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

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Obtrusive Subtleness and Why We Should Focus on Meaning,

not Form, in Social Acceptability Studies

Alarith Uhde

alarith.uhde@uni-siegen.de

University of Siegen

Siegen, Germany

Tim zum Ho

tim.zumho@uni-siegen.de

University of Siegen

Siegen, Germany

Marc Hassenzahl

marc.hassenzahl@uni-siegen.de

University of Siegen

Siegen, Germany

ABSTRACT

Nowadays, interactive technologies are used almost everywhere.

As a result, designers need to increasingly make them “socially

acceptable”. Previous work recommends “subtle” forms of interac-

tion to increase social acceptability and avoid negative experiences.

Although often appropriate, such uniform recommendations ne-

glect the variety of social situations. We demonstrate this limitation

in an experiment (N=35), by comparing the observer experience

of dierent forms of interaction in “face-to-face conversations”, a

social situation rarely studied. Here, the typically recommended

form of interaction (“subtle”) led to a more negative observer expe-

rience than the usually deprecated form (“suspenseful”), in terms of

aective experience and product perception. It also made the user

appear less extraverted. We conclude by positioning interactions

with technology not as separate from the social situation in which

they are performed, but as a constitutive part of it that meaningfully

relates to other situated activities.

CCS CONCEPTS

•Human-centered computing →HCI theory, concepts and

models;Interaction techniques;Empirical studies in HCI .

KEYWORDS

social acceptability, subtle, suspenseful, social situation, social con-

text, gesture-based interaction, design for the social

ACM Reference Format:

Alarith Uhde, Tim zum Ho, and Marc Hassenzahl. 2022. Obtrusive Subtle-

ness and Why We Should Focus on Meaning, not Form, in Social Accept-

ability Studies. In 21th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous

Multimedia (MUM 2022), November 27–30, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal. ACM, New

York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3568444.3568457

1 INTRODUCTION

Technology is often used in social situations. For example, people

interact with their smartphones in public, and it is often inevitable

that others observe or witness such interactions in some way. The

presence of others adds the challenge for designers to make inter-

acting with technology “socially acceptable”. This is particularly

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MUM 2022, November 27–30, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9820-6/22/11. . . $15.00

https://doi.org/10.1145/3568444.3568457

dicult, because the specic social situations we encounter in ev-

eryday life vary considerably: People, their activities, social and

cultural norms, and the technology itself, all come together to form

a wide variety of potential social situations. Often, users are in-

tuitively aware of the dierences between social situations and

adapt their interactions with technology accordingly, if possible.

They know, for example, that speaking loudly on the phone is not

appreciated in a library, but quite acceptable on a busy shopping

street. Given the complex and nuanced dierences between social

situations, it seems evident that depending on the particularities of

each, dierent forms of interaction may have dierent impact on

people’s experiences.

However, current recommendations in Human-Computer Inter-

action (HCI) for socially acceptable interactions are quite uniform.

Social acceptability guidelines mostly recommend inconspicuous

or hidden forms of interaction to make them as unobtrusive as

possible. For example, Koelle and colleagues [

] found that the

most common strategy to design for social acceptability is to make

interactions “subtle”, that is, unobtrusive, not drawing attention,

and possibly disguised as everyday activities [

]. In some cases,

the interaction can even be designed to be entirely invisible to

“observers” (i.e., from other people’s point of view), as a way to

increase social acceptability. Yet another approach is to hide the

interactive devices in accessories or jewelry [

]. Of course,

such unobtrusive and subtle forms of interaction seem compelling,

because they can be used across many social situations. At best,

they are not even registered by others, and thus do not oend any-

one (i.e., neither in the library nor the shopping street). But this

also leads to a general design trend to remove the interaction from

social situations, rather than explicitly addressing and catering for

them. In other words, instead of “designing for the social”, current

social acceptability guidelines to a large extend follow a strategy to

“design despite the social”.

