There have been many large-scale investigations of users' mobile app launch behaviour, but all have been conducted on Android, even though recent reports suggest iPhones account for a third of all smartphones in use. We report on the first large-scale analysis of app usage patterns on iPhones. We conduct a reproduction study with a cohort of over 10,000 jailbroken iPhone users, reproducing several studies previously conducted on Android devices. We find some differences, but also significant similarities: e.g. communications apps are the most used on both platforms; similar patterns are apparent of few apps being very popular but there existing a 'long tail' of many apps used by the population; users show similar patterns of 'micro-usage'; almost identical proportions of people use a unique combination of apps. Such similarities add confidence but also specificity about claims of consistency across smartphones. As well as presenting our findings, we discuss issues involved in reproducing studies across platforms.

We have created and evaluated a novel mobile messaging app named Curtains Messenger. The app has been designed to support synchrony in messaging. It does this by requiring users to be in the app at the same time as each other in order to send, receive and read messages. This design is contrary to typical apps where messages can be sent and read asynchronously at an individual's convenience. We have conducted a field trial in which 15 users installed the app on their own devices and used it in the wild. We present a qualitative analysis of interviews with the participants following the trial. The findings address how the app was used, how synchrony affected conversational flows, how synchrony raised issues of attention and intimacy, and what issues users faced in the practical work of conducting synchronous messaging. This work demonstrates how core concepts in the study of cooperative work such as a/synchrony can be drawn upon to reconsider taken-for-granted design features of mobile applications and the lived experience of communication.

Numerous studies have tracked people's everyday use of digital devices, but without consideration of how such data might be of personal interest to the user. We have developed a personal tracking application that enables users to automatically monitor their 'screen time' on mobile devices (iOS and Android) and computers (Mac and Windows). The application interface enables users to combine screen time data from multiple devices. We trialled the application for 28+ days with 21 users, collecting log data and interviewing each user. We found that there is interest in personal tracking in this area, but that the study participants were less interested in quantifying their overall screen time than in gaining data about their use of specific devices and applications. We found that personal tracking of device use is desirable for goals including: increasing productivity, disciplining device use, and cutting down on use.

Text messaging has long been a popular activity, and today smartphone apps enable users to choose from a plethora of mobile messaging applications. While we know a lot about SMS practices, we know less about practices of messaging applications. In this paper, we take a first step to explore one ubiquitous aspect of mobile messaging -- messaging history. We designed, built, and trialled a mobile messaging application without history named forget-me-not. The two-week trial showed that history-less messaging no longer supports chit-chat as seen in e.g. WhatsApp, but is still considered conversational and more 'engaging'. Participants expressed being lenient and relaxed about what they wrote. Removing the history allowed us to gain insights into what uses history has in other mobile messaging applications, such as planning events, allowing for distractions, and maintaining multiple conversation threads.

We have developed a mobile application called Pass The Ball that enables users to track, reflect on, and discuss physical activity with others. We followed an iterative design process, trialling a first version of the app with 20 people and a second version with 31. The trials were conducted in the wild, on users' own devices. The second version of the app enforced a turn-taking system that meant only one member of a group of users could track their activity at any one time. This constrained tracking at the individual level, but more successfully led users to communicate and interact with each other. We discuss the second trial with reference to two concepts: social-relatedness and individual-competence. We discuss six key lessons from the trial, and identify two high-level design implications: attend to "practices" of tracking; and look within and beyond "collaboration" and "competition" in the design of activity trackers.

This paper characterises the use of activity trackers as "lived informatics". This characterisation is contrasted with other discussions of personal informatics and the quantified self. The paper reports an interview study with activity tracker users. The study found: people do not logically organise, but interweave various activity trackers, sometimes with ostensibly the same functionality; that tracking is often social and collaborative rather than personal; that there are different styles of tracking, including goal driven tracking and documentary tracking; and that tracking information is often used and interpreted with reference to daily or short term goals and decision making. We suggest there will be difficulties in personal informatics if we ignore the way that personal tracking is enmeshed with everyday life and people's outlook on their future.

