Familiarity with mobile phones

Abstract

Heidegger describes familiarity as the readiness or preparedness to cope with the world, the equipment it comprises and other people. However, and more usefully for the current discussion, Dreyfus extends this and argues that familiarity comprises "know-how" and involvement which is a proposition susceptible to empirical testing. In our qualitative study of 21 regular mobile phone users we find evidence of "know-how" in the form of a range of cognitive heuristics which people use to make sense of how to use their phones and (when asked) to explain how it operates. We also found evidence of involvement which we understand to mean comportment, that is, an orientation towards the technology. To our surprise peoples' comportment was largely confined to the phones' ease of use rather than its aesthetics or brand. We were also able to distinguish between the phone as an artefact and the phone as a means to an end and some suggestion that this distinction may be age related. We conclude that familiarity offers a coherent conceptual platform from which we might reason about how people use, conceive of, feel about and select interactive technologies. Copyright 2009 ACM.