Designing Reflective User Experience with Social and Ubiquitous Computing Technologies.

Abstract

Reflection as a unique human experience has drawn steady attention from researchers in Human-Computer Information (HCI). Yet my review of HCI studies involving reflection reveals untapped opportunities to engage social science theories in studying computer-supported reflection. In response, I conducted three studies to show the potential of employing Schön’s (1983) theoretical framework in the design of reflective technology.

In the first study, I built a browser extension called Social Overlays to allow members of a user community to collectively reflect on issues they run into when they use their website. In a lab-based study, I found that Social Overlays facilitated reflection by reframing users’ roles from information consumers to co-designers of the website.

In the remaining two studies, I investigated using activity traces captured by ubiquitous computing technologies to support reflection. In the second study, I designed a system called Home Trivia to explore how we can use device usage traces in the home to allow household members to reflect on how they have been using their electronic devices and how they can better manage them. Through a field study of Home Trivia, I showed that reflection and engagement can reinforce each other.

In the third study, I explored long-term uses of traces and how traces might allow people in the future to connect with and reflect on the past. To understand what practices can be in the future, I examined a comparable phenomenon in the present: how people today use traces (in particular, traces of prior appropriation of their houses) left by their predecessors in the houses where they live. I found that traces allowed participants to reflect on local history, aesthetics of an earlier period, and their emotional attachment to their houses.

To synthesize these three studies, I conducted a meta-analysis based on Schön’s (1983) theoretical framework of reflection-in-action. This meta-analysis shows that it is fruitful to draw on those important yet previously underutilized concepts in the framework to inform system design. I concluded this dissertation with several implications to designing reflective user experience.