Although the current recommendation for subtle, unobtrusive, or

even hidden forms of interaction may at rst seem like a safe choice,

we believe that it comes with its own problems. First, by removing

the interaction from the social space, we abandon its potential to

create or promote positive social experiences, or to contribute to

positive social change. Second, the variety of social situations we

encounter in everyday life can be overwhelming. Designers might

choose to take such standard recommendations as a shortcut to

avoid engaging with this variety, and resort to boilerplate solutions,

assuming that unobtrusiveness will at least create no harm. But

in fact, there may be social situations where the seemingly unob-

trusive forms of interaction are actually experienced negatively.

It simply seems implausible that the same forms are appropriate

arXiv:2210.14325v1 [cs.HC] 25 Oct 2022

MUM 2022, November 27–30, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal Alarith Uhde, Tim zum Ho, and Marc Hassenzahl

across all social situations and activities, from libraries to rock con-

certs, and from family dinners to face-to-face conversations with

friends about hobbies. After all, “non-technical” forms of activities

in these dierent situations also vary considerably, and it is unclear

why the rules for interactions with technology should be dierent.

Of course, the current recommendation for subtleness is based

on empirical ndings, from social situations where subtleness con-

sistently turned out to be a good design strategy. Thus, the main

contribution of our paper is an experimental study from a dierent,

specically selected social situation, where subtleness may not be

the best choice. In fact, in our study a subtle interaction led to a

more negative experience, compared to an alternative, open and

outgoing form of interaction, which is described as especially prob-

lematic in the literature (i.e., a “suspenseful” interaction, explained

in detail below). This contradicts the current recommendations for

subtle and against these “suspenseful” and more expressive forms

of interaction. The second contribution is a critical reection on

the apparent empirical contradiction between our ndings and pre-

vious work. Generally speaking, we think that focusing more on

the situated meaning of forms of interaction, and less on the forms

themselves, could move the eld forward and allow us to more

specically cater for a broader range of social situations.

In the following, we rst review the crucial literature concerned

with social situations and how they relate to technology-mediated

experiences. We then present our experimental study in which

we compared the eects of dierent forms of casual interaction

on the non-interacting partners (“observers”) during a face-to-face

conversation. Finally, we discuss our ndings in light of the previous

work and sketch a conceptual model with a focus on co-located,

meaningfully interrelated activities.

2 BACKGROUND

2.1 Understanding Social Situations

In the late 1950s, Erving Goman developed still highly inuential

theoretical work about social situations [

]. He described people

as “performers”, who attempt to leave a positive impression on

others, that is, their “audience”. Goman looked at how people

strategically control their behavior in public and private situations.

He argued that in public situations (e.g., a restaurant or a park),

people perform for each other to leave positive impressions. In

contrast, private situations (e.g., a home) allow them to perform

less attering activities, and to prepare their public performances.

He also described a few cases where the public and the private

overlap, for example when having guests at home. Nowadays, due

to current communication technologies, overlaps of the public and

the private have become the norm. For example, people use social

media in their bedroom or stream videos from their living room,

making these situations “public in private”. Conversely, texting

makes private conversations possible even in public, surrounded

by strangers [

]. Thus, the public and the private are increasingly

dicult to tell apart.

Given the sheer variety of potential public and, thus, social situ-

ations, it is dicult to identify the situational aspects relevant for

design. In HCI, two broad approaches to understanding the relevant

situational factors can be distinguished [

]. The rst one under-

stands social contexts or situations as a “representational problem”.

Its proposed solution is to capture all the details of a social situation

as separate pieces of information in the sense of attributes. In this

view, a social situation can be represented as “a bar with 30 people,

dim light, background music, and table service”. Technology is then

supposed to make use of this information and, for example, to adapt

itself to the situation (e.g., through “context-awareness” [4, 31]).

The other approach understands situation as an “interactional

problem”. In this line of thinking, a social situation is marked by

the relations between the activities performed by all the people

involved. In contrast to the representational approach, interactions

with technology do not happen “within” a social situation, but the

activities themselves constitute the situation, thereby becoming

an inseparable part of it. For example, imagine the same bar as

above. People sit, chat, and drink. At some point, someone turns

the music louder and a few people start to dance, others join in.