The recent rise in large scale trials of mobile software using 'app stores' has moved current researcher practice beyond available ethical guidelines. By surveying this recent and growing body of literature, as well as established professional principles adopted in psychology, we propose a set of ethical guidelines for large scale HCI user trials. These guidelines come in two parts: a set of general principles and a framework into which individual app store-based trials can be assessed and ethical concerns exposed. We categorise existing literature using our scheme, and explain how researchers could use our framework to classify their future user trials to determine ethical responsibility, and the steps required to meet these obligations.

User trials of mobile applications have followed a steady march out of the lab, and progressively further ''into the wild', recently involving ''app store'-style releases of software to the general public. Yet from our experiences on these mass participation systems and a survey of the literature, we identify a number of reported difficulties. We propose a hybrid methodology that aims to address these, by combining a global software release with a concurrent local trial. A phone-based game, created to explore the uptake and use of ad hoc peer-to-peer networking, was evaluated using this new hybrid trial method, combining a small-scale local trial (11 users) with a ''mass participation' trial (over 10,000 users). Our hybrid method offers many benefits, allowing locally observed findings to be verified, patterns in globally collected data to be explained and addresses ethical issues raised by the mass participation approach. We note trends in the local trial that did not appear in the larger scale deployment, and which would therefore have led to misleading results were the application trialed using ''traditional' methods alone. Based on this study and previous experience, we provide a set of guidelines to researchers working in this area.

The problems of obesity and overweight are commonly cited as the motivation behind recent efforts to develop technology that promotes physical activity. Prompted by the social nature of many of the emerging applications, this paper presents our investigation of the sociality of weight management as experienced by a broad demographic of individuals. Our findings highlight the broad scope of peer involvement, and provide insight into the context and mechanics of related interaction that may prove valuable in informing the next generation of peer-based weight management technology for use in everyday life.

The application of self-monitoring technologies to the problem of promoting health-related behavioural change has been an active area of research for many years. This paper reports on our investigations into health-related behavioural change within the context of a cardiac rehabilitation programme, and considers the role that self-monitoring currently plays and may play in the future. We carried out semi-structured interviews with nineteen cardiac rehabilitation participants. Our main findings relate to distinctions between implicit and conscious change, tensions between cardiac rehabilitation and everyday life, the importance of self-awareness and self-determination, and an overall reluctance towards unnecessary self-monitoring. In view of these findings, we then offer suggestions as to how self-monitoring technologies can be designed to suit this particular context of use.

This paper demonstrates how useful content can be generated as a by-product of an enjoyable mobile multiplayer game. In EyeSpy, players tag geographic locations with photos or text. By locating the places in which other players' tags were created and 'confirming' them, players earn points for themselves and verify the tags' locations. As a side effect of game-play, EyeSpy produces a collection of recognisable and findable geographic details, in the form of photographs and text tags, that can be repurposed to support navigation tasks. Two user trials of the game successfully produced an archive of geo-located photographs and tags, and in a follow-up experiment we compared performance in a navigation task using photographs from the game, with geo-referenced photos collected from the Flickr website. Our experiences with EyeSpy support reflection upon the design challenges presented by 'human computation' and the production of usable by-products through mobile game-play.

Recent advances in mobile device technology have opened up new possibilities in enhancing the experience of spectators at stadium-based sporting events. In creating novel applications for use in such settings, designers must be aware of the current practices of spectators and of features of the environment at such events that novel applications may seek to exploit. This work forms an early part of the Designing the Augmented Stadium project. Data sets have been collected from spectators, logging the results of Bluetooth scans alongside GPS location. This paper presents an information visualization tool that can be used in the analysis and exploration of this data, to provide insight into the activities of spectators, the relationship between an individual spectator and the crowd as a whole and the suitability of stadium environments for applications based on infrastructure such as mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and wireless mesh networking. Various visualization tools are described and example cases are illustrated, using several real-world data sets recorded at football matches.

This paper investigates emergent practices around 'microblogging', changing and sharing status within a social group. We present results from a trial of 'Connecto', a phone based status and location sharing application that allows a group to 'tag' areas and have individuals' locations shared automatically on a mobile phone. In use the system moved beyond being an awareness tool to a way of continuing the ongoing 'story' of conversations within the group. Through sharing status and location the system supported each groups' ongoing repartee - a site for social exchange, enjoyment and friendship.

