Better Together: Disaggregating Mobile Services For Emergent Users

Mainstream mobile interactions are focused around individual devices, with any collaboration happening via 'the cloud'. We carried out design workshops with emergent users, revealing opportunities for novel collocated collaborative interactions. In this paper we present Better Together - a framework for disaggregating services, splitting interaction elements over separate mobiles. This distribution supports both sharing of resources (such as screen real-estate, or mobile data); and, scaffolding of inclusive interaction in mixed groups (e.g., in terms of literacy or prior technology exposure). We developed two prototypes to explore the concept, trialling the first-collocated group-based shopping list making-with emergent users in South Africa and India. We deployed the second probe, which splits YouTube into its constituent parts across separate mobiles, in a longitudinal study with users in Kenya, South Africa and India. We describe the concept and design process, and report on the design's suitability for emergent users based on our results.