Mobile User Research: A Practical Guide (Synthesis Lectures on Mobile & Pervasive Computing)

This book will give you a practical overview of several methods and approaches for designing mobile technologies and conducting mobile user research, including how to understand behavior and evaluate how such technologies are being (or may be) used out in the world. Each chapter includes case studies from our own work and highlights advantages, limitations, and very practical steps that should be taken to increase the validity of the studies you conduct and the data you collect.

This book is intended as a practical guide for conducting mobile research focused on the user and their experience. We hope that the depth and breadth of case studies presented, as well as specific best practices, will help you to design the best technologies possible and choose appropriate methods to gather ethical, reliable, and generalizable data to explore the use of mobile technologies out in the world.

Sunny Consolvo leads Google's Security & Privacy User Experience team. Sunny and her team focus on usable privacy and security (e.g., understanding how people share their mobile devices). Sunny previously worked as a Research Scientist at Intel Labs Seattle where she investigated how to use mobile technologies to encourage health & wellness and to help people be more aware of the privacy implications of sensing and inference systems. She has also designed and evaluated tools to help people be more aware of what they expose when they use Wi-Fi, examined privacy implications of location-enhanced technologies, and developed technologies to help elders age in place. Sunny received her Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington. She is a member of the Editorial Board for IEEE Pervasive Computing and the PACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable, and Ubiquitous Technologies. She became a Certified Information Privacy Professional (US) in 2013. Sayali Phatak is a Ph.D. student in the School of Nutrition and Health Promotion at Arizona State University. She works at the Designing Health Lab with Dr. Eric Hekler. Her research revolves around the design and development of personalized behavioral interventions using digital technologies. Over the last two years, she has worked on an NSF-funded project that uses a dynamical systems modeling approach to inform an app that can assign personalized daily step goals based on what it knows about the user. Her dissertation work is focused on systematizing self-experimentation research, particularly, developing a tool that can assist citizen scientists in designing data-collection protocols that are appropriate for their research questions.