VisGenome visualizes single and comparative representations for the rat, the mouse and the human chromosomes at different levels of detail. The tool offers smooth zooming and panning which is more flexible than seen in other browsers. It presents information available in Ensembl for single chromosomes, as well as homologies (orthologue predictions including ortholog one2one, apparent ortholog one2one, ortholog many2many) for any two chromosomes from different species. The application can query supporting data from Ensembl by invoking a link in a browser.

Ethnography has become a staple feature of IT research over the last twenty years, shaping our understanding of the social character of computing systems and informing their design in a wide variety of settings. The emergence of ubiquitous computing raises new challenges for ethnography however, distributing interaction across a burgeoning array of small, mobile devices and online environments which exploit invisible sensing systems. Understanding interaction requires ethnographers to reconcile interactions that are, for example, distributed across devices on the street with online interactions in order to assemble coherent understandings of the social character and purchase of ubiquitous computing systems. We draw upon four recent studies to show how ethnographers are replaying system recordings of interaction alongside existing resources such as video recordings to do this and identify key challenges that need to be met to support ethnographic study of ubiquitous computing in the wild.

We introduce a location--based game called Feeding Yoshi that provides an example of seamful design, in which key characteristics of its underlying technologies-the coverage and security characteristics of WiFi-are exposed as a core element of gameplay. Feeding Yoshi is also a long--term, wide--area game, being played over a week between three different cities during an initial user study. The study, drawing on participant diaries and interviews, supported by observation and analysis of system logs, reveals players' reactions to the game. We see the different ways in which they embedded play into the patterns of their daily lives, augmenting existing practices and creating new ones, and observe the impact of varying location on both the ease and feel of play. We identify potential design extensions to Feeding Yoshi and conclude that seamful design provides a route to creating engaging experiences that are well adapted to their underlying technologies.

Visualisation systems consisting of a set of components through which data and interaction commands flow have been explored by a number of researchers. Such hybrid and multistage algorithms can be used to reduce overall computation time, and to provide views of the data that show intermediate results and the outputs of complementary algorithms. In this paper we present work on expanding the range and variety of such components, with two new techniques for analysing and controlling the performance of visualisation processes. While the techniques presented are quite different, they are unified within HIVE: a visualisation system based upon a data-flow model and visual programming. Embodied within this system is a framework for weaving together our visualisation components to better afford insight into data and also deepen understanding of the process of the data's visualisation. We describe the new components and offer short case studies of their application. We demonstrate that both analysts and visualisation designers can benefit from a rich set of components and integrated tools for profiling performance.

This paper presents a framework for the pervasive sharing of data using wireless networks. 'FarCry' uses the mobility of users to carry files between separated networks. Through a mix of ad-hoc and infrastructure-based wireless networking, files are transferred between users without their direct involvement. As users move to different locations, files are then transmitted on to other users, spreading and sharing information. We examine three applications of this framework. Each of these exploits the physically proximate nature of social gatherings. As people group together in, for example, business meetings and cafés, this can be taken as an indication of similar interests, e.g. in the same presentation or in a type of music. MediaNet affords sharing of media files between strangers or friends, MeetingNet shares business documents in meetings, and NewsNet shares RSS feeds between mobile users. NewsNet also develops the use of pre-emptive caching: collecting information from others not for oneself, but for the predicted later sharing with others. We offer observations on developing this system for a mobile, multi-user, multi-device environment.

Design experience and theoretical discussion suggest that a narrow design focus on one tool or medium as primary may clash with the way that everyday activity involves the interweaving and combination of many heterogeneous media. Interaction may become seamless and unproblematic, even if the differences, boundaries and 'seams' in media are objectively perceivable. People accommodate and take advantage of seams and heterogeneity, in and through the process of interaction. We use an experiment with a mixed reality system to ground and detail our discussion of seamful design, which takes account of this process, and theory that reflects and informs such design. We critique the 'disappearance' mentioned by Weiser as a goal for ubicomp, and Dourish's 'embodied interaction' approach to HCI, suggesting that these design ideals may be unachievable or incomplete because they underemphasise the interdependence of 'invisible' non-rationalising interaction and focused rationalising interaction within ongoing activity.

