Identifying Situational Impairments that Risk Affecting Graffiti Removal Technicians’ Ability to Interact with Smartphones

Abstract: With the evolving opportunities smartphones provide their users, mobile field professions can gain much from having a field-office application that support work while in the field. However, both the environment and context in which field workers operate risk to impair the workers’ ability to interact with a device, and so called situational impairments may be induced. This thesis aims to identify the situational factors that risk impairing the interaction between the chosen field working group of graffiti removal technicians and a future smartphone application. To get an encompassing understanding of the profession of graffiti removal, a participant observation was performed, with two sanitation firms and four technicians involved in the study. After performed participant observation, a hypothetical future field-office application with the purpose to be used to handle sanitation orders was determined and situational impairments could be identified. The study shows that the situational impairments are (1) the gloves the technicians use while working, (2) the fact that devices used in the field often are worn out as a consequence of the activities and conditions in which they are operated, (3) rain, and (4) bright sunlight. To mitigate the aggravations these four factors cause, smartphones used in the field should be rugged and have screens that are operable when wet. The field-office application’s interface should be designed with consideration on how to facilitate readability in bright sunlight and with a user flow that does not require too many steps from starting to ending a sanitation order.