INF5261 ­ DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILE

INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND SERVICES

HAPPY TOURING Tran Hoang Duy Tan, Carola Walter, Ogla Skachkova

Table of Content

1. Introduction...…………………………………………………………………...…2

2. Literature reviews and key features……………………………….……………2

2.1. CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile Information

Systems…………………………………………………… …….……..……….2

2.2. On the Move with a Magic Thing: Role Playing in Concept Design of

Mobile Services and Devices...................................................................3

2.3. Using While Moving: HCI Issues in Fieldwork Enviroment………….. 5

2.4. Aspects of Personal Navigation with Collaborative User Feedback…5

2.5. The Impact of a Mobile Information System on Changing Travel

Behaviour and Improving Travel Experience………………..…………6

3. Related work……………………………………………………………………....7

3.1. Oslo ­ Official City App…………………………………………………...7

4. Methodology and tools…………………………………………………………...7

5. Our Work………………………………………………………………………….. 7

5.1. Data Gathering and Evaluation……………………………………….…7

5.2. Characteristics of user……………………………………………….….. 9

5.3. Mockups…………………………………………………………….…….. 9

6. Futher Work………………………………………………………………………. 10

7. References………………………………………………………………….……..12

8. Appendix: Mindmap after interview an user…………………………………... 13

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1 Introduction Nowadays, more and more people using mobile phones with Internet connection

anytime, anywhere. They expect their mobile phone will support them in almost

every activities of their everyday life. Therefore, these powerful tools play an

important role in their life. Currently, there are many apps and services have been

providing for end users to solve their everyday life problems. One of our interest is

design an mobile information system that assit tourists to choose places to go,

activities, events in which they want to take part, sharing information with their

friends (take photos and comment), and the app must have an ability to generate a

plan (where and when to go) for user in one day when they visit somewhere else.

To achieve these functions, we conducted a survey to obtain more information about

the user’s needs, and we also interviewed an user and invited her to take part in our

design process in order to develop a good prototype for the system.

Our research question is how people planning aktivities when they visit other

countries and cities. Is it possible te help people with an application by the planning

process for a tour?

2. Literature reviews and key features

2.1 CityFlocks: Designing Social Navigation for Urban Mobile

Information Systems

In this article, they developed a system called CityFlocks which helps people to find

information (places) of a city they visit by contact locals (direct social navigation

approach) or recommendation from the system (indirect social navigation approach).

The main purposes of the article is to evaluate the social navigation approach (direct

and indirect), and features of user interaction of mobile information systems which

employed from social navigation approach.

In order to reach their goals, prototype for CityFlocks was designed in an iterative

manner by following the contextual injury approach. Four focus group sessions were

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conducted to get requirments, features of which the CityFlocks should have.

CityFlocks employs folksonomy principle to build the search function, a web

application that utilised Google Maps was developed for locals publishing information

about places. After that, a group of six participants was chosen to test the system.

As a result, the indirect approach was more prefered than the direct because people

hesitate to contact with stangers despite their willingness to help. However, the

number of participants in the user testing were not enough to evaluate the system

and the aspects of social navigation approach. To be more concise, the user tests

should be conducted in more enviroments (only one enviroment was chosen for

testing), and the number and variety of participants should be more than six.

CityFlocks not only gives us the understanding of social navigation approach, but

also contributes to design guidelines for mobile information system. The authors

explained many factors of social navigation, and the design of the CityFlocks

(features, architecture), they explained and compared many sources for people to

obtain information (traditional and digital). These will help us in understanding the

features and design of mobile information system. The key features that we learn

from the article to apply for our project are the folksonomy principle for developing

search function and the architecture of the system, we also consider supporting

indirect social navigation for people to find places that best suit their needs.

2.2 On the Move with a Magic Thing: Role Playing in Concept Design of Mobile Services and Devices One of the most challenges for developing new devices and services is the

understanding of new products is not clear. The article addressed the challange by

focusing in Paticipatory Design (PD), two techniques called role­playing game with

toys and SPES (Situated Paticipatory and Enactment Scenarios) were developed to

investigate use scenarios and product concepts. The two techniques also were

useful in addressing three issues of the design (open­ended design, designing for

mobility and designing beyond workplace) they faced when developing their project

(GO).

