Designing for a multidevice environment– A descriptive case Jarle Petter Kasbo, Hans Gallis and Jo Herstad Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
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Abstract. In this paper we are focusing on designing for a multidevice environment. The paper presents preliminary results and describes topics from the Knowmobile project. The Knowmobile project is concerned with mobile opportunities for medical students at the University of Oslo. The multidevice paradigm in Knowmobile is enlighted, and the paper reports theoretical and empirical data on cross publishing. Cross publishing is a term that refers to one publication that is presented on various devices such as a book, a PDA, on the Internet and WAP and so on. The paper report Cross publishing on multiple devices is an approach to design for a multidevice environment.
1 Introduction This paper is related to Multidevice in Knowmobile— Does one size fit all? (Gallis, Kasbo & Herstad 2001), submitted to the IRIS’24 Conference in Norway 2001 and tries to illustrate an approach for designing in the multidevice paradigm, which is presented in that paper. This paper omits the detailed description of the ongoing Knowmobile project, and we therefore recommend the reader to read Gallis et al. (2001) to achieve the full context of this paper. We are using the term multidevice environment throughout this paper. A multidevice environment is a context where multiple devices are used to solve one or more tasks. These
devices varies in size, weight, portability and so on. The multidevice environment implies the multidevice paradigm. A device is defined as an equipment which you can interact with and gain information from (books, notepad, PDA, mobile phone etc.). The multidevice paradigm occurs when a user is interacting with several devices or terminals in a particular context. Using different devices to solve different tasks. Gallis et al. (2001) present a scenario which illustrates the multidevice paradigm in the context of a medical student in his practical training at a hospital. The same paper states that there are five problem areas are related to the multidevice paradigm (see figure 1).
Figure 1. The multidevice paradigm consists of problems connected to harmonization, standardization, synchronization, design and use • The use of the devices in the different contexts - what are the users needs, and how are these needs fulfilled. • How to design for a multidevice environment. • Synchronization: How and where can we access a network or a terminal; what and where is it possible to store all the information; what kind of technologies for connecting devices together are available; how can synchronization make interaction and communication more effective; what applications should be synchronized and which do we need; where and when is it possible to synchronize; how can we split personal information from more community oriented information and how should we upgrade and change different technologies without locking ourselves into the technology. • Harmonization. Is synchronization the only solution in the multidevice paradigm? Could the use be harmonized by introducing practical solutions or work routines in the way that several artifacts can live side by side in a multidevice environment? Harmonization leads to a organized use.
• Standardization, that is, the need of using standards in designing for multidevice environment (implementation standards, design standards, protocols, communication standards e.g.) This paper is presenting a prototype of a information service for medical students in their practical training that are still under construction - highlighting how one of the problem areas related to the multidevice paradigm is affecting the solution, that is, design. The rest of this paper is organized in the following way: First we present the context of the information service. Then, the method for this project is outlined. Further, we give an overview of theories related to our project, and then a discussion around system development in a multidevice environment, with focus on the terms use and design. The paper ends with a conclusion related to designing in the multidevice environment, and a section that descibes further work.
2 Context As a part of the ongoing project Knowmobile carried through by Intermedia, University of Oslo, we are focusing on medical students in their practical training at hospitals in southeast Norway. The full proposal name of the Knowmobile project is “Knowledge access in distributed training. Mobile opportunities for medical students”. The project is a research and development project exploring just-in-time access and functionality with Internet based educational resources (Knowmobile n.d., Gallis et al. 2001). In the tenth semester the medical students carry through a six week training partly at hospitals and partly at a practitioners office. The students recieve counseling from an experienced doctor during the training (one-to-one mapping). The guidance consists of practical tips, medical information and other kinds of information. During this training the students utilize a range of litterature in addition to the tutor (doctor). In dialogue with medical students, we were told that they are using litterature related to the study, medical magazines, online databases and medical handbooks. Some of this litterature they have in their training office, while they are carrying some medical handbooks with them in the hospital/ at the practitioners. Examples of handbooks they are utilizing are Felleskatalogen (Catalogue describing medicines and doses), Medisinsk h˚andbok (Medical Handbook) and Metodebok for turnusleger (Book of methodology for practitioners at hospitals). These handbooks are intended for use during the training, and are frequently utilized. 25 of the medical students at the University of Oslo will recieve handheld devices intended for use in their tenth semesters practical training from fall 2001. The prototype presented here will be further developed (se section 8 for details about further work) and implemented
on these devices, in addition to a portal on the Internet. How this information service is used, is to be evaluated throughout the semester starting fall 2001.
