Towards a Better Understanding of Availability and Interruptibility with Mobile Availability Probes

Abstract

In cooperative work shared awareness on mutual availability is important for the overall performance of the team. There has been great research on quantitatively analysing users’ behaviour and automatically detecting their interruptibility. In this paper we present our approach towards a better qualitative understanding of availability of users. Leveraging on experience sampling and cultural probes we developed a mobile tool to collect Mobile Availability Probes. We motivate the need for a better qualitative understanding of availability, introduce our approach and the Mobile Availability Probes, and present and discuss initially collected availability data.