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To make a mole hill out of a mountain : challenges in designing a recognizable GUI for an e-newspaper service on small screen devices

<p>The purpose of this study was to: obtain and review guidelines for designing on a small screen </p><p>from several theoretic sources and to purpose own guidelines for this context. There was </p><p>chosen for the development of 3 different prototypes meant for the use on 3 different mobile </p><p>devices. Those mobile devices had a different screen size and were: an e-reader, PDA and </p><p>mobile phone. The prototypes provided the user with a future e-newspaper service (a TV </p><p>schedule). </p><p> </p><p>First design principles for good usability on small screens were abstracted from literature. </p><p>With this knowledge the three prototypes were developed. The development started with </p><p>writing down the functional and user requirements for the prototypes. After that the </p><p>developing process had two stages. The first stage was a low-fidelity prototype, this were </p><p>sketches of the graphical user interface that was commented by users. The second stage was </p><p>a high-fidelity prototype, this stage consisted of three fully functional prototypes. The three </p><p>different prototypes were used in a user evaluation. After the evaluation interviews with the </p><p>users took place to obtain additional information. </p><p> </p><p>In this research the main question was: “What are the challenges for designing the </p><p>(graphical) user interface, as a part of an e-newspaper service which is aimed at use on </p><p>multiple devices with heterogeneous screen sizes, to be recognized as the same service?”. </p><p> </p><p>The results from this research are three challenges in designing the (graphical) user interface </p><p>for devices with small screens. These challenges are: how to make the user recognize the </p><p>service in the software (recognition of service), how to develop one service on multiple </p><p>devices (use on multiple devices) and how to develop software that it is useful and pleasant </p><p>to use (usable software). In total fifteen guidelines derived from theory were found, this </p><p>research shows that thirteen of them are applicable when designing for small screens. Three </p><p>of those thirteen are reformulated in this study to make them fit better in the context. Next to </p><p>this, seven additional guidelines were proposed in this study. Examples of the purposed </p><p>guidelines are: reconstruct the layout from the non-digital service in the interface as much as </p><p>possible, explore the targeted user group, built further on their mental model and pay </p><p>attention to possible disabilities of the group, implement extra’s that give users a good reason </p><p>to use the service and make it easy for the user to select the sought information.</p>

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA/oai:DiVA.org:hh-1830
Date January 2006
Creatorsde Steur, Giel
PublisherHalmstad University, School of Information Science, Computer and Electrical Engineering (IDE), Högskolan i Halmstad/Sektionen för Informationsvetenskap, Data- och Elektroteknik (IDE)
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, text

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