3 Method 3.1 Expert consulting The initiative of the project described in this paper is by dr.med Lars Aabakken. Aabakken had experienced some issues that could be problematic for the students in their training; lack of access to the needed information in training when and where they needed it, the handbooks they are carrying around during training are heavy and annoying to wear in their pockets. When we recently carried through interviews with 6 medical students, they could confirm that these issues exists. In collaboration with Aabakken, we then decided to make one of the medical handbooks accessible on handheld devices, desktops and laptops so that students could access information from multiple devices - either stationary og portable. In this way, the information could be accessible ’everywhere’ and ’everytime’. It was also argued that if the student have access to computerbased publications of the book, it will be more easy and faster to search for special terms or expressions, especially if the terms are organised in a database.We also discussed functionality of this electronic version of the handbook. We will come back to these features in section 5.3 and 8. We agreed to make a prototype based on Metodeh˚andbok for turnusleger by Lars Aabakken and associates (Aabakken, Lysengen & Røttingen 1998), and we recieved a Word document with the content and presentation of this handbook.
3.2 Scenario In order to explore the use of the information service, a scenario based on the interviews and expert consluting, is presented below. The scenario is also made in order to examine potential possibilities and as a tool for communication between system developers and users (Carrol 1995). A medical student scenario: Nora is a medical student in her tenth semester at the University of Oslo and in this semester she is in practical training at ’Rikshospitalet’. In her second week in practical training, Nora is facing a patient at a consultation she is responsible for, who has problems with his stomack. Nora has seen similar symphtoms earlier, but is a bit unsecure of the diagnosis. Nora is asking questions about the patients digestion and if he has other problems. She gently feels the patients stomack to discover any hard areas. Nora asumes that the patient has Ulserous Colitis, that is, infection of Large Intestine, but isn’t sure. On her PDA, Nora
has a medical handbook describing rutines and procedures in various medical areas, and is helpful to set the right diagnosis. Nora searches and finds the needed information on her PDA. The patient is a bit suspicious to the PDA, and ask what Nora is doing. Nora explaines that this is a medical service that gives her access to medical information written by expert. Nora turns the palmtop to the patient and shows him what and how. Suddenly the battery of the PDA goes flat, and the reading session is interupted. In the same room there is a laptop with Internet connection through WLAN. Nora logs in on the laptop and access the website with the handbook. She search and find the same paragraph, and finds the needed information. Nora returns to the patient, continue the examination and is now ensured that the right diagnosis for the patient is Ulserous Colitis. Nora is not completely sure of the right treatment for this diagnosis, but the service developed supplies links from diagnosis to medical treatment and appropriate medical drugs.
3.3 Analyzing the book As an prototype we focused on a chapter from Metodebok for Turnusleger, shown in figure 2. The handbook is structured based on medical areas; Heart/blood-vessel and Stom-
Figure 2. Metodebok for Turnusleger ack/intestine e.g. Each chapter can be divided into three areas: • Journal. • Symptoms. • Procedures. These areas have no technical differenses, only by content. Each area is divided in different themes. The chapter of ’Stomack/Intestine’ was chosen on the basis that it is well structured, and has less figures, images and tables than other chapters in the handbook. The structure in this current chapter is shown in figure 3.
