Browsing by Author "Eklund, Tommy"

Large screens, interactive or not, are becoming a common sight at shopping centers and other public places. These screens are used to advertise or share information interactively. Combined with the omnipresence of smartphones this gives rise for a unique opportunity to join these two interfaces and to combine their strengths and complement their weaknesses. Smartphones are very mobile thanks to their small size and can access information virtually from anywhere, but suffer from overflow of information. Users have too many applications and web sites to search relevant information to find what they want or need in a timely fashion. On the other hand, public screens are too large to provide information everywhere or in a personalized way, but they do often have the information you need, when and where you need it. Thus large screens provide an ideal place for users to select content onto their smartphones. Large screens also have the advantage of screen size and research has indicated that using a second screen with small handheld devices can improve the user experience. This thesis undertook design and development of a prototype Android application for existing large interactive public screen. The initial goal was to study the different aspects of personal mobile devices coupled with large public screens. This large screen interface is also under development as a ubiquitous system and the mobile application was designed to be part of this system. Thus the design of the mobile application needed to be consistent with the public screen. During the development of this application it was observed that the small mobile screen could not support the content or interactions designed for a much larger screen because of its small size. As a result this thesis focuses on developing a prototype that further research could draw upon. This lead to a study of small screen graph data visualization and previous research on mobile applications working together with large public screens. This thesis presents a novel approach for displaying graph data designed for large screens on a small mobile screen. This work also discusses many challenges and questions related to large screen interaction with mobile device that rose during the development of the prototype. An evaluation was conducted to gather both quantitative and qualitative data on the interface design and the consistency with the large screen interface to further analyze the resulting prototype. The most important findings in this work are the problems encountered and questions raised during the development of the mobile application prototype. This thesis provides several suggestions for future research using the application, the ubiquitous system and the large screen interface. The study of related work and prototype development also lead to suggestion of design guidelines for this type of applications. The evaluation data also suggests that the final mobile application design is both consistent with and performs better than a faithful implementation of the visuals and interaction model of the original large screen interface.