  Nowadays, interactive technologies are used almost everywhere. As a result,
designers need to increasingly make them "socially acceptable". Previous work
recommends "subtle" forms of interaction to increase social acceptability and
avoid negative experiences. Although often appropriate, such uniform
recommendations neglect the variety of social situations. We demonstrate this
limitation in an experiment (N=35), by comparing the observer experience of
different forms of interaction in "face-to-face conversations", a social
situation rarely studied. Here, the typically recommended form of interaction
("subtle") led to a more negative observer experience than the usually
deprecated form ("suspenseful"), in terms of affective experience and product
perception. It also made the user appear less extraverted. We conclude by
positioning interactions with technology not as separate from the social
situation in which they are performed, but as a constitutive part of it that
meaningfully relates to other situated activities.