Figure 3. The structure of Stomack/Intestine
4 Supported terms of mobility and mobile computing In this section we will highlight theory of mobility related to our case. We will here argue that our service supports mobile computing, and also state that the multidevice paradigm is within the area of mobile computing. The terms just-in-time (JIT) and just-in-place (JIP) is widely used in the Knowmobile contexts. A quick search on the Internet returns pages related to hats for ladies, electronic article delivery services e.g. In our context these terms envisions the ability a user have to access information when they need it (JIT) and where they need it (JIP). Consider the trouble Nora fronted in her patient consultation (section 3.2). She could access the needed information at the spot and when she needed it mostly. In addition, when the battery on her handheld turned flat, she could access the same information on a laptop in the room, which is both JIT and JIP access to the information. Local mobility is mobility within a restricted area, like a room or a building (Bellotti & Bly 1996). E.g.; Nora was able to roam locally with the information at hand. The motivation for local mobility is use of common resources and the users need for communication. Related to our scenario, this is illustrated by Nora’s use of the resources supplied on different devices, which all students have access to. Kristoffersen & Ljungberg (1998) introduces wandering, traveling and visiting (modalities) in order to illustrate mobility. Wandering means in our case that a student in training can move around at the hospital with access to the information. Travelling is focusing on enabling a student to use the service while traveling from one spot to another. Visiting points
out the ability to use a service even though the user isn’t oin his/her regular environment. As an example, a student doing his/her training at different hospitals or even visiting patients at home. The prototype we are presenting in this paper supports all these modalities. Our prototype also supports personal and terminal mobility, as well as session mobility. Person mobility is the ability of a user to access services from any terminal at any location, including invitations to join sessions (Thanh 1997, Kristiansen 1997). Terminal mobility is the ability of a terminal to change physical location. This includes terminals which can continue to support services while moving, and those that cannot (Hegeman & Abarca 1997). Session mobility enables a user to continue a work session in a different physical location, on another device and another time (Thanh 1997). What then, is the definition of a session? If we look at the reading of a document as a session, our prototype supports session mobility. Nora is able to continue searching/reading the information on the laptop when her handheld is down. Thus, she cannot directly find the same paragraph as she was reading on the handheld. Luff & Heath (1996) suggests that the medical consultation, like other activities which are largely office bound, points to a form of mobility not normaly associated with new technologies. They call it micro-mobility. Micro-mobility is the way in which an artefact can be mobilised and manipulated for various purposes around a relatively circumscribed, or ’at hand’, domain (Luff & Heath 1996). Analogous to a piece of paper, Nora can gesticaulate, rotate, share and show information to patients, co-students and doctors with a handheld terminal. In the context of a patient consulation, Nora is able to face the patient, taking notes during the consultation and in this way transmit authority to the patient. This is restricted by using a desktop, which lacks the ability to support micro-mobility. The teory above is specificly related to this papers context and use of our information solution. Concerning theory related to the multidevice paradigm in general, we refer to Gallis et al. (2001).
5 System development for multidevice environment This section is discussing the design in the multidevice paradigm presented in section 1 and in Gallis et al. (2001) in relation to the project presented in this paper. In the first subsection, we present a design approach for multidevice environments in general. The solution presented in subsection 5.2 is the one we have used in our prototype. The approach here is XML-based cross publishing. We will argue that this is an appropriate design approach for multidevice environments. This arguementation will be continued in section 6, where we also discuss how this solution is approprate for the Knowmobile context.
