Gestalt Theory in Visual Screen Design — A New Look at an old subject

Although often presented as a single basis for educational visual screen design, Gestalt theory is not a single small set of visual principles uniformly applied by all designers. In fact, it appears that instructional visual design literature often deals with only a small set of Gestalt laws. In this project Gestalt literature was consulted to distil the most relevant Gestalt laws for educational visual screen design. Eleven laws were identified. They deal with balance/symmetry, continuation, closure, figure-ground, focal point, isomorphic correspondence, prŠgnanz, proximity, similarity, simplicity, and unity/harmony. To test the usefulness of these laws in visual screen design they were applied to the redesign of an instructional multimedia application, 'WoundCare', designed to teach nursing students wound management. The basic text-based screens in the original WoundCare application were replaced with graphical user interface screens, that were designed according to these principles. The new screen designs were then evaluated by asking students and others to compare the designs. The viewers were also asked to rate directly the value of using the eleven Gestalt design principles in the redesign, both for improving the product's appearance and improving its value for learning. The evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive. Both the new design and the value of applying the eleven Gestalt laws to improve learning were strongly supported by the students' opinions. However, some differences in the value of applying particular Gestalt laws to the interface design were identified and this forms a useful direction for future research

A Study of Task Characteristics and User Intention to Use Handheld Devices for Mobile Commerce

Interface design and the selection of appropriate tasks for small-screen mobile applications are issues critical for mobile commerce. Our earlier research has identified five major task factors that may influence user intention to use handheld devices for wireless applications. These factors are: perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived playfulness, perceived task complexity, and perceived security. We followed up with a questionnairebased empirical study to validate the relative impact of these proposed task factors on user intention to use handheld devices for mobile commerce. This paper confirms significant correlations between the task factors and user intention. However, only three of the five factors -- perceived usefulness, perceived security, and perceived playfulness -- are important to user intention, explaining 30% of the variations in a multiple regression model. This study makes a unique contribution to HCI and MIS research by providing empirical evidence of user perception of task characteristics for mobile commerce

An Evaluation Of Integrated Zooming and Scrolling On Small-Screens

Speed-dependent automatic zooming (SDAZ) has been proposed for standard desktop displays as a means of overcoming problems associated with the navigation of large information spaces. SDAZ combines zooming and panning facilities into a single operation, with the magnitude of both factors dependent on simple user interaction. Previous research indicated dramatic user performance improvements when using the technique for document and map tasks. In this paper we propose algorithmic extensions to the technique for application on small-screen devices and present a comparative experimental evaluation of user performance with the system and a normative scroll-zoom-pan interface. Users responded positively to the system, particularly in relation to reduced physical navigational workload. However, the reduced screen space reduced the impact of SDAZ in comparison to that reported in previous studies. In fact, for one-dimensional navigation (vertical document navigation) the normative interface out-performed SDAZ. For navigation in two dimensions (map browsing) SDAZ supports more accurate target location, but also produces longer task completion times. Some SDAZ users became lost within the information space and were unable to recover navigational context. We discuss the reasons for these observations and suggest ways in which limitations of SDAZ in the small-screen context may be overcome

