There are many situations where using personal devices is not socially acceptable, or where nearby people present a privacy risk.For these situations, we explore the concept of hidden interactiontechniques through two prototype applications. HiddenHaptics allows users to receive information through vibrotactile cues on asmartphone, and HideWrite allows users to write text messagesby drawing on a dimmed smartwatch screen. We conducted threeuser studies to investigate whether, and how, these techniques canbe used without being exposed. Our primary findings are (1) userscan effectively hide their interactions while attending to a socialsituation, (2) users seek to interact when another person is speaking, and they also tend to hide the interaction using their body orfurniture, and (3) users can sufficiently focus on the social situationdespite their interaction, whereas non-users feel that observing theuser hinders their ability to focus on the social activity.

Publication

Ville Mäekelä, Johannes Kleine, Maxine Hood, Florian Alt and Albrecht Schmidt.Hidden Interaction Techniques: Concealed Information Acquisition and Texting on Smartphones and Wearables.In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. CHI'21. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA.[Download Bibtex]