Enhancing the User Experience for a Mobile Signup

Abstract: The last couple of years email has stretched beyond the desktop computer and into the mobile devices. Visiarc, a company in Linkoping, developed an application called Mobile Documents to cater for this new market. With the use of Cloud Computing techniques, the application lets the user access large attachments sent to them to view them in the device without having to download any file to the device itself. The main focus of this thesis is the signup for Mobile Documents on the Android platform, utilizing methods and techniques from the field Human-Computer Interaction to develop a new design for the signup process with high regard to the common user, and integrate it into the existing architecture of the service. The thesis covers theoretical aspects that were taken into account regarding usability guidelines and heuristics when developing for the end consumer software market. The developed signup covered in this thesis was integrated into the new release of Mobile Documents for Android in February 2011. In addition to featuring the work at Visiarc the thesis contains two chapters discussing particular aspects of mobile technology, \Utilization of Cloud Computing in Mobile Applications" and \Designing for Small Screens". The former discusses the recent development of Cloud Computing and how that can be applied to also include mobile applications. The latter presents guidelines when developing the GUI for small screen devices.