User Experiences in Social Situations

How does the presence of other people influence user experiences?

A drawing of a person using an ATM while another person walks past. Both look at each other, and thought bubbles represent that they think about what the other person may think of them. The image represents some of the social dynamics between people using technologies in social situations and how they shape other people's experiences.

Smartphones, vending machines, cameras on selfie sticks: Interactive technologies are everywhere, and we often interact with them in social situations. When someone else starts a phone call on a train we may feel disturbed, for example if we try to read something. But it can also give us an enjoyable, “forbidden” glimpse into their private life. It can facilitate social interactions: Maybe they mention that they are tourists and worried to miss the right stop, so we can offer help. Or maybe other passengers also feel disturbed, and we can get a sense of togetherness while sending annoyed looks to the intruder. The point is, even a seemingly identical interaction with technology can lead to all sorts of experiences in social situations and change the interaction dynamics for everyone involved. I am interested in this impact of social situations on how we experience technologies.

I study how different people, with their goals, activities, and interpersonal relations, shape each other’s experiences of technology. While research so far has mainly focused on the user and the form of interaction (e.g., mid-air gestures, touch displays, voice interfaces), I try to take a broader perspective that includes the other people, their activities, and how everything fits together. Obviously, phone calling and reading do not go along well. But phone calling and “listening in” do (in a way). How can we describe and explain such (in-)compatibilities between activities systematically, and how can we use this productively to create positive social experiences? In addition, how can we define which combinations of activities we consider positive, if we look at diverse groups of individuals who all experience an interaction differently?

There is still a lot of groundwork to do until we reach a solid understanding of these dynamics. In a first sketch, I have made use of social practice theory to describe how different materials, skills, and motivations of different co-located people and their activities can relate to each other. These relations can have positive or negative effects on everyone involved. For example, a phone caller cannot easily have an additional conversation with someone sitting next to him, by design. During a date, that is a problem. But the caller can also use this incompatibility on purpose, as a tactic to self-defend against salespeople on a shopping street.

An overlay photo of a young woman wearing a futuristic hearing aid that spans over her head. She is interacting with the hearing aid through an expressive hand gesture, indicated through overlaid photos that represent a movement. She reaches out to a fictional disturbing noise, grabs the hearing focus of the interactive hearing aid, and sets it to her conversation partner.

So far, we used this practice-based perspective in two experimental studies to compare people’s experiences of different forms of interaction with an interactive hearing aid. Such studies are often set in anonymous, public settings like a bus or a supermarket. We chose a different social situation: Face-to-face conversations. In this social setting, we found that a more expressive form that is normally considered “unacceptable” was experienced more positively than a supposedly “safe”, subtle alternative. We can make sense of this effect if we consider the form of interaction not as an isolated, standalone characteristic of an interaction, but as a carrier of situated meaning. In face-to-face situations, “subtle” can signal that someone is trying to hide something or is not fully “there”. In contrast, expressive gestures do not hide anything and clearly communicate that something is going on. In a second study, we critically reflected on the widely used concepts of “hiding” and “showing”. They have been formative for current design and social acceptability research, but used inconsistently. We could show that existing guidelines based on hiding and revealing not only fail to create the intended experiences (depending on the situation), but also unnecessarily reduce the design space to only a couple of categories. As an alternative, we show that we get much more flexibility when looking at the actual form of an interaction in more detail, with its situated meaning.

My current research revises some further concepts in the field of socially situated experiences of technology and takes new methodological approaches that better capture the complexity of interpersonal dynamics than traditional experiments.

Further Reading

The Witness Experience Inventory

Alarith Uhde, Lianara Dreyer & Marc Hassenzahl
2025, Interacting With Computers

Beyond Hiding and Revealing: Exploring Effects of Visibility and Form of Interaction on the Witness Experience

Alarith Uhde, Tim zum Hoff & Marc Hassenzahl
2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction (MobileHCI)

LoopBoxes – Evaluation of a Collaborative Accessible Digital Musical Instrument

Andreas Förster, Alarith Uhde, Mathias Komesker, Christina Komesker & Irina Schmidt
2023, Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME'23)

Obtrusive Subtleness and Why We Should Focus on Meaning, not Form, in Social Acceptability Studies

Alarith Uhde, Tim zum Hoff & Marc Hassenzahl
2022, Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM'22)

Social Practice Cards: Research Material to Study Social Contexts as Interwoven Practice Constellations

Alarith Uhde, Mena Mesenhöller & Marc Hassenzahl
2022, Contribution to the CHI Workshop InContext: Futuring User-Experience Design Tools

Interaction in the Public: Aesthetics, Social Acceptability, and Social Context

Alarith Uhde, Stefan Tretter, Pia von Terzi, Marion Koelle, Sarah Diefenbach & Marc Hassenzahl
2021, Workshop at Mensch und Computer

Technology-mediated Experiences and Social Context: Relevant Needs in Private vs. Public Interaction and the Importance of Others for Positive Affect

Pia von Terzi, Stefan Tretter, Alarith Uhde, Marc Hassenzahl & Sarah Diefenbach
2021, Frontiers in Psychology

Simulating Social Acceptability With Agent-based Modeling

Alarith Uhde & Marc Hassenzahl
2021, Contribution to the CHI Workshop on Emergent Interaction

Towards a Better Understanding of Social Acceptability

Alarith Uhde & Marc Hassenzahl
2021, Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts
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