Designing and Evaluating Mobile Interaction: Challenges and Trends Authors: Marco de Sa and Luis Carrico

Significance Review the current approaches and recent advances in the design, evaluation of mobile interaction and mobile user interfaces. Address the challenges, the most significant results and the upcoming research directions.

Outline Understanding the Real World Prototyping the concepts Evaluating the Results The Future of Mobile Design and Evaluation

Understanding the Real World The Mobile Dynamics – Ubiquity and portability.

Understanding the Real World

Prototyping the concepts Low-fidelity Prototypes High-fidelity Prototypes

Evaluating the Results Commonly Used Methods – User testing. – Think-aloud evaluations. – User observation. – Scenario-based reviews. – Questionnaire-based evaluation.

Evaluating the Results The Challenge of Mobile Evaluation – Users behavior and their perception, efficiency, and use of the mobile applications are influenced by the number of contexts and the constant changing from one to another. – The main challenge with mobile evaluation is the ability to obtain data and find issues within real scenarios and especially while changing between contexts, considering the mobility factor.

Evaluating the Results Active Data Gathering – The main advantage for these approaches is that given that users can capture information by themselves, designers can minimize the effect of observers on their studies and participants. – For example, Experience Sampling Method (ESM). Users were equipped with PDAs that prompted questionnaires at specific times.

Evaluating the Results Passive Data Gathering – Passive data gathering approaches require no intervention from the user/participant. – For example, the users are requested to interact with the mobile device using different colored pens for different tasks. Researchers can review the sketches and prototypes and detect the number of taps and locations of these taps for each task and activity.

The Future of Mobile Design and Evaluation Cooperation and group activities also assume a greater role as target services for mobile devices. Creating personalized application. The use of sensors. The evaluation of mobile software and UIs.