iStuff Mobile: Rapidly Prototyping New Mobile Phone Interfaces for

Ubiquitous ComputingRafael Ballagas, Faraz Memon, Ren´e Reiners, Jan Borchers

Media Computing GroupRWTH Aachen University

Aachen, Germany

Hank WeiCHI 2007 Proceedings • Mobile Kits & Stuff

Paper Outline• INTRODUCTION• RELATED WORK• ISTUFF MOBILE ARCHITECTURE• RECREATING SEMINAL MOBILE PHONEW

INTERACTIONS• UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING PROTOTYPING

SCENARIOS• EVALATION• RESULTS• CONCLUSIONS

INTRODUCTION

• Mobile phones are not built to suit research needs, and the hardware is difficult to extenddifficult to extend because of its commercial packaging.

• iStuff Mobile focuses on building low-cost functional prototypes.

• By decreasing the amount of time, money, and effort to produce functional prototypes, the framework encourages more iterations in the encourages more iterations in the design processdesign process, which has been shown to increase the quality of user interfaces.

RELATED WORK• How to Evaluate Toolkits– Myers et al. : threshold, ceiling– Papier-Mâché : efficiency (e.g., development time, or lines of code)

• Physical Hardware Toolkits– Phidgets, Telo, Calder, VoodooIO, Smart-It

• Software prototyping environments– Base iStuff, d.tools– New Apple’s Quartz Composer (Visual Programmimg)

• Mobile phone interface protoypes– reusable prototyping framework for research and design

scenarios like these.• Mobile phone toolkits– functional physical sensor-based interactions with existing

mobile phones

ISTUFF MOBILE ARCHITECTURE

• Mobile Phone application support– foreground application– background application

• Sensor network support– Smart-Its

• Rapid Prototyping through Visual Programming– Quartz Composer

ISTUFF MOBILE ARCHITECTURE

RECREATING SEMINAL MOBILE PHONEW INTERACTIONS

• Working with iStuff Mobile

UBIQUITOUS COMPUTING PROTOTYPING SCENARIOS

• The mobile phone as a ubiquitous input device– Sweep for Large Public Displays [Rafael et al.]

• Using ubiquitous resources as an interface to the phone - interactive workspaces, PointRight

EVALATION

• The test consisted of 16 participants (10 male, 6 female) from a computer science course.

• On average, the students were in their 4th year of university studies.

• All students had completed lectures on Human Computer Interaction and were familiar with the fundamentals of interaction design, prototyping, and iterative design.

EVALATION (cont.)• Multi-screen presentation– two remote machines were running PowerPoint

• Tilt-to-scroll– scrolling through lists of data by tilting the phone

• Handheld music player– song selection and volume control functionality

• Remote steering– similar to mouse

• The 16 participants were split up into 2 shifts of 8 and further split into 4 teams of 2 participants.

RESULTS

• Average time was 19.6 minutes - Quartz Composer GUI, and 27.6 minutes - Patch Panel script.

• Test in the time 81% - Quartz Composer, compared to only 31% - Patch Panel script

CONCLUSIONS

• The iStuff Mobile framework is the first to simplify the exploration of new mobile phone interactions in ubiquitous computing environments.

• Our evaluation shows that the visual programming environment allows prototypes to be built faster and encourages more design iterations to be performed.