5.1 Designing for multidevice environment
In the multidevice environment, designers are forced to design the information, not a graphic presentation (Hjelm 2000). The different devices in use in a mobile environment have different size of screens, processors and capasity. An application or a web-site packed with graphical details as flashy, graphical advertises are therefore going to be presented differently by the devices and possibly be difficult to read and navigate. Which is more important, a good presentation, or that the user are able to read and find the information needed (Hjelm 2000)? User interface design compromises two set of design decisisons: One that determines what users can do through the interface; logical interaction between human and computer, and one that detemines how they can do it; user interface appearance. In the mobile environment, the second set is less important than the first (Hjelm 2000). Transforming information into the mobile and multidevice environment can be done in three ways (Hjelm 2000): Resizing means sqeezing a web-page into a smaller screen. You simply take something designed for a 21-inch screen and try to present it on a small, hendheld device. Hjelm (1999) argues that this is the least option, while H˚akon Wium Lie argued in a lecture at Department of Informatics at the University of Oslo, March 2001 (Lie 2001), that resizing was the solution to this problem. Wium Lie based his argument on the Operabrowsers ability to resize a web-page successfully. Reformatting the information means adapting it to the current device, but without any changes to the content. This can be done using style sheets, as for example Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), which suits the presentation capabilities of the device. When a query is reformulated, the information is extracted from the resource to be presented on a handheld device. In this case the resource should not be a manuscript, but a compound object consisting information. Hjelm (1999) defines compound objects as objects which is composed of other objects, but can be broken down into other object until they correspond to chunck of information - the units of perception, the lexia - smallest meaningful units. Handheld devices which have limited processing capacity and even more limited memory, may not be able to meet the requirements for downloading the entire document (Hjelm 2000). One user may have many different views of the same information set, and many users will have access to it in different ways. To provide that the information is presented in a meaningfull way when we are in the multidevice environment, we have to separate the presentation form the content (Hjelm 1999). If the information is formatted for a specific presentation method, it becomes meaningless in other presentation methods. But the information is not formatted, only structured, it wil be meaningful in any presentation.
5.2 A possible solution by XML-based cross publishing An application, especially a browser-based application like an information service, consists of three parts: The semantic layer, which holds the content, the syntax layer, which concerns the structure of the information and creates the user’s sequence of interaction with the information (the grammar of the language for interaction with the site), and the lexical layer, where the semantic and syntactic information is further refined to concrete data types that have to be provided for interaction (audio, video, spatial, and so on) (Hjelm 2000). Related to the XML environment, the semantic layer correspond to the XML file, which holds the content, the syntax layer correspond to the DTD, and the lexical layer to the XSL file. XML is a way of making sure that all data follows the same rules. We declare what elements we are using in the document type description (DTD), and what types of data the elements will contain. Now that the content is declared and structured valid to XML, and we can start think about how to present this information into different types of terminals. As pointed out above, designing a presentation for multiple devices can be done using stylesheets. We used XSL (XML Style Language) for the presentation on all the devices. The XML and DTD for the current chapter could be constant, only the XSL had to be modified for the various devices, so that the presentation were customized to the screen size, memory and processing capacity. In terms of resizing, reformatting and reformulating, we reformatted for Web and PDAs (ebook and AvantGo), while reformulating for Wap because of the limitations of the terminal. In the continuation of this project, where we will implement the whole book and with extended functionality (se section 8), we asume that more reformulation will have to be done.
Implementation We worked out a model of a XML processor which illustrates our approach (figure 4). The circles in this model illustrates different file-formats which is used or generated during the process. To present the information on different types of terminals the three files XML, DTD and XSL are combined. Each terminal will have an according XSL-file which determine how the information should be presented. To specify these XSL-files the programmers need knowledge about the terminals used. As the model points out, we focused on desktops/laptops, PDA’s and WAP enabled mobile phones in this project. We chose to carry through a vertical prototyping; to reduce the number of features and implement a range of functionality of those chosen (Hjelm 2000).
Content
XML
Meta structure
DTD
Presentation
XSL
XML processor
HTML
XSL
AvantGo HTML
XSL
E-book
XSL
WML
desktop/ HTML laptop
AvantGo
layout complexity
pda
E-book
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Figure 4. A graphical presentation of our approach
5.3 The result The chapter Stomack/intestine is available on the following devices: • Handheld terminals like HP Jornada, iPaq and Palm through an AvantGo version (AvantGo n.d.) and ebook version, which can be accessed offline, that is, the dokuments are stored on the PDA. • Desktop and laptop through the Internet, which requires online mode or the HTML document downloaded on the device. • WAP enabled mobile phones through WML. Requires access to a WML server. In addition to the content being presented on the device, there is a limited functionality in navigation in the information space. Se section 8 for planned functionality in the further work.
