Capricorn - an intelligent user interface for mobile widgets

ABSTRACT

Widgets are embeddable objects that provide easy and ubiquitous access to dynamic information sources, e.g., weather, news or TV program information. Interactions with widgets take place through a so-called widget engine, which is a specialized client-side runtime component that also provides functionalities for managing widgets. As the number of supported widgets increases, managing widgets becomes increasingly complex. For example, finding relevant or interesting widgets becomes difficult and the user interface easily gets cluttered with irrelevant widgets. In addition, interacting with information sources can be cumbersome, especially on mobile platforms. In order to facilitate widget management and interactions, we have developed Capricorn, an intelligent user interface that integrates adaptive navigation techniques into a widget engine. This paper describes the main functionalities of Capricorn and presents the results of a usability evaluation that measured user satisfaction and compared how user satisfaction varies between desktop and mobile platforms.

REFERENCES

• 1: Apple Inc. Apple Mac OS X Dashboard. http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/. {Retrieved 26-02-2008}.
• 2: Fredrik Boström , Patrik Floréen , Tianyan Liu , Petteri Nurmi , Tiina-Kaisa Oikarinen , Akos Vetek , Péter Boda, Capricorn: an intelligent interface for mobile widgets, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 13-16, 2008, Gran Canaria, Spain [doi>10.1145/1378773.1378845]
• 3: M. Debevc, B. Meyer, D. Donlagic, and R. Svecko. Design and evaluation of an adaptive icon toolbar. User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, 6(1):1--21, 1996.
• 4: Jiawei Han , Jian Pei , Yiwen Yin , Runying Mao, Mining Frequent Patterns without Candidate Generation: A Frequent-Pattern Tree Approach, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, v.8 n.1, p.53-87, January 2004 [doi>10.1023/B:DAMI.0000005258.31418.83]
• 5: James R. Lewis, IBM computer usability satisfaction questionnaires: psychometric evaluation and instructions for use, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, v.7 n.1, p.57-78, Jan.-March 1995 [doi>10.1080/10447319509526110]
• 6: Joanna McGrenere , Ronald M. Baecker , Kellogg S. Booth, An evaluation of a multiple interface design solution for bloated software, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503406]
• 7: Nokia Inc. Nokia. s60 goes beyond web browsing with web run-time and widgets. http://sw.nokia.com/id/e67c057a-7549-4edb-b9f1-193ab27cce71/S60WebRunTimeandWidgets.pdf. {Retrieved 26-02-2008}.
• 8: Rattapoom Tuchinda , Pedro Szekely , Craig A. Knoblock, Building Mashups by example, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 13-16, 2008, Gran Canaria, Spain [doi>10.1145/1378773.1378792]
• 9: Jeffrey Wong , Jason I. Hong, Making mashups with marmite: towards end-user programming for the web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 28-May 03, 2007, San Jose, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1240624.1240842]

INDEX TERMS

Primary 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)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.4 Systems and Software
      H.3.5 On-line Information Services

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
adaptive user interfaces, mobile usability, mobile widgets