Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

HMD versus PDA: A comparative study of the user out-of-box experience

The out-of-box experience (OOBE) has been identified as a significant factor contributing to user perception and acceptance of products and technologies. Whilst there has been considerable emphasis placed on formalising methodological procedures for evaluating the OOBE and on the creation of positive user experiences through appropriate interfaces and applications, relatively little work has been undertaken examining how the OOBE is impacted when the experience itself covers a range of (possibly interconnected) devices. In this paper we report the results of an empirical study which examined the OOBE when a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and Head Mounted Device (HMD) were configured and then connected for inter-operability purposes. Our findings show that type of device has a considerable impact on the OOBE, with the ask of interconnecting devices having a detrimental effect on the OOBE. The OOBE, however, is in main unaffected by user type and gender

Evaluation of mobile health education applications for health professionals and patients

Paper presented at 8th International conference on e-Health (EH 2016), 1-3 July 2016, Funchal, Madeira, Portugal. ABSTRACT Mobile applications for health education are commonly utilized to support patients and health professionals. A critical evaluation framework is required to ensure the usability and reliability of mobile health education applications in order to facilitate the saving of time and effort for the various user groups; thus, the aim of this paper is to describe a framework for evaluating mobile applications for health education. The intended outcome of this framework is to meet the needs and requirements of the different user categories and to improve the development of mobile health education applications with software engineering approaches, by creating new and more effective techniques to evaluate such software. This paper first highlights the importance of mobile health education apps, then explains the need to establish an evaluation framework for these apps. The paper provides a description of the evaluation framework, along with some specific evaluation metrics: an efficient hybrid of selected heuristic evaluation (HE) and usability evaluation (UE) factors to enable the determination of the usefulness and usability of health education mobile apps. Finally, an explanation of the initial results for the framework was obtained using a Medscape mobile app. The proposed framework - An Evaluation Framework for Mobile Health Education Apps – is a hybrid of five metrics selected from a larger set in heuristic and usability evaluation, filtered based on interviews from patients and health professionals. These five metrics correspond to specific facets of usability identified through a requirements analysis of typical users of mobile health apps. These metrics were decomposed into 21 specific questionnaire questions, which are available on request from first author

Are e-readers suitable tools for scholarly work?

This paper aims to offer insights into the usability, acceptance and limitations of e-readers with regard to the specific requirements of scholarly text work. To fit into the academic workflow non-linear reading, bookmarking, commenting, extracting text or the integration of non-textual elements must be supported. A group of social science students were questioned about their experiences with electronic publications for study purposes. This same group executed several text-related tasks with the digitized material presented to them in two different file formats on four different e-readers. Their performances were subsequently evaluated by means of frequency analyses in detail. Findings - e-Publications have made advances in the academic world; however e-readers do not yet fit seamlessly into the established chain of scholarly text-processing focusing on how readers use material during and after reading. Our tests revealed major deficiencies in these techniques. With a small number of participants (n=26) qualitative insights can be obtained, not representative results. Further testing with participants from various disciplines and of varying academic status is required to arrive at more broadly applicable results. Practical implications - Our test results help to optimize file conversion routines for scholarly texts. We evaluated our data on the basis of descriptive statistics and abstained from any statistical significance test. The usability test of e-readers in a scientific context aligns with both studies on the prevalence of e-books in the sciences and technical test reports of portable reading devices. Still, it takes a distinctive angle in focusing on the characteristics and procedures of textual work in the social sciences and measures the usability of e-readers and file-features against these standards.Comment: 22 pages, 6 figures, accepted for publication in Online Information Revie

Understanding user experience of mobile video: Framework, measurement, and optimization

Since users have become the focus of product/service design in last decade, the term User eXperience (UX) has been frequently used in the field of Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI). Research on UX facilitates a better understanding of the various aspects of the user’s interaction with the product or service. Mobile video, as a new and promising service and research field, has attracted great attention. Due to the significance of UX in the success of mobile video (Jordan, 2002), many researchers have centered on this area, examining users’ expectations, motivations, requirements, and usage context. As a result, many influencing factors have been explored (Buchinger, Kriglstein, Brandt & Hlavacs, 2011; Buchinger, Kriglstein & Hlavacs, 2009). However, a general framework for specific mobile video service is lacking for structuring such a great number of factors. To measure user experience of multimedia services such as mobile video, quality of experience (QoE) has recently become a prominent concept. In contrast to the traditionally used concept quality of service (QoS), QoE not only involves objectively measuring the delivered service but also takes into account user’s needs and desires when using the service, emphasizing the user’s overall acceptability on the service. Many QoE metrics are able to estimate the user perceived quality or acceptability of mobile video, but may be not enough accurate for the overall UX prediction due to the complexity of UX. Only a few frameworks of QoE have addressed more aspects of UX for mobile multimedia applications but need be transformed into practical measures. The challenge of optimizing UX remains adaptations to the resource constrains (e.g., network conditions, mobile device capabilities, and heterogeneous usage contexts) as well as meeting complicated user requirements (e.g., usage purposes and personal preferences). In this chapter, we investigate the existing important UX frameworks, compare their similarities and discuss some important features that fit in the mobile video service. Based on the previous research, we propose a simple UX framework for mobile video application by mapping a variety of influencing factors of UX upon a typical mobile video delivery system. Each component and its factors are explored with comprehensive literature reviews. The proposed framework may benefit in user-centred design of mobile video through taking a complete consideration of UX influences and in improvement of mobile videoservice quality by adjusting the values of certain factors to produce a positive user experience. It may also facilitate relative research in the way of locating important issues to study, clarifying research scopes, and setting up proper study procedures. We then review a great deal of research on UX measurement, including QoE metrics and QoE frameworks of mobile multimedia. Finally, we discuss how to achieve an optimal quality of user experience by focusing on the issues of various aspects of UX of mobile video. In the conclusion, we suggest some open issues for future study