39410616
Theme issue on interactive mobile information access
This paper introduces this issue on interactive mobile information access. Papers are presented issues relating to a diversity of user groups and environments, with a central theme of accessing information whilst on the move.
3325969
Improving web search on small screen devices
Abstract Small handheld devices—mobile phones, Pocket PCs etc.—are increasingly being used to access the web. Search engines are the most used web services and are an important factor of user support. Search engine providers have begun to offer their services on the small screen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the how easy to use such services are in these new contexts. An experiment was carried out to compare users' abilities to complete search tasks using a mobile phone-sized, handheld computer-sized and conventional, desktop interface to the full Google™ index. With all three interfaces, when users succeed in completing a task, they do so quickly (within 2–3 min) and using few interactions with the search engine. When they fail, though, they fail badly. The paper examines the causes of failures in small screen searching and proposes guidelines for improving these interfaces. In addition, we present and discuss novel interaction schemes that put these guidelines into practice.
42586645
The music is the message
the music being played by her tiny mobile audio appliance. She's standing waiting for a train. Other commuters swarm nearby, headphones on, listening in more muted ways to the soundtracks they've chosen to accompany today's episode of their daily routine. Mobile music players—iPods, Walkmans and the like—are exciting for those of us involved in thinking about the future of mobile devices and services. Like the mobile phone—increasing numbers of which also sport a music player—these are gadgets that people actually desire, and aspire to own. They have vast storage capacities, increasingly sophisticated processors and pleasing, effective mechanisms for users to control their func-tionality. From click and jog wheels to high-resolution color displays, these players are far from being the impoverished devices that typified mobile platforms just a few years ago. And there are hundreds of millions of them in circulation—Apple sold five million in the first quarter of 2006 alone. But at the same time, these marvelous mobiles could be seen as an obstacle to the bright futures dreamt up in the research labs. How will people be able to make use of the ubiquitous computing infrastructure being envisaged, the anytime, everywhere access to information and services, when they are immersed in digital sound bubbles of their own choosing? Some mobile listeners, at first sight, certainly appear cut off. Another scene: A young man stares out of a train window, watching the long green fields flash by. His eyes are bright but still; his gaze betrays a mood of deep reflection. Listening to music on expensive , noise-reducing headphones, what is he thinking? Is he sadly contemplating a lover left or anticipating a longed-for meeting at his destination? How can we design mobile services that will fit this context? The conventional clumsy beeps, vibrations, and attention-seeking displays seem out of place. What opportunities are there to build more emphatic systems , systems to enhance the music and environmental experience or to provide ways for the listener to later reflect on the situations they've lived through in relation to the music they've heard? At other times, though, these sound bubbles seem more permeable, don't they? One of the photos of people listening to music available on a popular image-sharing site is entitled " Listening to Kim's iPod and talking to Joe! " A teenager holds a mobile phone to her left ear while wearing the distinctive white music-player headphones. Chatting and …
9543196
Children as Design Partners and Testers for a Children's Digital Library
Most of today's digital libraries (DLs) are not designed for children. To produce usable and useful DLs, designers need to ensure that good design features are incorporated, taking into consideration users' needs. We describe our experience working with children as design partners and testers in building a children's DL of stories and poems for 11-14 year olds, using a concrete example to demonstrate our design philosophy and research approach, The study provides insights on useful design features children's DLs should have, and their importance to children. The initial work we have done highlights issues and provides a basis for the building of usable and useful digital libraries for children.
3268647
A digital library of conversational expressions: helping profoundly disabled users communicate
Digital libraries are for everyone. This paper describes the development of a digital library for a user who has a profound physical disability that means she cannot communicate verbally, and cannot use conventional communication tools.
22559047
Usability of digital libraries
14189118
A Theory of Qualified Types
• The ability to include local constraints as part of the type of an object. This enables the definition and use of polymorphic overloaded values within a program. ∗An earlier version of this paper was presented at the European Symposium on Programming, Rennes, France, February 1992 and appears in the conference proceedings published in Springer Verlag LNCS Volume 582. †Address from September 1992: Yale University, Department of Computer Science, P.O. Box 2158 Yale Station, New Haven, Connecticut 06520-2158, USA.
18345527
Groupware and the Social Infrastructure of Communication
Communication technologies can supplement, but never supplant, the value of social bonds and trusting relationships.
19544571
Too close for comfort? Distance and engagement in interpretive information systems research
In this paper, we seek to explore the implications of the assumptions underlying interpretivism for the preferred relationship between the researcher and the research phenomenon. The growing interest in interpretive information systems research has drawn attention to the need to gain access to the interpretations of social actors. Various data-gathering methods are available to the researcher to achieve such access. These may be seen as located on a spectrum in terms of the degree of engagement between the researcher and the research subject. While engagement is not without its drawbacks from a research perspective, it may be argued that it enables good access to the sorts of data that interpretive researchers are seeking. Most of the research reported in the information systems (IS) field, however, has adopted relatively distant methods by which the researcher avoids intervention in the research context. Some of the characteristics of more engaged forms of research are illustrated through a discussion of a participant observation study of executive information systems development. This research has highlighted a number of issues that can be seen to be common to other data-gathering methods. Reasons for the neglect of engaged data-gathering methods are explored, and it is suggested that consideration of the issues it raises may contribute to more reflexive interpretive IS research practice.
2346657
ML Typing, Explicit Polymorphism and Qualified Types
The ML type system was originally introduced as a means of identifying a class of terms in a simple untyped language, often referred to as core-ML, whose evaluation could be guaranteed not to “go wrong”. In subsequent work, the terms of core-ML have also been viewed as a ‘convenient shorthand’ for programs in typed languages. Notable examples include studies of ML polymorphism and investigations of overloading, motivated by the use of type classes in Haskell.
23406227
Toward an understanding of similarity judgments for music digital library evaluation
This paper presents an analysis of 7,602 similarity judgments collected for the Symbolic Melodic Similarity (SMS) and Audio Music Similarity and Retrieval (AMS) evaluation tasks in the 2006 Music Information Retrieval Evaluation eXchange (MIREX). We discuss the influence of task definitions, as well as evaluation metrics on user perceptions of music similarity, and provide recommendations for future Music Digital Library/Music Information Retrieval research pertaining to music similarity.