a large number of devices and artifacts with them. Technologies that integrate the functions of these artifacts could help address this problem.

Designing technology for women may present many opportunities for industry. Harnessing “the power of Oprah” could lead to many new marketing opportunities. The work described here is also occurring in parallel with a general convergence between IT and the fashion industry, as technologists begin to consider how to make their products fashionable, and fashion designers consider how to modify their designs to better support technology use.

Dr. Fisher described several opportunities for future work, including a quantitative study to produce greater generalizability and a study of women and men who are less oriented toward shopping. The research group may also look at closet organization, and may begin to prototype mobile applications in the future.

Questions

Q: How to demographic factors affect these types of shopping behaviors?
A: The sample was too small to see any effects of this type.

Q: Did any of the participants present concerns about privacy related to the sharing of shopping information?
A: This was not a common concern among the participants in this study.

Q: How did the women in the study describe the role played by men in the family as it related to their shopping behavior?
A: There was not much discussion of this topic. Some women mentioned that men did not seem to understand the women’s desire to shop. In some families, shopping duties were split between men and women such that each person had their own shopping domain.

Understanding Cultural Differences in the Use of Mobile Phones

Understanding Cultural Differences in the Use of Mobile Phones
by Sandra Hirsh, Microsoft

Her task was to explore the mobile space to provide a solid understanding of cultural differences. This would inform the design of the Windows mobile platform.

Information science: a new partner for social scientists and humanists?

Paul Wouters
Program Leader and Founding Member, The Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences

The talk took the form of an autobiographical case study, discussed in three parts:
1. A biographical encounter about personal introduction to information science and how the field developed

From a degree in biochemistry, Wouters became involved in science journalism, interviewing prominent sociologists of science (e.g., Bruno Latour and social scientists in the Netherlands) and being exposed to the Science Citation Index. As a PhD student, he researched the history and development of the SCI (with the assistance of Eugene Garfield). The study of the history of information systems, work on the interplay between semiotics and IS, and conferences on cyberscience (1996) led to his current work in e-Research and knowledge production. The questions of how we increase (or not), standardize (or not), diversify (or not), stabilize (or not) the creation and sharing of scholarship in the social science and humanities.

The basic premises of the Virtual Knowledge Studio include: (1) changes in information and communication create new possibilities; (2) how can these resources be used by researchers in the humanities and social sciences; (3) how do we engage with and reflect upon e-Research (to ask new questions, reformulate old questions, find new ways to combine data, to generate new types of data, to establish new ways of communicating, and to collaborate in new ways). Other institutes (e.g., NCeSS) were mentioned. The VKS focuses on design, conceptualization, experiment/play, interdisciplinary work, and the dynamics of knowledge creation. Virtual ethnography, web archiving, and simulation are the three methods that VKS develops, through analytical centers and construction platforms (based at institutions).

2. How the Virtual Knowledge Studio scholars engage with methods, topics, and ideals

Information Science techniques and approaches abound at VKS: Webometrics and link analysis, network analysis, scholarly information behavior (e.g., how Women Studies scholars use ICTs in their research and teaching), differences in behavior and practice across fields, embodied data and semiotics, data sharing (e.g., creating a safe spaces, common spaces, and private spaces for data), Semantic Web and classification, Web archiving.

The boundaries of information science are often blurred–adopting a focus on contexts, users, information, and labor (e.g., illustrating “invisible work”) to build and configure tools–and building theory that is (productively) explanatory and/or experiential. (Information science should avoid trying to define itself; rather, it should worry about boundary crossing to contribute to society.)

3. Looking from localized practices that illuminate the future roles for information science

Wouters calls for information science/studies to support theory building about information infrastructure, embodied data, and construction of research objects as well as assessing new information sources (e.g., new media like blogs, wikis, Facebook, Flickr; large scale analysis and collection beyond a single discipline), creating data and analytical tools, and monitoring Web use.

Questions and discussion
Q: How are you making this claim about blogs as a undifferentiated information source?

A: The investigation should be the first question to address, but it would be helpful, perhaps, if you could make use of pre-formatted sources as a source of data.

Q: Why would you look at technology as how it can enhance science rather than the other way around: looking at scholarly work and how technology could support this work?

A: VKS moves between these two perspectives and takes the position that there are untapped possibilities for scholarship based in new technologies.

Q: The research object: are there new objects that are examples of what may be possible? How do we measure scholarly output or productivity?

A: That’s not what I meant by research objects. For examples, games are the object of research now, and we see these communities of scholars and scholarship emerge around this area.

Q: If Whitley’s framework is descriptive, how would we use it as a prescriptive framework for problem selection in information science?

A: It is probably not stable enough to predict, but it is useful as a lens through which conversations could start; you would need to see if what you observe and if it fits.

Q: What is virtual ethnography?

A: You live with people, take notes, see the world from their perspective in ethnography. It is an open question how you use a method like this is cyberspace: log file analysis, lurking, avatars, etc.