How do users find out what's new: a study of change indicators in mobile services

  • Authors:
  • Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila;Minna Wäljas

  • Affiliations:
  • Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu, Tampere, Finland;Tampere University of Technology, Korkeakoulunkatu, Tampere, Finland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future Media Environments
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

An increasing number of people use a large variety of Web-based services on their mobile devices. Many of these services contain dynamically changing items such as media content produced by various social networks; news, schedule and route information from service providers; and updated versions of the service functionality. As the number of the used services grows, user's effort needed for being up-to-date in terms of the changing content gets higher. Paying attention to new content may be burdensome especially in the mobile context, on mobile devices. We conducted a qualitative user study to explore how users currently find out what's new in the services via the mobile user interfaces. Ten users were interviewed and asked to show how they notice changes in the mobile services they use. We present the found change indicators and propose design implications for mobile service user interfaces.