Perceptions of visualizing personal mobile communication patterns

Mobile communication technology has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Yet, do we recognize the patterns how we communicate with each other? In this paper we describe our work on increasing users' self-awareness of their communication with their social network with a mobile phone. We have developed two mobile phone applications, which log and visualize different elements of these patterns, enabling users to recognize the activity and responsiveness of their communication behavior more easily. We conducted a user study with 50 participants, where we compared the two applications and derived information of visualizing personal mobile communication patterns. Our research showed that although people were mostly well aware of the patterns of their social activity, still the majority of them found the applications interesting enough to view on a daily basis. We also report on findings on increased awareness of communication gaps, unexpected activity histories, and unbalanced communication behavior with incoming and outgoing calls/messages