Mobile Evaluations in a Lab Environment

The evaluation of mobile applications is increasingly taking into account the users of such applications’ mobility (e.g., Mizobuchi, Chignell, & Newton, 2005; Mustonen , Olkkonen, & Hakkinen, 2004). While clearly an important factor, mobility on its own often does not require the user’s visual focus to any great extent. Real-life users, however, are required to be aware of potential hazards while moving through their environment. This chapter outlines a simple classification for describing these distractions and two evaluations into the effect visual distractions have on the users of a mobile application. In both cases, the participants were required to monitor both their environment and the display of their mobile device. The results of both evaluations indicated that monitoring the environment has an effect on both task performance and the subjective workload experienced by the participants, indicating that such distractions should be considered when designing future evaluations.

Multilayered Approach to Evaluate Mobile User Interfaces

This chapter presents a method for the evaluation of user interfaces for mobile applications. The method is based upon an approach that combines user opinion, standard conformity assessment, and user performance measurement. It focuses on the evaluation settings and techniques employed in the evaluation process, while offering a comparison between the laboratory evaluation and field evaluation approaches. The method’s presentation and the evaluation comparison will be supported by a discussion of the results obtained from the method’s application to a case study involving a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). This chapter argues that the experience gained from evaluating conventional user interfaces can be applied to the world of mobile technology.

Evaluating Context-Aware Mobile Interfaces for Professionals

Evaluation refines and validates design solutions in order to establish adequate user experiences. For mobile user interfaces in dynamic and critical environments, user experiences can vary enormously, setting high requirements for evaluation. This chapter presents a framework for the selection, combination, and tuning of evaluation methods. It identifies seven evaluation constraints, that is, the development stage, the complexity of the design, the purpose, participants, setting, duration, and cost of evaluation, which influence the appropriateness of the method. Using a combination of methods in different settings (such as Wizard-of-Oz, game-based, and field evaluations) a concise, complete, and coherent set of user experience data can be gathered, such as performance, situation awareness, trust, and acceptance. Applying this framework to a case study on context-aware mobile interfaces for the police resulted in specific guidelines for selecting evaluation methods and succeeded to capture the mobile context and its relation to the user experience.

Unobtrusive Movement Interaction for Mobile Devices

Gesture control of mobile devices is an emerging user interaction modality. Large-scale deployment has been delayed by two main technical challenges: detecting gestures reliably and power consumption. There have also been user-experience-related challenges, such as indicating the start of a gesture, social acceptance, and feedback on the gesture detection status. This chapter evaluates a solution for the main challenges: an event-based movement interaction modality, tapping, that emphasizes minimal user effort in interacting with a mobile device. The technical feasibility of the interaction method is examined with a smartphone equipped with a sensor interaction cover, utilizing an enabling software framework. The reliability of detecting tapping is evaluated by analyzing a dataset collected with the smartphone prototype. Overall, the results suggest that detecting tapping is reliable enough for practical applications in mobile computing when the interaction is performed in a stationary situation.

Design of an Adaptive Mobile Learning Management System

This chapter introduces the application of an artificial intelligence technique to a mobile educational device in order to provide a learning management system platform that is adaptive to students’ learning styles. The key concepts of the adaptive mobile learning management system (AM-LMS) platform are outlined and explained. The AM-LMS provides an adaptive environment that continually sets a mobile device’s use of remote learning resources to the needs and requirements of individual learners. The platform identifies a user’s learning style based on an analysis tool provided by Felder & Soloman (2005) and updates the profile as the learner engages with e-learning content. A novel computational mechanism continuously provides interfaces specific to the user’s learning style and supports unique user interactions. The platform’s interfaces include strategies for learning activities, contents, menus, and supporting functions for learning through a mobile device.

Context-Awareness and Mobile Devices

Context-awareness is a maturing area within the field of ubiquitous computing. It is particularly relevant to the growing sub-field of mobile computing as a user’s context changes more rapidly when a user is mobile, and interacts with more devices and people in a greater number of locations. In this chapter, we present a definition of context and context-awareness and describe its importance to human-computer interaction and mobile computing. We describe some of the difficulties in building context-aware applications and the solutions that have arisen to address these. Despite these solutions, users have difficulties in using and adopting mobile context-aware applications. We discuss these difficulties and present a set of eight design guidelines that can aid application designers in producing more usable and useful mobile context-aware applications.

Context as a Necessity in Mobile Applications

This chapter presents how the use of context can support user interaction in mobile applications. It argues that context in mobile applications can be used not only for locating users and providing them with suitable information, but also for supporting the system’s selection of appropriate interaction techniques and providing users with a tool necessary for composing and creating their own mobile applications. Thus, the target of this chapter is to demonstrate that the use of context in mobile applications is a necessity. It will focus on the current trend of modeling devices, services and context in a formal way, like ontologies, and will present an ontology-based context model.

User Acceptance of Mobile Services

Personal mobile devices are increasingly being used as platforms for interactive services. User acceptance of mobile services is not just based on usability but includes also other interrelated issues. Ease of use is important, but the services should also provide clear value to the user and they should be trustworthy and easy to adopt. These user acceptance factors form the core of the Technology Acceptance Model for Mobile Services introduced in this chapter. The model has been set up based on field trials of several mobile services with altogether more than 200 test users. The model can be used as a design and evaluation framework when designing new mobile services.

Interaction Design for Personal Photo Management on a Mobile Device

This chapter explores some of the technological elements that will greatly enhance user interaction with personal photos on mobile devices in the near future. It reviews major technological innovations that have taken place in recent years which are contributing to re-shaping people’s personal photo management behavior and thus their needs, and presents an overview of the major design issues in supporting these for mobile access. It then introduces the currently very active research area of content-based image analysis and context-awareness. These technologies are becoming an important factor in improving mobile interaction by assisting automatic annotation and organization of photos, thus reducing the chore of manual input on mobile devices. Considering the pace of the rapid increases in the number of digital photos stored on our digital cameras, camera phones and online photoware sites, the authors believe that the subsequent benefits from this line of research will become a crucial factor in helping to design efficient and satisfying mobile interfaces for personal photo management systems.

Problems Rendezvousing

This chapter seeks opportunities to use mobile technology to improve human mobility. To this end, the chapter reports a diary study of university students’ use of mobile telephones for rendezvousing—arranging, and traveling to, informal meetings with friends and family. This diary study reveals, and suggests explanations for, a number of deficits in user performance: (1) rendezvousers occasionally become highly stressed and lose valuable opportunities; (2) outcomes are worse when rendezvousing at unfamiliar locations; (3) 31 to 45 year olds report more personal sacrifices than 18 to 30 year olds; and (4) when mobile phones are used on the move, the experience of communication is slightly worse than when phones are used prior to departure. Ways of using mobile technology to make good these deficits are suggested.