Designing technology for older people has traditionally focused on compensating for the decline in abilities that occurs with ageing. The research described in this paper followed a more holistic approach, focusing on the broader user experience of technology in the home environment. Specifically, this research was concerned with the very first interactions with a new product known as the Out-of-Box Experience (OoBE): how older people acquire their technology, how they unpack it, and how they set it up. This paper describes two exploratory studies that used a design ethnography approach to build a rich picture of the OoBE of new technology for older adults. The findings indicate that older people experience varying benefits from the involvement of other people during the OoBE of new technology. Lastly, the paper discusses the value of social interaction in this context and offer recommendations on the design of the OoBE of technology to engage older adults.

The authors present a system that adapts application shortcuts (apps) on the homescreen of an Android smartphone, and investigate the effect of UI displacements that are caused by the choice of adaptive model and the order of apps in the homescreen layout. They define UI displacements to be the distance that items move between adaptations, and they use this as a measure of stability. An experiment with 12 participants is performed to evaluate the impact of UI displacements on the homescreen. To make the distribution of apps in the experiment task less contrived, naturally generated data from a pilot study is used. The authors’ results show that selection time is correlated to the magnitude of the previous UI displacement. Additionally, selection time and subjective rating improve significantly when the model is easy to understand and an alphabetical order is used, conditions that increase stability. However, rank order is preferred when the model updates frequently and is less easy to understand. The authors present their approach to adapting apps on the homescreen, and initial insights into UI displacements.

Timebanking refers to community-based volunteering in which participants provide and receive services in exchange for time credits. Although timebanking takes advantage of web technologies, the lack of flexibility in managing web-based timebanking transactions and the difficulty of attracting younger adults whose contributions would be highly valuable to the community still remain as major challenges. The authors' design research attempts to address these issues by leveraging the unique affordances of smartphones and their attractiveness to young adults. In this paper, the authors introduce a timebanking smartphone application and present a 5-week user study with 32 young adults. The results highlight the potential of timebanking for young population with an application that facilitates access to communications and transaction-management activities, and strengthens social connection and the sense of community attachment. The authors in particular present new affordances of smartphone technology on timebanking, including (1) transaction time reduction, (2) location and time-sensitive timebanking activity support, and (3) real-time coordination. The authors discuss design challenges and opportunities of smartphone-based timebanking.

Development and deployment of location-based systems is a key consideration in the design of new mobile technologies. Critical to the design process is to understand and manage the expectations of stakeholders (including funders, research partners and end users) for these systems. In particular, the way in which expectations impact upon technology development choices between small-scale, ‘high tech' innovations or larger scalable solutions. This paper describes the differences in a revolutionary design process (for ‘high tech' prototypes or catwalk technologies) versus an evolutionary design process (for scalable or prêt-a-porter systems), as exemplified in two location-based mobile interaction case studies. One case study exemplifies a revolutionary design process and resultant system, and the other an evolutionary design process and system. The use of these case studies is a clear natural progression from the paper that first described the concept of ‘catwalk technologies' (Adams et al, 2013), which itself drew upon research that used mobile devices for outdoor 'in the wild' locations. This paper presents a set list of fifteen heuristic guidelines based upon an analysis of these case studies. These heuristics present characteristics and key differences between the two types of design process. This paper provides a key reference point for researchers, developers and the academic community as a whole, when defining a project rationale for designing and developing technical systems. In addition, we refer to the role of the researcher/research team in terms of guiding and managing stakeholder and research team expectations and how this relates to the planning and deployment of catwalk or prêt-à-porter technologies. Lastly, we state how this research has vital implications for planning and enacting interventions and sequences of interactions with stakeholders and, crucially, in the planning of future research projects.

