Tuomas Vaittinen

I don't mind being logged, but want to remain in control: a field study of mobile activity and context logging

People have a natural tendency to capture and share their experiences via stories, photos and other mementos. As users are increasingly carrying the enabling devices with them, capturing life events is becoming more spontaneous. The automatic and persistent collecting of information about ones life and behavior is called lifelogging. Lifelogging relieves the user from manually capturing events but also poses many challenges from the users perspective. We conducted a field study to explore the user experience of mobile phone activity and context logging, a technically feasible form of lifelogging. Our results indicate that users quickly stop to pay attention to the logging, but they want to be in control of logging the most private information. Although logging personal content, such as text messages, is experienced as a possible privacy threat, browsing the content and getting insight to the revealed life patterns was considered interesting and fun.

A diary study on annotating locations with mixed reality information

With advanced sensor technologies and tools for content creation, current mobile devices possess features for providing information services based on users location. There are several services for geographically pinned user-generated content focusing on providing information to users in unfamiliar locations. However, information needs regarding location-based content services in the familiar everyday context have so far been quite little researched. Our research entailed a 12-day user study where nine participants kept a diary, in which they reported needs for annotations of locations they had come across in various day-to-day situations. Based on our results, we present design implications for annotation services, taking into account the user needs in various daily situations. The results show that the services should support flexible controls of the visibility of annotations, notifications about selected annotations within the vicinity, and easy remote annotations. In addition, the system should support collective and living annotations that can be contributed by several users.

Kuukkeli: design and evaluation of location-based service with touch UI for hikers

This paper presents the design and prototype implementation of a location-based service aimed for hikers. Maps and navigation in urban areas are already well-researched topics but it can be argued that greater demands are placed on location-based services in non-urban areas -- a field which has not been researched in detail yet. Studying these demands more closely provided us valuable information about location-based services in general as well. The feature set of the prototype was chosen to help users in their typical outdoor needs, such as map handling, basic navigation, and communication. In the design, we took advantage of the capabilities of touch screens, such as direct interaction by finger pointing. To validate our design in actual use context and to get feedback for improving the design, a user trial with 16 hikers was arranged. As a result, we deepened our understanding of the features hikers expect from location-based services and found requirements for devices used to implement them. In addition, we identified several areas of improvement in the user interface of the prototype, which can also be applied to other similar systems.

Design issues related to pie menus for 5-way joysticks

Although linear textual menus are a widely adopted solution in the mobile phone user interfaces, alternatives that would take smaller amount of screen real estate exist, e.g. toolbars and pie menus. Pie menus also provide access to functions with fewer key presses than traditional Options menu but are best suited for expert users. We compared toolbars and pie menus as a way to access most often used functions of a mobile media player. Based on user test results, we selected pie menus for implementation into a prototype and made another user test to see what kind of design considerations are related to pie menus for digital joysticks. The user feedback was positive and six design issues were identified.

Towards an optimal information architecture model for mobile multimedia devices

In this paper we propose an optimal information architecture model for mobile multimedia devices. In our study we first reviewed the information architecture models of four currently popular mobile multimedia devices, Apple iPod Video, Nokia N80, Sony Ericsson W800i and Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP). Then we used Open card sorting method to find out what kind of mental models does people have for optimal information architecture model. Finally we compared these two study results together and created a design proposal.

Experience explorer: context-based browsing of personal media

We designed and built a system for browsing digital content and activity data created and gathered with mobile phones. We evaluated the system with 13 users to study the value of the context-based visualizations in real life. In addition to supporting reminiscing, content aggregated on the map revealed life patterns supporting reflection. Aggregation of items from several people also revealed common interests among friends.

Unified media UI structure and design for mobile devices

In this paper we describe our research on unified media experience for the end-users. The research focused on unified mobile media player supporting different media types with one unified UI structure and design for all media types. The created UI structure and design was based on our earlier study of finding an optimal information architecture model for mobile multimedia devices. Unified mobile media player demo was then implemented and validated in Finland and Hong Kong, and after analyzing the validation findings the UI structure and design were updated. Our research findings show that there are similarities between different media types, and it is possible to create unified UI structure and design, but also some media type specific restrictions exists.

Investigating tangential access for location-based digital cultural heritage applications

Abstract As location-based digital cultural heritage applications are beginning to be applied outside ‘traditional’ cultural heritage sites, there is an increased need to consider their use amongst people who may be interested in the cultural heritage of a site, but have that interest as a tangential, opportunistic, aspect of their visit. We outline why this is important, and present issues in evaluating it. We then introduce Explore: a mobile, location-based, digital cultural heritage application for the Finnish recreational island of Seurasaari. By considering how the common visitor trajectory of a museum visit can be mapped onto a visit to the island, we were able to evaluate Explore with participants who were not primarily there to access cultural heritage. Evaluation with 45 participants over 5 days identified how the low immersion techniques used allowed participants to fit accessing cultural heritage around their visit, how participants managed group tension between those more and those less interested in Explore, as well as issues around considering the use of cultural heritage applications as a tangential purpose of a visit.