6 Discussion In this section we discuss how and why the XML-based cross publishing approach is suitable for designing for the multidevice environment. In addition we question the usability of a information service like this for the medical students in Knowmobile.
In a multidevice environment, there is a range of different devices used to solve or support the users tasks (Gallis et al. 2001). By XML-based cross publishing, the content is separated from the presentation, and the information is presented on the device combining XML, XSL and DTD. In the XSL files, the designer takes in consideration the features of the different devices, and makes the presentation suitable for that device (Hjelm 2000). XML is a well-known and widely used standard (W3C n.d.) that ease problems around incompability concerned presentation and synchronization, since all devices are supporting XML. This prototype is a solution for harmonization; synchronization is not compulsory because the documents are stored on the PDA’s. The use of desktop/laptop or WAP can be parallell to the PDAs and is compatible, as well. We have already presented a scenario in section 3.2 which illustrates an example of how the prototype could be used in a students practical training. We cannot know if, and how this information service is going to be used. But, we can argue that our prototype is suitable for its intent from a theoretical point of view: Consider the context; students need various information just-in-time and just-in-place, and are dependent of being mobile throughout the day. Section 4 discuss our prototype’s mapping to terms of mobile computing and mobility, and we stated that the prototype supported a range of these terms. On a theoretical basis, it then seems like our service could fulfill the needs of students to have access to needed information. Of course, our prototype has not all the needed content implemented yet, nor all the functionallity. This theoretical basement is not sufficient to predict how and if the service will be used. A range of other factor play a role here: • How quickly can the needed information be accessed, compared to a printed book? • What does this service superior the printed book? Is presentation of the information enough, or does it require additional functionality? • How experienced the students are with use of technical equipment • Training in usage • The students motivation to use the service • The surroundings reactions on the students use of a handheld terminal • Availability of devices in the context • The usability of the service and usability of the device in other Situations and contexts (off duty e.g.) • Unknown bi-effects
Brown & Duguid (1994) discuss borderline issues, that is, the use of artefacts in design and how people’s context and surroundings affect how they utilize artefacts. Some of the issues raised in this article can give guidelines to ease some of the problems listed above. Though, we will not discuss this issue further here. It could be a topic for another paper in the multidevice paradigm area.
7 Conclusion In this paper we have presented the design of a prototype for an information service intended for use in the Knowmobile project. The designing activity in a multidevice environment has to concider the multidevice paradigm, and the problem areas use, synchronization, harmonization and standardization related to the multidevice paradigm. We state that designing for a multidevice environment are sharing a range of similarities with designing mobile information services, which is presented in Hjelm (2000). An approach like the XML-based cross publishing is a design well fit for designing information services in the multidevice environment.
8 Further work In the continuation of the project described in this article, we will continue within several areas. We have categorized the work in content, implementation and functionaliy. Content As pointed out, this project has so far been focusing on one chapter of Metodebok for turnusleger. Further, we will identify the structure of, and implement the whole book. If there are rescources available, we will implement other handbooks, litterature which are critical in the medical students training, and medical databases as well. Implementation The chapter Stomack/Intestine has a simple presentation, without pictures or tables, which made it easy to reformat the presentation for multiple devices. In other chapter, or other books, this may not be so straight forward. Some of the content have to be reformulated according to the devices. Functionality In our prototype we have focused on the presentation of information within a multidevice environment, while the interaction with the document, searching and detailed linking in the document, and between documents is omitted. In the continuation of the project we will expand the functionality in these areas. Internal linking between terms and themes in the document will make it easier to navigate and find the information needed. Searching the document by a query based on indexed terms and themes, would additionally ease the
searching. Linking between documents, Metodehandbok for turnusleger and related documents as Felleskatalogen, medical databases e.g., is features that would expand the usability of the service. This would for instance support the students requirements of getting information of what medicines fits to diagnosis.
9 Acknowledgements Thanks to: Marit Andreassen and Anders Breivik for letting us use material from our common project, and for constructive discussions during the project - so far.
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