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Integrated model based on the psychology of active/non-active computer users: activating technology holdouts
Abstract
Although many Internet-based social services exist that can raise our quality of life, there are still many non-active users who cannot fully enjoy the convenience of the computer and its functionality even though they have computers in the home. In order to analyze how to enhance computer usage, we conducted a field study and arrived at an integrated model that enables us to deeply understand the psychology of active/non-active computer users. Initial design guidelines for activating the non-active users are derived from our model.
Despite advances in technology, nearly everyone experiences technical chal- lenges using home computers and the Internet. In a field trial of household Internet usage, 89% of 93 families needed support from a computer help desk in the 1st year they used the Internet. However, usually only the most technically involved members of the family requested external technical support, and this behavior was associated with other computer-related behaviors in the house- hold. We explore the process by which a family member with comparatively high technical skill or enthusiasm, often a teenager, becomes the family guru,
Prior research suggests that people may ask their family and friends for computer help. But what influences whether and how a "helper" will provide help? To answer this question, we conducted a qualitative investigation of people who participated in computer support activities with family and friends in the past year. We describe how factors including maintenance of one's personal identity as a computer expert and accountability to one's social network determine who receives help and the quality of help provided. We also discuss the complex, fractured relationship between the numerous stakeholders involved in the upkeep of home computing infrastructures. Based on our findings, we provide implications for the design of systems to support informal help-giving in residential settings.
The domestic environment is predicted by market analysts to be the major growth area in computing over the next decade, yet it is a poorly understood domain at the current time of writing. Research is largely confined to the laboratory environment, although it has been recognized that ubiquitous computing will in due course have to resonate with the ‘stable and compelling routines of the home’. This paper seeks to inform ubiquitous computing for the home environment by unpacking the notion of domestic routines as coordinational features of domestic life. We focus in particular on the routine nature of communication and use ethnographic study to explicate a discrete organization of coordination whereby household members routinely manage communications coming into and going out of the home. The coordinate ways in which members routinely organize communication are made visible through sequences of practical action, which articulate domestic routines and key properties of communication. These include ecological habitats, activity centres, and coordinate displays at which technology is at the core. These organizational features combine to form a locally produced system of communication and open up the play of possibilities for design, articulating the distinct needs of particular settings and ‘prime sites ’ for the deployment of ubiquitous computing devices.
In this paper we explore the use of computer at home. This work is based on the automatic recording of application focus data in natural situation from a wide representative panel of 661 households with 1,434 users at home over 19 months. To process these large-scale data, we build a two- level classification of PC applications describing the whole PC use. At the household level, we worked on computer usage temporality: we observed two strategies of PC usage reflecting a tension between synchronous and asynchronous usage profiles. At the individual level, we found out that software preferences and usage intensity are rather independent; therefore, we distinguished five specific profiles of users reflecting strong routine behaviors of computer usage at home. These observations tend to show the strength of routine behaviors in computer usage. Author Keywords Computer usage, user generated events, user profiles, representative panel.
Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques
- A L Strauss
- J Strauss
- Strauss A.L.