Developing mobile applications as a complement to interactive public screens

Large screens, interactive or not, are becoming a common sight at shopping centers and other public places. These screens are used to advertise or share information interactively. Combined with the omnipresence of smartphones this gives rise for a unique opportunity to join these two interfaces and to combine their strengths and complement their weaknesses. Smartphones are very mobile thanks to their small size and can access information virtually from anywhere, but suffer from overflow of information. Users have too many applications and web sites to search relevant information to find what they want or need in a timely fashion. On the other hand, public screens are too large to provide information everywhere or in a personalized way, but they do often have the information you need, when and where you need it. Thus large screens provide an ideal place for users to select content onto their smartphones. Large screens also have the advantage of screen size and research has indicated that using a second screen with small handheld devices can improve the user experience. This thesis undertook design and development of a prototype Android application for existing large interactive public screen. The initial goal was to study the different aspects of personal mobile devices coupled with large public screens. This large screen interface is also under development as a ubiquitous system and the mobile application was designed to be part of this system. Thus the design of the mobile application needed to be consistent with the public screen. During the development of this application it was observed that the small mobile screen could not support the content or interactions designed for a much larger screen because of its small size. As a result this thesis focuses on developing a prototype that further research could draw upon. This lead to a study of small screen graph data visualization and previous research on mobile applications working together with large public screens. This thesis presents a novel approach for displaying graph data designed for large screens on a small mobile screen. This work also discusses many challenges and questions related to large screen interaction with mobile device that rose during the development of the prototype. An evaluation was conducted to gather both quantitative and qualitative data on the interface design and the consistency with the large screen interface to further analyze the resulting prototype. The most important findings in this work are the problems encountered and questions raised during the development of the mobile application prototype. This thesis provides several suggestions for future research using the application, the ubiquitous system and the large screen interface. The study of related work and prototype development also lead to suggestion of design guidelines for this type of applications. The evaluation data also suggests that the final mobile application design is both consistent with and performs better than a faithful implementation of the visuals and interaction model of the original large screen interface

Físchlár on a PDA: handheld user interface design to a video indexing, browsing and playback system

The Físchlár digital video system is a web-based system for recording, analysis, browsing and playback of TV programmes which currently has about 350 users. Although the user interface to the system is designed for desktop PCs with a large screen and a mouse, we are developing versions to allow the use of mobile devices to access the system to record and browse the video content. In this paper, the design of a PDA user interface to video content browsing is considered. We use a design framework we have developed previously to be able to specify various video browsing interface styles thus making it possible to design for all potential users and their various environments. We can then apply this to the particulars of the PDA's small, touch-sensitive screen and the mobile environment where it will be used. The resultant video browsing interfaces have highly interactive interfaces yet are simple, which requires relatively less visual attention and focusing, and can be comfortably used in a mobile situation to browse the available video contents. To date we have developed and tested such interfaces on a Revo PDA, and are in the process of developing others

Interaction With Tilting Gestures In Ubiquitous Environments

In this paper, we introduce a tilting interface that controls direction based applications in ubiquitous environments. A tilt interface is useful for situations that require remote and quick interactions or that are executed in public spaces. We explored the proposed tilting interface with different application types and classified the tilting interaction techniques. Augmenting objects with sensors can potentially address the problem of the lack of intuitive and natural input devices in ubiquitous environments. We have conducted an experiment to test the usability of the proposed tilting interface to compare it with conventional input devices and hand gestures. The experiment results showed greater improvement of the tilt gestures in comparison with hand gestures in terms of speed, accuracy, and user satisfaction.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figure

SWiM: A Simple Window Mover

As computers become more ubiquitous, traditional two-dimensional interfaces must be replaced with interfaces based on a three-dimensional metaphor. However, these interfaces must still be as simple and functional as their two-dimensional predecessors. This paper introduces SWiM, a new interface for moving application windows between various screens, such as wall displays, laptop monitors, and desktop displays, in a three-dimensional physical environment. SWiM was designed based on the results of initial "paper and pencil" user tests of three possible interfaces. The results of these tests led to a map-like interface where users select the destination display for their application from various icons. If the destination is a mobile display it is not displayed on the map. Instead users can select the screen's name from a list of all possible destination displays. User testing of SWiM was conducted to discover whether it is easy to learn and use. Users that were asked to use SWiM without any instructions found the interface as intuitive to use as users who were given a demonstration. The results show that SWiM combines simplicity and functionality to create an interface that is easy to learn and easy to use.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure

Mobile access to personal digital photograph archives

Handheld computing devices are becoming highly connected devices with high capacity storage. This has resulted in their being able to support storage of, and access to, personal photo archives. However the only means for mobile device users to browse such archives is typically a simple one-by-one scroll through image thumbnails in the order that they were taken, or by manually organising them based on folders. In this paper we describe a system for context-based browsing of personal digital photo archives. Photos are labeled with the GPS location and time they are taken and this is used to derive other context-based metadata such as weather conditions and daylight conditions. We present our prototype system for mobile digital photo retrieval, and an experimental evaluation illustrating the utility of location information for effective personal photo retrieval