Linda Di Geronimo

Surveying personal device ecosystems with cross-device applications in mind

To inform the design of cross-device applications, it is important to know what devices users typically have within reach in various settings in the home, in the workplace and on the move. We report on a survey carried out using an online questionnaire and discuss the most significant findings that should be taken into account in cross-device scenarios. The results are based on 293 participants covering a wide range of ages, nationalities, professions and living arrangements.

The Forgotten Many? A Survey of Modern Web Development Practices

With an estimated 21.9% of the top 10 million web sites running on WordPress, a significant proportion of the web development community consists of WordPress developers. We report on a survey that was carried out to gain a better understanding of the profile of these developers and their web development practices. The first two parts of the survey on the background and development practices were not exclusive to WordPress developers and therefore provide insight into general web developer profiles and methods, while the third part focussed on WordPress specifics such as theme development. We present the results of the survey along with a discussion of implications for web engineering research.

Tilt-and-Tap: Framework to Support Motion-Based Web Interaction Techniques

Mobile devices in everyday use such as smartphones and tablets contain sensors capable of detecting the motion of the device in terms of the angle and speed of rotation. While these have been exploited in a range of mobile apps, little attention has been paid to how these could be used to support interaction on the web. To enable researchers and developers to explore new forms of interaction based on motion sensors, we introduce a framework that supports the rapid development of web applications featuring motion-based interaction. Our Tilt-and-Tap framework focuses on the combination of tilting and tapping as a means of interaction since this allows users to easily interact without changing their hand position. We present the features of the framework as well as details of its implementation, and then demonstrate its flexibility and ease of use through some examples. We also discuss issues of performance and portability.

CTAT: Tilt-and-Tap Across Devices

Motion gestures have been proposed as an interaction para-digm for pairing, and sharing data between, mobile devices. They have also been used for interaction with large screens such as semi-public displays where a mobile phone can be used as a form of remote control in an eyes-free manner. Yet, so far, little attention has been paid to their potential use in cross-device web applications. We therefore decided to develop a framework that would support investigations into the use of a combination of touch and tilt interactions in cross-device scenarios. We first report on a study that motivated the development of the framework and informed its design. We then present the resulting Cross-Tilt-and-Tap (CTAT) framework for the rapid development of applications that make use of various motion gestures for communication between two or more devices. We conclude by describing an applications developed using CTAT.

X-Themes: Supporting Design-by-Example

Design-by-example enables users with little technical knowledge to develop web sites by reusing all or parts of existing sites. In CMS such as WordPress, themes essentially offer example designs for all-or-nothing reuse. We propose an extension to the theme concept that allows web sites to be designed by reusing and combining components of different themes. In contrast to previous research advocating design-by-example, we do not restrict ourselves to static web pages, but also support the reuse of dynamic content including functionality for animations and database access. Our approach is to provide a theme generator that structures the themes that it generates in terms of reusable components which can then be reused in future themes. We present a first prototype tool, called the X-Themes Editor, developed to demonstrate the viability of the approach and investigate requirements and issues. We describe how the X-Themes Editor has been integrated into the WordPress platform as well as discussing the outcomes of these initial investigations.

MyoShare: sharing data among devices via mid-air gestures

With the growth of mobile devices, the necessity for a more ubiquitous network among the smartphones, tablets and computers of users increases. Sending and receiving content among personal devices should be an intuitive rather than a distracting task to be performed. With MyoShare, we propose a system that exploits the use of mid-air gestures, captured via the Myo wearable armband, to share web data among devices without requiring the user to open additional windows or copy-paste content into emails or chat applications. Users can select content from any web page and send it to another device by simply waving their hands. During the demo session, participants of the conference will be able to try out and see our system in action.

Exploiting mid-air gestures to share data among devices

The number of smart devices that people own or share with family and friends has increased dramatically. As a result, users often want to copy data among devices such as smart-phones, tablets and desktop computers. While various chat and cloud services support the sharing of data, they require users to interrupt their workflow to copy resources. We present MyoShare, a system that allows content to be shared among devices using mid-air gestures that can be used at any time, independent of the current task and location of devices. We report on an elicitation study where participants designed a set of gestures for sharing content. In a second user study, we compared mid-air gestures with alternative interaction modes using keyboard or touch Shortcuts, Speech, and Menu Selection. We discuss the results of the study in terms of both the strengths and weaknesses of mid-air gestures, along with suggestions for future work.

XD-Bike: A Cross-Device Repository of Mountain Biking Routes

Despite the high level of interest in cross-device interaction, only few fully functional example applications exist. With XD-Bike, we built one of our own to not only showcase the use of our cross-device framework but also gather insights into the development process. XD-Bike is an application for mountain bikers that is built with web technologies and adapts to the set of devices at hand. The user interface is distributed across all available devices taking into account the space requirements of the UI elements, their importance, and the available space on devices. While using the cross-device framework eased the development process, we found the testing and debugging challenging due to the distributed nature of the application and the large set of possible device combinations.

Supporting out of office software development using personal devices

Software developers typically use multiple large screens in their office setup. However, they often work away from the office where such a setup is not available, instead only working with a laptop computer and drastically reduced screen real estate. We explore how developers can be better supported in ad-hoc scenarios, for example when they work in a cafe, an airport, or at a clients site. We present insights into current work practices and challenges when working away from the usual office desk sourced from a survey of professional software developers. Based on these insights, we introduce an IDE that makes use of additional personal devices, such as a phone or a tablet. Parts of the IDE can be offloaded to these mobile devices, for example the application that is being developed, a debugging console or navigational elements. A qualitative evaluation with professional software developers showed that they appreciate the increased screen real estate.

End-user web development tool for tilting interactions

Tilting gestures allow end-users to use motion gestures to interact with their mobile devices. While there exist solutions for integrating motion gestures into web applications, they require programming skills to set up the gesture configuration. To allow end-users to easily introduce tilting interactions into their websites, we developed WP-TAT, a WordPress plugin that allows tilt-and-touch gestures to be easily integrated into WordPress websites without any programming. We present WP-TAT and show its potential by describing various demonstrator applications and reporting on a preliminary user study. Moreover, we also discuss how web applications could be adapted to cater for motion gestures.