InstaBox — A Probe kit to understand mobile phone use among students

InstaBox — Mobile phone storage

Role: Designer
Team: Solo Project
Project Duration: 1 day build

Context

Mobile phones have dominated our lives as more continue software technologies shift towards the smallest of screens: mobile. With most people using it for social interaction, social media has also been on a continued rise. Beyond its benefits, the hedonic experience around social media use on mobile phones has most people, particularly the youth, staying plugged into their phones almost all the time.

According to a Pew Research survey, 84% of people say they can’t go a day without their mobile phones.

Given that this issue is very contextual more empirical studies have to be conducted to gain a more situated understanding of it.

Project Goal

For this exercise, I sought out to develop a cultural probe kit that has the potential to give us a look into the lives of students and their phone use and their reaction without them — from their emotions and their desires to reactions when without their phones. I wanted to leverage a Fourth Wave of HCI approach called ‘Removal’. The approach promotes the removal of technologies and the documenting of their absence as a method (Homewood& Vallgårda, 2020). I was interested in using this approach to understand mobile phone habits among first-year students at Purdue University.

Initial Ideas

I started by sketching out some ideas. The critical aspect of this stage was finding the best kit to answers the probe question. Taking inspiration from the context, I wanted to mainly understand the user’s reaction group reaction when they weren’t or didn’t use the phone for a certain period. With this rationale, I came up with three concepts that are supposed to help the participant reflect on periods when they do not use their mobile phone.

Concept 1 — A storage box for keeping the mobile phone for some time participants can reflect on the day without the phone when they come back

Concept 2 — A phone case that automatically locks for some time. Participants get to write their thoughts and reflection after it unlocks in a provided journal.

Concept 3 — A large box that can project a phone screen onto its glass screen when you phone a phone in it.

Concept Selection and Refinement

This probe’s core purpose was to create a channel for participants to elicit their habits through reflection and interaction. From a construction standpoint, the first concept was much easier to prototype than the 2nd and 3rd. This is due to the technology involved. Though this could have been overlooked because it was just a prototype, creating a near high-fidelity prototype could help the goal be actualized easier. Also, concept one had some simplistic features that could be improved to make it fun and exciting.

After the brainstorming, I conducted a short informal group interview of students I taught. All students were freshmen and lived on campus. All the students most used their phones for chatting and browsing social media. Out of the nine students, seven said they mostly use Instagram and TikTok every day. One said, ‘I think I am an Instagram ‘addict’’.

Bringing these insights together with initial ideas, I decided to create a probe that helps users reflect on their mobile phone use for social media.

The concept to create an Instagram storage box that participants will leave their phones in for a specific timeframe and share their reflection when they come back for it.

Refinement of concept 1

Deployment strategy/ final output

The InstaBox will be deployed for a week, during which participants will interact with it twice a day. It will be placed by the bedside of the participant. Interacting with Instabox will be done in the morning and the evening. The participant will turn off and leave the phone in the box for two hours for both periods. After removing, Participants will fill out two reflection cards for the probe.

1. Can you share your experience within the time you didn’t have your phone

2. Can you list ten words that best describe how you felt about your phone

First, the participants will open the box, which contains two kinds of reflection cards.

He will turn off the phone and leave it there and close it.

After two hours, he can remove it and write a quick reflection about their experience without the phone.

Analysis strategy

After the week-long probing, participants will be asked to mail the Instabox and the reflection kit. Responses will be analyzed using thematic analysis. The recurring themes will be coded using open coding and axial coding. The high-level themes and categories from the analysis will be leveraged to generate scenarios and inform the research direction.

Conclusion

InstaBox is a personalized experience for social media users. Leaving your phone in the box shows you have left your social media for some time. Though not entirely a critical design, it helps people reflect on their addiction to their phones and social media. It can be deployed to probe different contexts and research areas. The successful use of this probe kit can generate spontaneous responses.

Reference

Homewood, S., Karlsson, A., & Vallgårda, A. (2020, July). Removal as a Method: A Fourth Wave HCI Approach to Understanding the Experience of Self-Tracking. In Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 1779–1791).

Appendix

Prototype Construction

For the prototype construction, I used your ⅛ ply. The cuts were made on the side and the base.

The edges were glued together with masking tape. The major change from the sketches was the top covering and how participants could put in their phones. The top part was made solid/closed instead of having an opening there. The front’s opening was made bigger to improve the ease when people were putting on their phones.

The whole design drew inspiration from the classic Instagram logo from 2016. The goal was to draw from its popularity compared to the current Instagram logo

For this prototype, the front open was fastened with adhesive paper and a thumbtack.