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Social acceptability of user interfaces
Definition and design strategies.
I admit I take pictures of my food. I take lots at home whenever I put a meal together. However, I avoid taking them when I’m out with acquaintances or with that friend who insists that foodstagramming could be a sign of mental illness. I adjust my behavior depending on who might be judging my actions — what accounts for the difference is social acceptance or the absence of social disapproval.
In a recent review, Koelle and colleagues argue that social acceptability is integral to designing user interfaces as our interactions with them increasingly happen in a social context. The first thing that comes to mind are smart glasses and other head-mounted displays. People were not comfortable with the Google Glass due to its potential to intrude privacy, especially with its front-facing camera. This led to the glasses being banned in a lot of public spaces like bars and hospitals even before they were released.
Social acceptability as a quality of an interface
Drawing from Goffman’s impression management theory, Koelle et al. explains that users deliberately control how spectators perceive them which influences their manner of technology use. From this observation, they have defined social acceptability as a quality…
