User-centered design of a mobile application for sharing life memories

ABSTRACT

People have an inherent need to capture and collect life memories such as moments with children or special events with friends. Capturing life memories is either spontaneous or planned. Memories are stored and frequently shared with other people. New internet services allow online sharing of photographs but they bypass the mobile aspect in capturing and sharing multimedia. In this paper, we present a concept mobile application for capturing and sharing memories while mobile and the user research studies that supported its design. Our aim was to design a prototype application that would enable mobile users to capture and share precious moments. Various categorizations of user behaviors related to personal media management emerged out of our user needs studies. We then followed a user-centered design process according to Contextual Design. The user evaluation of the resulted paper prototype showed that users appreciate the event based, instant sharing within particular groups of people.

REFERENCES

• 1: Hugh Beyer, Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco, CA, 1997
• 2: Marc Davis , Simon King , Nathan Good , Risto Sarvas, From context to content: leveraging context to infer media metadata, Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM international conference on Multimedia, October 10-16, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/1027527.1027572]
• 3: Vannevar B. 1945. As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945.
• 4: Jim Gemmell , Lyndsay Williams , Ken Wood , Roger Lueder , Gordon Bell, Passive capture and ensuing issues for a personal lifetime store, Proceedings of the the 1st ACM workshop on Continuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences, October 15-15, 2004, New York, New York, USA [doi>10.1145/1026653.1026660]
• 5: Hayes, G. et al. 2004. The Personal Audio Loop: Designing a Ubiquitous Audio-Based Memory Aid. MobileHCI 2004. Glasgow, Scotland.
• 6: Nancy Van House , Marc Davis , Morgan Ames , Megan Finn , Vijay Viswanathan, The uses of personal networked digital imaging: an empirical study of cameraphone photos and sharing, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, OR, USA [doi>10.1145/1056808.1057039]
• 7: Okabe, D., Ito, M. Everyday Contexts of Camera Phone Use: Steps Towards Technosocial Ethnographic Frameworks. In Höflich, Joachim & Hartmann, Maren Eds. Mobile Communication in Everyday Life: An Ethnographic View. Berlin: Frank & Timme, 79--102.
• 8: Jim Gemmell , Gordon Bell , Roger Lueder , Steven Drucker , Curtis Wong, MyLifeBits: fulfilling the Memex vision, Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on Multimedia, December 01-06, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France [doi>10.1145/641007.641053]
• 9: Hewlett Packard: Photographic memories. http://www.hpl.hp.com/news/2004/jan-mar/casualcapture.html. Viewed: 1/2007.
• 10: Tripp Millican, iam: experiences with persistent video recording, publishing and sharing, Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Continuous archival and retrieval of personal experiences, November 11-11, 2005, Hilton, Singapore [doi>10.1145/1099083.1099093]
• 11: Dey, A., Abowd, G., Wood, A. 1999. CyberDesk: A Framework for Providing Self-Integrating Context-Aware Services. Knowledge-Based Systems, 11. pp. 3--13.
• 12: Schilit, B., Adams, N. Want, R. 1994. Context-Aware Computing Applications. 1st International Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications. pp. 85--90.
• 13: Eija Kaasinen, User needs for location-aware mobile services, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, v.7 n.1, p.70-79, May 2003 [doi>10.1007/s00779-002-0214-7]
• 14: Häkkilä, J. 2006. Usability with Context-aware Mobile Applications - Case Studies and Design Guidelines. Doctoral Dissertation. Acta Universitatis Ouluensis, Finland.
• 15: Sarvas, R. 2006. Designing User-Centric Metadata for Digital Snapshot Photography. Doctoral Dissertation. Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Finland.
• 16: Marc Davis , Nancy Van House , Jeffrey Towle , Simon King , Shane Ahern , Carrie Burgener , Dan Perkel , Megan Finn , Vijay Viswanathan , Matthew Rothenberg, MMM2: mobile media metadata for media sharing, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, OR, USA [doi>10.1145/1056808.1056910]
• 17: Anne Marie Kanstrup , Ellen Christiansen, Selecting and evoking innovators: combining democracy and creativity, Proceedings of the 4th Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction: changing roles, p.321-330, October 14-18, 2006, Oslo, Norway [doi>10.1145/1182475.1182509]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
      H.5.m Miscellaneous

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
contextual design, life memories, mobile application, personal content management, user-centered design