Lecture 1: An Overview of Mobile Interaction

Transcription

1 Lecture 1: An Overview of Mobile Interaction George Buchanan Slide 1

2 Housekeeping CitySpace should have everything bar this week s audio file?! Seminars: Today in AG03 (same as last week) AND ALG16 Coursework: Will be announced next week Slide 2

3 Lecture 4 Overview Mobile Interaction A potted history Problems and features Design processes Slide 3

4 Mobile Interaction Starts to emerge as a field in the late 1990 s with the first mobile phones Initial concerns are bounded by basic hardware: Black & grey display (c. 160x120 pixels max.) Approx. 14 buttons No applications or optional software, so focus is on feature navigation (e.g. finding a particular feature) A lot of emphasis is on the input/output limitations, and builds on earlier research on those topics Slide 4

5 Mobile Interaction Very quickly, SMS becomes an issue Efficient text entry (can be tested as per Marsden s paper) Editing and reading short texts on a small display But the phones cannot be programmed at all, except by the manufacturers Most work creates virtual phones on computer desktops with imagined features that might be implemented for future phones that can be programmed Others start to examine social issues with mobile phones how the social context impacts on use A third stream is technology acceptance Slide 5

6 Sidebar: Technology Acceptance Model The Technology Acceptance Model is a very simple model that attempts to predict whether a system will actually be used It is not a usability metric; rather the question is does the combination of usability and function mean that the technology will actually be used? Origins of the TAM are in the work of Fred Davis (and Richard Bagozzi) The model is well proven, and has been replicated and reproved a number of times Slide 6

7 Mobile Interaction: Second Wave The first wave was very rapidly succeeded by a broader range of interests, including the anticipated arrival of internet service to mobile phones (c ) Considerable interest in longer, more extensive reading Building on work on small screens in the 1980 s Display and button technologies essentially the same; some colour display emerging Themes from the first wave continue (basic function usability) Concerns really focus on getting the most out of the small display Slide 7

8 Mobile Interaction: Second Wave Interest in improving mobile browsing of web pages The use of WAP internet browsing Later also looking at searching Growth also in Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) devices such as the Palm and Psion Organisers Bigger displays (e.g. 240x320) Some colour (perhaps 4096) Non-keyboard input (stylus or touch-sensitive) Concern about the better device for information use a bigger/better phone or the PDA? Slide 8

9 WebTwig WebTwig was written by myself in 1999, to try and improve web browsing on a mobile phone Used an outliner-style presentation to reveal content without lots of navigation Slide 9

10 WebTwig It used the heading levels of HTML as a skeleton for the outline Minimised the scrolling that a reader needed to do to find a text Particularly reduced horizontal scrolling, which proved to be really very, very difficult for users to do Vastly improved task performance (even if it doesn t look too cute) The basic expand/collapse model for interaction has particularly taken off on mobiles with touch screens Slide 10

11 WebTwig Later expanded from basic browsing to doing search too Also used in digital libraries to support browse and search across different documents Most recently, concept is being used in the case of notes and bookmarks on small screens A similar method was used by Orkut Buyukkokten s PowerBrowser of the same period (c. 2000) Slide 11

12 Discussion Which of the mobile technologies discussed so far have you encountered? What s reading the internet like on a mobile phone today? What do you think the problems still are? Slide 12

13 The Third Age (c ) The second wave of research established what are now the norms of mobile interaction However, once this platform was established, several new areas emerged: Social Interaction (interaction in the large) Alternative input and sensing devices (beyond the keyboard) Interaction styles ( sit forward versus lean back ) And others The relatively homogeneous consensus on key issues declines Slide 13

14 Social Interaction Mobiles facilitate a lot of inter-personal communication Phone SMS Multimedia messaging Facebook etc now But the use or rather social context of use became more and more of an issue e.g. photo messaging really didn t take off, generally, but proved very popular with certain groups (e.g. clothes shopping for young women) Social applications were seen as key amongst adopters, particularly in Japan Slide 14

15 Social Interaction We ll study Facebook /Web 2.0 style apps separately Example mobile tools included: Rendezvous: how to coordinate several people who are meeting up (planned or accidentally) in a location (Martin Colbert) What have other people done here, before me? (sometimes known as Geotagging; Jones and Buchanan) Who else is around here? But also simple things like considering social touch (Abigail Sellen) or situational awareness (Fred is in the supermarket ) Slide 15

16 Social Interaction This led to a diversification of research strategies: Ethnography Mobile observations (which raises a host of data capture and privacy issues!) And unclear evaluation criteria: When is a rendezvous successful? What is effective social touch? Slide 16

17 Alternative Input Technologies By 2005 we had keyboard and stylus Also emerging were: Tilt-based interaction (even being used for text entry!) Physical gesture (shaking, rolling) Near-field communication (RFID) Touch-sensing and multi-touch Each brought different limitations and advantages E.g. tilting for text input is clearly difficult, but is good for directional cueing and pointing, which stylus, keyboard or even multitouch suck at! Slide 17

18 Interaction Styles Desktop interaction assumes that the user s primary attention is on the software Also that the interaction is continuously observed by the user Both poor assumptions in many environments, but utterly false for many mobile applications Interactions may be long-term but populated by bursts of attention divided by long periods of inactivity The user s primary focus may be on another task (e.g. having a meeting) Slide 18

19 The Third Wave Third wave mobile devices broke away from a very constricted design space However, this give rise to problems of agreeing what was good/appropriate design Particular issues arose for users whose mental model of mobile devices is primarily the mobile phone Many devices are now not phones at all There has been scant attention to other devices (Walkmans) Even researchers have fallen into the trap! One increasing concern is understanding user s mental models and task conceptions Slide 19

20 Summary Mobile HCI did not come out of nowhere This week we ve focussed on history Next week, we ll return to models of cognition Slide 20

21 Reading Duchnicky, R L & Kolers, P A (1983) "Readability of text scrolled on visual display terminals as a function of window size," Human Factors, 25: Davis, F. D. (1989). Perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and user acceptance of information technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), George Buchanan, Sarah Farrant, Matt Jones, Harold W. Thimbleby, Gary Marsden, Michael J. Pazzani: Improving mobile internet usability. WWW 2001: Mobile Interaction Design Chapter 2. Slide 21

22 Questions? Slide 22