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Role­playing game was developed to figure out services and devices in use

scenarios extracted from the game. The ideas, game rules, organization of the

game, the conduction were descbribe in details. However, specific scenarios,

examples of the way the users playing the game were not mentioned clearly.The

results of the role­playing games are not the services and devices themself, but the

context of use the the services and devices. For the second technique, the

participant would be given a mock­up (simple tool) to envision what type of services

and product features should have by imagining functions of that the mock­up would

provide. The participant would be followed by the designer, he/she would take note

about the activities of the participant in his everyday life. Many ideas of the product

were extracted through user’s activities.

In the role­playing game, it requires to have a good understanding of what aspects,

features of the product to explore, so that the designer can design the rules,

organizations of the game and use scenarios. Many participants are also mandatory

for conducting the game, it also need an enviroment for playing the game. After

playing the game, the designers must analysis use scenarios carefully to extract the

ideas from the game. Despite the technique help us in investigating the context of

use of the services and devices, it is time­consuming and need to be prepared

carefully before conducting the game. The second approach seems to be simpler

that the first one, however it is also inconvenient, because of the shadowing of the

designer to the participant to track his/her activities. Instead, the participant is

encouraged to take notes or memorize the activities with the mock­up and presents

them to the designer is more comfortable.

From our point of view, the article provides us not only the techniques when

designing new product concepts, but also gives us the understanding in the design

issues and how the techniques that we can employ for addressing the issues.

However, currently we could not apply the first technique either the second in our

project because of the inconvenience described above. Therefore, we utilize the

second technique by interviewing user to get the ideas of the product (ask her to

memorize the functions of her smartphone she needed when traveling), and also

encourage her to take note functions and apps she want to have in her smartphone

when visiting some new places.

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2.3 Using While Moving: HCI Issues in Fieldwork Enviroments

One of the most problems in using mobile/handheld devices was that it was not be

inherented the mobility feature of these devices. In this case, these devices were

portable not mobility (using while moving). In order to address the problem, the

authors developed a prototype software tool for fieldworkers who had many mobility

features (dynamic user configuration, limited attention capacity, high­speed

interation, and context dependency), these features posed challenges on design

user interface for the prototype (Minimal Attention User Interfaces ­MAUI and context

awareness). The purpose of the article is to shed light on these features,

consequence the prototype could be applied widely on variety of applications that

employ these features.

According to the characteristics of users, many features of MAUI were developed to

adapt user’s activities in fieldwork enviroment. Despite the fact that the article was

published a long time ago, many features of MAUI (one­handed controls, eye­free

access, voice control, multiple taps) become the standard for design mobile

application nowaday. The context awareness feature also becomes popular in many

mobile applications (apps for direction... ) today.

In the article, many features of mobile users and prototype software were analyzed

and presented. These will help us in analyzing characteristics of our users, and

design user interface for Happy Touring.

2.4 Aspects of Personal Navigation with Collaborative User

Feedback (Holone, 2008)

The main idea of this article is to create a system that offers the best route in terms

of accessibility between points A and B on the basis of user feedback. This system

should take into account users’ abilities and needs. To test this concept the

researchers created a prototype in the form of an application for a mobile phone

called OurWay. The indoors experiment involved nine participants, one experiment

coordinator and two observers. According to the scenario participants had to play the

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roles of temporarily disabled people and move around in the building in a wheelchair

while they provide to the system their accessibility ratings of route segments. Since

no one of the participants had prior experience as wheelchair user they received the

necessary instructions before the experiment began. For data gathering in this case

the researchers used traditional methods: data logging, observations on­thego, and

semi­structured user debriefings. This study had interesting findings; in particular,

the researchers came to the conclusion that during the tasks execution users

concentrate on their own goals and do not think about the benefits their feedback

can bring to other users of the system.

“However, when retrospectively thinking about the system’s usefulness, they

soon take the view of the system as a collaborative tool, useful for “the

invisible others”

We think that this finding can open new rooms for research during our own project.

