iSocialize: investigating awareness cues for a mobile social awareness application

Emerging technologies increasingly provide opportunities for creating and maintaining social relations with people even though separated by time or distance. However, it is still unclear how such technologies can support these social relations and what kind of interface awareness cues such technologies should provide. Based on an ethnographic study of social awareness in families, we identified four awareness cues namely activity, status, relation, and vicinity. From these cues, we designed a prototype called iSocialize to explore the identified awareness cues. Based on a laboratory-based evaluation, we assessed our solution and identified five issues of social awareness cues including that imprecise awareness cues are requested to ensure privacy issues and that users found it difficult to maintain a continuously peripheral awareness of their contacts.