Their collective behavior transforms the bar into something like a

club. Initially, everything else remains unchanged, except for the

volume of the music. But this new attribute alone (i.e., “loud music”)

does not change much. It only renders some activities more likely

(e.g., dancing) and discourages others (e.g., conversing), paving

the way for the activities themselves to transform the situation in

an emergent process. According to the interactional approach, the

solution to understanding social situations and peoples’ experiences

lies in an awareness of the interplay of such situated activities.

Following this interactional perspective, Uhde and Hassenzahl

[36]

argued that the “social t” of a technology-mediated activity

(e.g., a phone call) to a certain location (e.g., a library) is not so

much a consequence of attributes of the library. Instead, “library”

should better be understood as shorthand for a situation in which

people read, and noisy “phone calls” are usually incompatible with

“reading”. A more lenient example is a rock concert, which promotes

dancing and shouting. Here, some incompatible activities, such as

reading, are unlikely yet usually not forbidden (although they would

seem a little weird), because they do not strictly conict with the

central concert activities. But they are uncommon. If a reader nds

herself at a concert, she might bewilder people, and she will have

a hard time trying to convince them to be silent. More generally,

Uhde and Hassenzahl argue that such (in-)compatibilities between

co-located activities lead to dierent types of situations. In this

sense, incompatible activities (e.g., loud chatting in a library) are

not unacceptable per se, but solely because of their incompatibility

with other activities (e.g., reading).

In both examples, the library and the rock concert, the location

and time imply an expected activity (i.e., reading and dancing, re-

spectively). In many other cases, this is less clear and needs to be

negotiated ad hoc among the people in the particular situation.

This makes apparent that whether a technology-mediated activity

“ts” or not, is neither a matter of the activity, nor of location, time,

people, technology, or environmental attributes as such. Instead, it

is primarily a matter of the emerging obstructing and facilitating

relationships between the activities performed concurrently [

In this view, a technology-mediated activity, such as a phone call,

is not simply performed against the backdrop of a surrounding

audience and location (i.e., “in context”), but in relation to other

activities concurrently performed by many performers. Taken to-

gether, the central takeaway from this interactional perspective is

that a closer look at what people do in a certain situation and how

Obtrusive Subtleness and Why We Should Focus on Meaning, not Form, in Social Acceptability Studies MUM 2022, November 27–30, 2022, Lisbon, Portugal

these activities relate to each other gives us a better understanding

about which activities “t”, are “acceptable”, or even appreciated.

2.2 Technology-Mediated Experiences in Social

Situations

Reeves and colleagues [

] provided an early taxonomy to describe

technology-mediated experiences in social situations. More specif-

ically, they focused on the experience from the “spectator’s” per-

spective (similar to the “audience” in Goman’s work or “observers”

elsewhere, e.g., [

]). Reeves and colleagues distinguished between

four main categories of interaction, based on the visibility of their

manipulations and eects to spectators. Interactions with visible

manipulations (e.g., pressing a big red button) and eects (e.g., a

light ashes) fall into the expressive category. If only the eects are

visible, the interaction is magical. In contrast, if only the manipu-

lation is visible, the interaction is suspenseful. Finally, interactions

with invisible manipulations and eects fall into the secretive cate-

gory. This taxonomy makes it easier for designers to think about

what parts of the interaction should be revealed or hidden from

other people. However, from an interactional perspective, one of

its shortcomings is that it does not account for the spectator’s own

activity or other activities performed by surrounding people. As a

consequence, the taxonomy does not capture, for example, whether

a spectator is reading a book or dancing as potentially relevant

factors to describe their experience of someone else’s phone call—

although we might intuitively expect very dierent experiences.

Nonetheless, the model can be useful from an interactional perspec-

tive as well, because it emphasizes that parts of the interaction need

to be at least perceptible to have an eect on others. For example, in

expressive and suspenseful interactions, visible manipulations can

become obtrusive for the spectator’s activity and clearly reveal the

user as the “culprit”. In contrast, magical and secretive interactions

keep the attention away from the user.

Empirical comparisons of the four categories found especially

suspenseful interactions (i.e., manipulation visible, eects invisible)

to be experienced as “awkward” by observers and recommended

using the other forms instead [

]. For example, Monk et al

[22]

studied phone calls at bus stops and on trains and found that

observers were annoyed by more suspenseful types of interaction.