Also this study has given us an idea of the additional features we may include in the

next versions of our application during the further development. So what if the users

will be able to activate an option in their profile settings that allows them to evaluate

in the ranking of the visited places as far these places are accessible for wheelchair

users. We feel it can give us the opportunity to address the concepts of universal

design in our project. Some of methods the researchers used in this project can be

also relevant for us when we will evaluate our prototypes with users so it was useful

to learn about it now in the early stages of our project.

2.5 The Impact of a Mobile Information System on Changing

Travel Behaviour and Improving Travel Experience (Skelley,

2013) In this paper the researches investigate the impact of mobile information systems on

the behavior of the public transport users. They found that the introduction of Occy, a

web based mobile bus timetable application, makes the trip more efficient for

individuals and leads to greater satisfaction with the bus service. Their findings about

design features are especially important for our project. So during the design

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process we should keep in mind that such features as location aware technology,

personalized travel preferences and real­time travel disruption alerts are more

beneficial for users and result in actual system use.

3 Related work

3.1Oslo ­ Official City App We were very impressed of the official city app for Oslo. But in this app there are

some important or interesting aspects missing. In the app user can choose from

categories and check some activities. Users get detail information about the activity.

But in this app it is not possible to write user comments on it or rate the system. The

user can add activities to an own list, so it is possible to lock at your interest points

again. But the user can’t do any special things with his own list. So the idea is now,

that user can see a tour with his interest points of view.[3]

4 Methodology and tools We have done an interview with the user to find out what is important for us. With

this interview we will find out how the users will use the app and which features we

need. We evaluated the interview so we can use the results for our design. After se

interview we have done some mockups with the mockup tool “moqups”. The

mockups is orientate at the results of the interview.

5 Our Work

5.1 Data Gathering and Evaluation

In order to better understand our users, their way of thinking and habits we decided

to conduct a survey (seethe link). To find the potential users we published invitations

to complete this survey in different Facebook groups that are mainly uniting

foreigners in Norway (e.g. International Students at HiOA, International students at

BI Norwegian Business School, International Students Union at HiOA and

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IMOBAGO ­ International Mums Forum) and those who plan to go abroad

(Utvekslingsstudenten, NTNUtveksling og AFS Norge Internasjonal Utveksling).

Total 45 persons from 18 different countries participated in this study. The

participants have different ages. We have ask some important questions for our app.

Some questions are very relevant for our design decisions. We ask how many times

they visit other countries. The most answer was between 2­4 times. This answer was

around 50%. The most comes people visit other countries as a tourist (75%). For us

it was very important that the users have internet at a smartphone. It wasn’t clear

that all user will have this in other countries, so we ask this. More than 80% have

internet on their smartphone also in other countries and lot’s of them use the internet

more than one time. We also found it interesting from where the people get

information’s for activities. The most people ask friends for help or check the internet.

This is an relevant aspect for our project. Over 65% of the people would give

information’s of their profile to the system. We also ask for some ideas and some

features in the app. One person say, that it would be good if you course between

more tour like chilling tours or family friendly tours. Lot’s of people want to see

information’s like family friendly, popular tourist points or cafes.

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5.2 Characteristics of user

According to our survey, interview and the article [8], we summerize the features of our users in table 5.1

No. Characteristic Explain

1 Mobility User using Happy Touring when moving such as search for someplaces, get direction...

2 Limited Attention Capacity

When moving and directing in the street, they don’t want to concentrate much on their mobiles

3 High­speed interaction

They want to have a fast request/reponse with the system (search for places and want the system reponse immediately)

4 Context dependency The system will provide information for users based on their context (weather, hotels, direction…)

Table 5.1 ­ Characteristics of user

5.3 Mockups

For the app we have some main features. The user can choose activities from

categories. The activities have lots of information like opening hours or family friendly

and of course also some general information. You can also see some comments

from users and ratings. So this is an indirect Method to choose activities, we have

learned from the article CityFlocks. The user can add a comment or rats the activity.

