An Experimental Design in the Picture Browsing Patterns towards an Interactive Mobile User Interface in a Partially Attentive Environment

Abstract: In the days that personal equipment like PDAs and mobile phones being spread and used widely in people’s everyday life, communications between equipments and human beings have become an important issue that attracts people’s attentions. A lot of research has been done to help either equipment or human beings to better understand each other. Methodologies like user-centered design have been introduced to the interaction design process. Furthermore, as the increasing interests are arising in the field of context-aware technologies, research regarding how equipments that in a partially attentive user environment should help people with their everyday tasks smartly and timely has become important. Most findings have focused on what can be applied to a system to obtain information from the environment and how to establish a context of the current status of the environment and make it useful for the user. But seldom work has been done to discover how the user recognizes, interprets and understands the result from the application, in other words, how does an application provide the user with useful, friendly and efficient information is still lacking in this field. This paper aims to discover the best picture browsing patterns that should be used in the interactive mobile user interface design based on a partially attentive user environment. To concrete the goal, the picture browsing patterns were narrowed down to the combinations of picture display patterns and user manipulating patterns. During this work, the author had studied mobile interface design in theory, and read other scholars’ findings in the field of interface framework, content, size, commercial issue, etc. Based on that, and associated with the conclusions from the user interview and the brainstorming session, the author came up with some assumptions which guided him to design series of experiments to validate the theoretical findings. With the help from friendly users, two rounds of experiments were carried out and helped the author to approach the goals of this thesis, which were finding out the best combination of picture display pattern and user manipulating pattern, and discovering some guideline or trend that would inspire other designers when designing for an interactive mobile user interface in a partially attentive user environment.