MakeIt: Integrate User Interaction Times in the Design Process of Mobile Applications

  • Authors:
  • Paul Holleis;Albrecht Schmidt

  • Affiliations:
  • Pervasive Computing and User Interface Engineering, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany;Pervasive Computing and User Interface Engineering, University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Pervasive '08 Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Besides key presses and text input, modern mobile devices support advanced interactions like taking pictures, gesturing, reading NFC-tags, as well as supporting physiological and environmental sensors. Implementing applications that benefit of this variety of interactions is still difficult. Support for developers and interaction designers remains basic and tools and frameworks are rare. This paper presents a prototyping environment that allows quickly and easily creating fully functional, high-fidelity prototypes deployable on the actual devices. With this work, we target the gap between paper prototyping and integrated development environments. Additionally, new interaction techniques can be significantly faster or slower to use than conventional mobile user interfaces. Hence it is essential to assess the impact of interface design decisions on interaction time. Additionally, the presented tool supports implicit and explicit user performance evaluations during all phases of prototyping. This approach builds on the original as well as extensions of the Keystroke-Level Model (KLM) which allows estimating interaction times in early phases of the development with a simulated prototype. An underlying state graph structure enables automatic checks of the application logic. This tool helps user interface designers and developers to create efficient and consistent novel applications.