In this paper we discuss the use of models of space in the building of mixed-reality systems. By model of space we mean a geometric or symbolic description associated with a physical space. We outline several types of model that exist, how they are surveyed and authored, how they are represented to the users and how they are supported by middleware and sensors. We show that systems often contain numerous models of space and we discuss the issues in maintaining or reifying assumptions about transformations between models. We illustrate these ideas by describing the implementation of a collaborative mixed-reality system that allows users to experience a museum in three modalities: physically colocated visitor with personal digital assistant guide, virtual reality visitor and Web visitor.

By drawing from semiology, epistemology and philosophical hermeneutics, we discuss the way that computer systems, particularly systems used in collaborative work, represent information, situation and activity. In other words, we focus on approaches to representation in design for computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW). We point out similarities between discourse in hermeneutics and in the anthropology and sociology that predominates in CSCW, and propose that a hermeneutic perspective offers a unifying view on the social science and computer science within CSCW. We discuss formalisation, adaptation and objectivity in our theories, methodologies and implementations, and offer collaborative filtering and its extension, the path model, as examples of practical approaches to representation, which show, support and adapt with activity in a hermeneutic style.

Museums attract increasing numbers of online visitors along with their conventional physical visitors. This paper presents a study of a mixed reality system that allows web, virtual reality and physical visitors to share a museum visit together in real time. Our system allows visitors to share their location and orientation, communicate over a voice channel, and jointly navigate around a shared information space. Results from a study of 34 users of the system show that visiting with the system was highly interactive and retained many of the attractions of a traditional shared exhibition visit. Specifically, users could navigate together, collaborate around objects and discuss exhibits. These findings have implications for non-museum settings, in particular how location awareness is a powerful resource for collaboration, and how 'hybrid objects' can support collaboration at-a-distance.

Information retrieval, workflow, collaborative filtering, and the path model can be considered as members of the family of approaches to information access. Although details of nomenclature and technique may vary, each is meant to provide people with access to useful information. In this paper we take a broad view over information access, drawing from philosophy and semiology in constructing a framework for comparative discussion. We use this framework to examine the information representations that underlie these four approaches, looking at phenomena included and excluded, the sharing of information amongst the community of use, interaction in terms of models of user activity and presentation of results, adaptation of system behaviour, and the inter-relationships of the representation's components. With deeper understanding of relative strengths and weaknesses, and characteristic emphases and assumptions, we can improve our selection, combination, and development of information systems.

Techniques for improving the imageability of an existing data visualisation are described. The aim is to make the visualisation more easily explored, navigated and remembered. Starting from a relatively sparse landscape– like representation of a set of objects, we selectively add to the visualisation static features such as clusters, and dynamic features such as view–specific sampling of object detail. Information on past usage is used in this process, making manifest an aspect of interaction which is often neglected. Issues arising from the use of such features in a shared virtual environment are discussed.

Article Where is information visualization technology going? Share on Authors: Mountaz Hascoët-Zizi LRI - Bât 490- Université Paris-Sud, 91 405 ORSAY Cedex - France LRI - Bât 490- Université Paris-Sud, 91 405 ORSAY Cedex - FranceView Profile , Chris Ahlberg IVEE - Chalmers University IVEE - Chalmers UniversityView Profile , Robert Korfhage Pittsburgh University Pittsburgh UniversityView Profile , Catherine Plaisant A.V. Williams Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MD A.V. Williams Building, University of Maryland, College Park, MDView Profile , Matthew Chalmers UBILAB UBILABView Profile , Ramana Rao Xerox Parc Xerox ParcView Profile Authors Info & Claims UIST '96: Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technologyNovember 1996 Pages 75–77https://doi.org/10.1145/237091.237101Online:01 November 1996Publication History 3citation641DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations3Total Downloads641Last 12 Months9Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

A technique is presented for the layout of high dimensional data in a low dimensional space. This technique builds upon the force based methods that have been used previously to make visualisations of various types of data such as bibliographies and sets of software modules. The canonical force based model, related to solutions of the N body problem, has a computational complexity of O(N/sup 2/) per iteration. The paper presents a stochastically based algorithm of linear complexity per iteration which produces good layouts, has low overhead, and is easy to implement. Its performance and accuracy are discussed, in particular with regard to the data to which it is applied. Experience with application to bibliographic and time series data, which may have a dimensionality in the tens of thousands, is described.

We describe work on the visualization of bibliographic data and, to aid in this task, the application of numerical techniques for multidimensional scaling.