20100926 - Lee, D&D of User Interfaces for Small Screen Computers

The design and development of user interfaces for small screen computers by Lee, Kwang Bok, Ph.D., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 2003 , 175 pages; AAT 3098862 My Interest: 1) Usability testing. Note: His write-up on Usability Testing is extensive. 2) Problems of small screen computers. Action: To read specific parts of Dissertation in future. Problem Statement The increasing availability of small size computers, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), Palm pilots or handheld devices, with the ability to transmit information over wireless networks has enormously enhanced opportunities for researchers. However, these devices have difficulty displaying information because of their hardware constraints, such as small screens, small storage, low speed, and low power. Research Goal This thesis introduces two methods for solving these problems. Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUI) First, providing zoomable user interfaces (ZUI) introduces many zooming applications such as a file zoom, a focus zoom, and a search zoom which are based on geometric and semantic zooming methods. The file zooming applications use dynamic zoom-in and zoom-out functions for visualizing large amounts of information on the PDA screen. The focus zooming applications are based on a magnifying glass lens that is a 2D visualization for large rectangular presentations that allows a user to quickly focus on a part of the PDA screen. Finally, the thesis describes the search zooming applications for easy recognition and comparison of the content of files on the screen. Adaptive User Interfaces (AUI) With the proliferation of PDAs, people are using such small devices to access the web; however, the web is not accommodating such access. For small device users, we introduce adaptive user interfaces (AUI) based on an efficient method for extracting readable documents from XML-based files, which will be used for information streams for mobile Internet access. We design a selector for handling information streams to extract the customized information based on the user request for the small devices. The selector's attributes can be adapted from the XML documents, and then works on translating information streams into the new file that will be displayed on the devices. Also, the selector has visual menu interfaces so that users can easily choose each attribute according to their preferences. This is developed to devise an efficient method for the small devices' problems. Usability Testing Furthermore, we prepare usability testing for the applications in order to find usability problems, and then we offer suggestions for improving the usability of the applications. The prototypes and implementations of these approaches will be also provided in this thesis. Comments: Softcopy Dissertation is scanned version; cannot copy and paste; difficult to blog about it. 1.3.3 Usability testing Chapter 5 Usability Testing for Small Screen Computers Page 52 – 87 Content (the entire Chapter 5) looks very good…for my reading. Must read!