For rating there are five starts. If the user haven’t rate the activity the stars show the

actually voting from the community. It is possible to go over the starts and give an

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own vote. This will overwrite the voting from the community. The color of the starts

will be changed. The user can add an activity to his own list. From the own list the

map with information routes will generated. The user can also choose from existing

routes. The route information describes the whole route. It describes in which order

the user can visit his chosen activities. There are also some information for public

transportation. The user will get more than one route, so he can choose which route

he wants. For changing routes the user can make a swipe gesture. If the user find

his own route very good, it is possible to share the route so that other users can

choose this route as an existing one. It is also possible to share the route at

Facebook.

6 Futher Work

With the Mockups we have our first prototype. This is a paper based prototype. A

paper based prototype is a Low­fidelity prototyping. A Low­fidelity prototype can be

very helpful in the early progress. It can help by the idea process and can help to

evaluate the GUI. A Low­fidelity prototype don’t need so much time to develop and is

very cheap. It is very cheaper if you see mistakes with the paper based prototype

than with a real one. [5] With this prototype we can make our first user evaluation.

We will show the mockups some users maybe 4­5. We will give the users some

specific tasks we created for them. One of us will play the computer. So if the user is

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clicking on something we will change the mockup. We will write down some

problems and also ask the users for feedback. We will categories the problems and

fix it, if it is a high priority problem. [7] Paper based prototypes can be difficult with

multitouch devices, because the interaction is very relevant. With paper based

prototypes you can’t react so fast and you can’t simulate all features. For example a

search function is very difficult to simulate. Sometimes the user reaction and

interaction is different to a High­fidelity prototype. So after the paper based prototype

it is necessary to have a High­fidelity prototype. A High­fidelity prototype look more

and feel more like the final product. In our Project we will create a Click Dummy with

a prototype software like justinminde or Axure. [5] The users will got a smartphone

and we can make a usability test with the users. We will give the users some

scenario they had to handle. This will feel more like a real app, so our Click Dummy

is our High­fidelity prototype.

In the next phase, we will analysis many features and functions of Happy Touring in

more details, so that we can decide what functions the app should have, which

architectures we should employ for the system, we will develop use case and class

diagram for Happy Touring. And then, user interface prototype will be developed and

describe in more details.

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7 References

[1] Bilandzic, M., Foth, M., & De Luca, A. (2008). CityFlocks: Designing Social

Navigation for Urban Mobile Information Systems. Paper presented at the

ACM SIGCHI Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference, Cape Town,

South Africa.

[2] Iacucci, G., Kuutti, K., Ranta, M., On the Move with a Magic Thing: Role Playing

in the Design of Mobile Services and Devices. In the Proceedings of DIS2000,

Designing Interactive Systems, New York City, USA, pp. 193­202.

[3] Centre, O. V. Google Play. retrieved from Oslo ­ Official City App:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=se.interguide.oslo.mobil

[acessed 06.10.2015]

[4] Holone, H., Misund, G., Tolsby, H., & Kristoffersen, S. (2008, October). Aspects

of personal navigation with collaborative user feedback. InProceedings of the

5th Nordic conference on Human­computer interaction: building bridges (pp.

182­191). ACM.

[5] Jan Derboven, D. D.­B. (2010). Comparing user interaction with low and high

fidelity prototypes of tabletop surfaces. 6th Nordic Conference on

Human­Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries (pp. 148­157 ). ACM

New York, NY, USA ©2010.

[6] Skelley, T., Namoun, A., & Mehandjiev, N. (2013). The Impact of a Mobile

Information System on Changing Travel Behaviour and Improving Travel

Experience. In Mobile Web Information Systems (pp. 233­247). Springer

Berlin Heidelberg.

[7] UsabilityNet. (2006). Evaluate Prototyp. retrieved from Summary:

http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/evaluate.htm [acessed 06.10.2015]

[8] Pascoe, J., Ryan, N. and Morse, D.: Using While Moving: HCI Issues in Fieldwork

Environments. Transactions on Computer­Human Interaction, Vol. 7, No.3.

ACM (2000) 417­437

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8. Appendix: Mindmap after interview an user

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