Note, however, that the observers’ activities were not reported, so

we can only tentatively assume that they were performing relatively

independent “bus stop activities” (e.g., smoking, waiting) and “train

activities” (e.g., reading, sleeping). Montero and colleagues [

]

asked participants to imagine dierent types of interactions (based

on the categories by Reeves et al. [

]) with a smartphone in public

places versus at home. They also found suspenseful interactions to

be the least acceptable in public, although observer activities were

again not considered. Finally, Häkkilä and colleagues [

] found

suspenseful interactions with smart glasses in a supermarket and

on the beach (no observer activities reported) to be perceived as

potentially embarrassing. In sum, suspenseful interactions have

led to the most negative experiences among the four categories

in previous studies, albeit with the restriction that they focused

mostly on the user and the interactive technology, and not on what

other people were doing. Consequently, previous work recommends

alternative forms of interaction that keep the attention away from

the user and hide their manipulations (e.g., secretive or magical

interactions [15, 23]).

However, hiding an interaction completely (especially a manip-

ulation) is not always possible. Thus, a common suggestion to

overcome acceptability problems is to make relatively visible in-

teractions more subtle [

]. For example, manipulations can

take the form of inconspicuous everyday gestures, such as foot tap-

ping. Subtleness is an attempt to reduce obtrusiveness (compared to

suspenseful and expressive interactions) while preserving privacy

(compared to expressive and magical interactions). It is the most

frequently used strategy in the social acceptability literature [

and it seems to make sense in the locations studied—supermarkets,

streets, and trains. The situations typically related to these places

involve unrelated strangers performing mostly independent activi-

ties. Here, subtle interactions can avoid friction and thus negative

experiences for “observers”.

But things may be dierent in other social situations, such as face-

to-face conversations. A conversation is a co-performed activity,

which creates a particular relationship between the conversation

partners. Here, unobtrusiveness and privacy, the central advantages

of subtle interactions, may not be the main concerns of the people

involved. After all, they have already agreed to interact with each

other more or less openly. This notion is somewhat supported

by Ahlström and colleagues’ [

] ndings, although the authors

draw dierent conclusions. They tested spatial hand gestures of

dierent sizes to interact with a smartphone. The participants felt

comfortable with smaller (i.e., more subtle) hand gestures in front of

all “audiences”, including strangers. But large (i.e., more suspenseful

and potentially more obtrusive) gestures had high acceptance rates

as well, when performed around family, partners, or friends. We

often interact with these people in more intimate social situations

such as face-to-face conversations in enclosed spaces, and we co-

perform many activities. While Ahlström and colleagues generally

recommend the smaller gestures, we would argue that their ndings

do not strictly reject larger interactions across all social situations.

Later studies tentatively suggested possible negative side eects

of subtleness. Pohl and colleagues [

] note that subtleness intro-

duces a risk to be “uncovered”, which could breach trust in close

social interactions, such as intimate face-to-face conversations. Ens

and colleagues [

] presented an alternative design strategy to com-

municate the eects of otherwise “suspicious” interactions (e.g.,

with a smartphone) more openly, for example to communicate that

one is not distracted but looking up relevant information for the

current conversation.

Unlike subtle and secretive forms of interaction, expressive and

suspenseful interactions clearly communicate that something is

going on. Expressive interactions additionally communicate their

purpose transparently. They are self-contained and the interaction

itself can signal to others that no further intervention is needed.

In contrast, suspenseful interactions can be more dicult for ob-

servers to interpret. They may require more prior knowledge about

the interaction. This can be problematic in situations where people

perform independent activities among strangers, which has possi-

bly contributed to the general advice against them [

]. But in

closer, more direct social interactions, the observers (who are more

involved) might already have more knowledge about the user and

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ObtrusiveSubtlenessandWhyWeShouldFocusonMeaning,notForm,inSocialAcceptabilityStudiesAlarithUhdealarith.uhde@uni-siegen.deUniversityofSiegenSiegen,GermanyTimzumHofftim.zumhoff@uni-siegen.deUniversityofSiegenSiegen,GermanyMarcHassenzahlmarc.hassenzahl@uni-siegen.deUniversityofSiegenSiegen,GermanyABSTR...

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