With the ubiquity of interactive computer-based systems, designers are challenged to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of their designs for a variety of different environments and user activities. To achieve this, designers need to have a comprehensive understanding of the relevant contexts and of the people for whom they are designing systems. Therefore, in helping students learn how to become proficient and innovative designers and developers, it is crucial to get them out of the classroom and into the environments in which their designs will be used. In this paper we describe an app designed to provide location-based hints and formative feedback to students to aid their understanding of the context. The results show an improvement in scores and quality of assessed work completed with the support of the app and a positive response from students regarding its usability and pedagogic utility. The paper also considers the challenges of conducting an ecologically valid study of such interventions in a higher education setting.

Humans are approaching a new and intriguing time with regards to Mobile Human Computer Interaction. For years we have observed the processing power, memory capabilities and battery life of the mobile device increase exponentially. While at the same time mobile devices were converging with additional technologies such as increased connectivity, external peripherals, GPS and location based services etc. But what are the cognitive costs associated with these advancements? The software used on mobile devices is also becoming more sophisticated, demanding more from our limited mental resources. Furthermore, this complex software is being used in distracting environments such as in cars, busses, trains and noisy communal areas. These environments, themselves, have steadily become increasingly more complex and cognitively demanding. Increasingly complex software, installed on increasingly complex mobile devices, being used in increasing complex environments is presenting Mobile HCI with serious challenges. This paper presents a brief overview of five experiments before presenting a final experiment in detail. These experiments attempt to understand the relationship between cognition, distraction, usability and performance. The research determines that some distractions affect usability and not performance while others affect performance but not usability. This paper concludes with a reinforced argument for the development of a cognitive load aware system.

Context plays a central role in mobile applications but is very difficult to control, and therefore, the evaluation of context-aware applications can be challenging. Traditionally, researchers had to choose either field-based or lab-based studies but recently, virtual environments have been proposed as a middle-ground between those two methods. In this paper, the authors review previous work on using virtual environments to evaluate mobile applications. the authors identify and classify different approaches to simulate specific aspects of the real world, and analyse their relative properties with respect to evaluating different facets of context-aware mobile applications. Based on this analysis, the authors derive criteria and selection strategies that can help researchers in picking specific evaluation approaches. The authors also point out a number of research challenges in this area as well as a number of promising areas for future research.

Today’s smartphones provide the technical means to serve as interfaces for public displays in various ways. Even though recent research has identified several new approaches for mobile-display interaction, inter-technique comparisons of respective methods are scarce. The authors conducted an experimental user study on four currently relevant mobile-display interaction techniques (‘Touchpad’, ‘Pointer’, ‘Mini Video’, and ‘Smart Lens’) and learned that their suitability strongly depends on the task and use case at hand. The study results indicate that mobile-display interactions based on a traditional touchpad metaphor are time-consuming but highly accurate in standard target acquisition tasks. The direct interaction techniques Mini Video and Smart Lens had comparably good completion times, and especially Mini Video appeared to be best suited for complex visual manipulation tasks like drawing. Smartphone-based pointing turned out to be generally inferior to the other alternatives. Examples for the application of these differentiated results to real-world use cases are provided.

For the last decade, mobile phones have been the fastest growing segment of the technology market increasing the importance of interface design for this type of device. Yet, many of the assumptions about user interactions that the authors know from “traditional” computer usage do not hold true for mobile devices and more specifically for touch-screen phones. A key question is, if usability heuristics tailored to this type of device exist. To answer this question, they conducted a systematic literature review. The authors analyzed the encountered sets of heuristics by mapping them to Nielsen’s ten heuristics and identified additional ones specifically proposed for this kind of device. Their review indicates that research findings with respect to usability heuristics for mobile phones are still extreme sparse. Most of these heuristics are strongly based on “traditional” ones, not considering comprehensively mobile phone characteristics concerning physical limitations, technology, usage goals, features as well as user characteristics and usage environment. Nevertheless, this article provides a general overview on the state of the art of usability heuristics for mobile phones. This can guide the design and evaluation interfaces for mobile phones as well as provide a starting point for the evolution of such heuristics taking into consideration more extensively the specific features of mobile phones.