It can be very challenging to get an accurate understanding of mobile phone usage because of the difficulty of observing phone activity in a natural setting. We describe a retrospective methodology where participants review visualizations of their logged activity in an interview setting, and our lessons learned in applying this methodology in a study of user goals and journeys on mobile devices across apps.

More and more products and services are being deployed on the web, and this presents new challenges and opportunities for measurement of user experience on a large scale. There is a strong need for user-centered metrics for web applications, which can be used to measure progress towards key goals, and drive product decisions. In this note, we describe the HEART framework for user-centered metrics, as well as a process for mapping product goals to metrics. We include practical examples of how HEART metrics have helped product teams make decisions that are both data-driven and user-centered. The framework and process have generalized to enough of our company's own products that we are confident that teams in other organizations will be able to reuse or adapt them. We also hope to encourage more research into metrics based on large-scale behavioral data.

We present a large-scale analysis of the content of weblogs dating back to the release of the Blogger program in 1999. Over one million blogs were analyzed from their conception through June 2006. These data was submitted to the Text Analysis: Word Counts program [12], which conducted a word-count analysis using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Counts (LIWC) dictionaries [20] to provide and analyze a representative sample of blogger word usage. Covariation among LIWC dictionaries suggests that blogs vary along five psychologically relevant linguistic dimensions: Melancholy, Socialness, Ranting, Metaphysicality, and Work-Relatedness. These variables and others were subjected to a cluster analysis in an attempt to extract natural usage groups to inform design of blogging systems, the results of which were mixed.

This article is concerned with the problem of improving software products and investigates how to base that process on solid empirical foundations. Our key contribution is a contextual method that provides a means of identifying new features to support discovered and currently unsupported ways of working and a means of evaluating the usefulness of proposed features. Standard methods of discovery and evaluation, such as interviews and usability testing, gather some of the necessary data but fall short of covering important aspects. The shortcomings of these approaches are overcome by applying an integrated and iterative method for collecting and interpreting data about product usage in context. This article demonstrates its effectiveness when applied to the discovery and evaluation of new features for standard Web clients.

This paper presents the design and user evaluation of SmartBack, a feature that complements the standard Back button by enabling users to jump directly to key pages in their navigation session, making common navigation activities more efficient. Defining key pages was informed by the findings of a user study that involved detailed monitoring of Web usage and analysis of Web browsing in terms of navigation trails. The pages accessible through SmartBack are determined automatically based on the structure of the user's navigation trails or page association with specific user's activities, such as search or browsing bookmarked sites. We discuss implementation decisions and present results of a usability study in which we deployed the SmartBack prototype and monitored usage for a month in both corporate and home settings. The results show that the feature brings qualitative improvement to the browsing experience of individuals who use it.

In this paper we present and discuss the findings of a study that investigated how people manage their collections of digital photographs. The six-month, 13-participant study included interviews, questionnaires, and analysis of usage statistics gathered from an instrumented digital photograph management tool called Shoebox. Alongside simple browsing features such as folders, thumbnails and timelines, Shoebox has some advanced multimedia features: content-based image retrieval and speech recognition applied to voice annotations. Our results suggest that participants found their digital photos much easier to manage than their non-digital ones, but that this advantage was almost entirely due to the simple browsing features. The advanced features were not used very often and their perceived utility was low. These results should help to inform the design of improved tools for managing personal digital photographs.

WebScout is a system that creates a personal archive of Web pages seen by the user and a rich record of the user's navigation, including various types of user and system generated annotations. We explore how this rich archive can be used to provide support for user navigation, in particular, for revisitation of pages within a navigation session. We describe the WebScout SessionNavigator feature that enhances the current browser functionality by providing both sequential and graph representation of the user navigation. It introduces the concept of a WebTrail which designates a sequence of navigation steps, started by a particular event, such as search, or explicit specification of a URL by typing into the address bar, or executing a link from a bookmark list. We present details of a user study that explores how users perceive and remember their navigation on the Web.

In current systems for browsing image collections, users are presented with sets of thumbnail images arranged in some default order on the screen. We are investigating whether it benefits users to have sets of thumbnails arranged according to their mutual similarity, so images that are alike are placed together. There are, of course, many possible definitions of "similarity": so far we have explored measurements based on low-level visual features, and on the textual captions assigned to the images. Here we describe two experiments, both involving designers as the participants, examining whether similarity-based arrangements of the candidate images are helpful for a picture selection task. Firstly, the two types of similarity-based arrangement were informally compared. Then, an arrangement based on visual similarity was more formally compared with a control of a random arrangement. We believe this work should be of interest to anyone designing a system that involves presenting sets of images to users. Keywords Image retrieval, information visualisation, evaluation.

No abstract available.