Multi-users and multi-contextuality – a mobile ... - Semantic Scholar

Multi-users and multi-contextuality – a mobile tourism setting

Carina Ihlström Eriksson1, Maria Åkesson1 1

Halmstad University, P.O. Box 823, 301 18 Halmstad, Sweden {carina.ihlstrom_eriksson, maria.akesson}@ide.hh.se

Abstract. This paper reports from an initial stage of a Swedish project concerning mobile IT support for tourism. From three workshops with actors within the tourism sector we identified barriers and challenges in designing IT support for all phases of the tourist life cycle. Thereafter we designed and evaluated a mobile tourism guide in real life setting with six different user groups. The research question of this paper is: What factors influence the design of mobile services to be used by multi-users in multiple contexts? The initial findings show that indeed there are several design challenges regarding e.g. a) the visibility of the content of the screen when multi-users are simultaneously using the service, b) the audibility of the speaker voice in the service when used in a surrounding with traffic noise, c) providing optional designs for different context, i.e. indoors/outdoors etc, and d) providing personalization options for different group sizes. Keywords: mobility, mobile services, tourism, multi-users, multi-contextuality

1 Introduction Fifty years ago most people never left their hometown. Today, all airline companies routinely accommodate even the youngest children. Our western society has become more and more mobile. As a result of almost everyone owning a mobile phone, e.g. both Italy and Sweden reached a 110% penetration of mobile phones in 2006 [1], we can now be anywhere in the world and still communicate with everybody else and have access to information regardless of where we are. Technological developments allow us to be more mobile and many people use IT while they are “on the move” [2]. People switch between different settings, for example using a desktop at the office or at home, a laptop while traveling by train and a mobile phone or PDA when walking on the street. Henfridsson and Lindgren [3] define this multitude of contexts that users encounter in their everyday mobility as multi-contextuality, i.e. “the co-existence of different physical environments that ubiquitous users encounter” (p.98). In this paper we use the term multi-contextuality to discuss different aspects that influence the use of a mobile service in real life use.

Indeed, this development is of special interest to one of the biggest industries of today, i.e. tourism, since it is based on mobility. 2006 was yet another record year for world tourism with 842 million international arrivals and a 4.5% growth rate compared to the previous year [4]. Wertner [5] describe the tourism experience divided into three phases, i.e. pre trip, on site, and after trip each demanding different kinds of IT support. In the pre-trip phase a stationary computer or a laptop will work for planning and booking the trip. This equipment will also work in the after trip phase when the user shares his or her vacation memories with others through, for example, blogs and photo galleries. But there is also a need for supporting the tourists on site with mobile services, e.g. guide services and local tourist information. However, to make a mobile tourist service a success several factors ranging from technical and security issues to user interface need to be considered [6]. Tourists are a very heterogeneous group of customers having different tastes, experiences and motivations concerning traveling, which influence the design of a successful mobile tourism service. Furthermore, tourism is often a group activity which occurs in different contexts [7], implying a need to design for “multi-users”. In this paper we define multi-users as a heterogeneous group of users with different ages, interests, habits etc, jointly interacting with a service. This paper reports from the initial stage of a Swedish project concerning mobile IT support for tourism, with partners representing the region, five tourist agencies and several companies within the tourist trade in Halland, a county on the Swedish west coast with well-known beaches and golf courses. In this project we have performed three workshops with these partners in order to define barriers and challenges for designing IT support for all phases of the tourist’s lifecycle. Thereafter we focused on the on site phase and developed a mobile tourist guide prototype which was evaluated in a field test. Inspired by the work of Brown and Chalmers [7] who focused on the collaborative nature of the tourist experience and argued for better support for this in systems, we formulated the research question of this paper: What factors influence the design of mobile services to be used by multi-users in multiple contexts? The aim of this paper is to exemplify problems associated with the design of mobile tourism services related to multi-users and multi-contextuality aspects and to discuss the corresponding design challenges.

2 Related research Tourism has attracted a lot of researchers in several research fields such as economics [8], culture [9], CSCW [7] and human computer interaction [10]. Lately, special attention has been paid to mobile tourism systems where prototype services have been developed and evaluated [11]. Some examples tourism systems are Cyberguide [12], CRUMPET [11] and GUIDE [10]. CRUMPET allows the user to request information about tourist attractions or guided tours. The system could also alert the user about interesting attractions [11] and the GUIDE system offers similar functions [10]. Special attention

has been paid to usability aspects of mobile interactive guides [13; 14] and social and technical pitfalls in designing tourist guide systems [15]. Schwinger et al. [11] has evaluated nine different mobile tourism guides that offered map-oriented interaction according to an evaluation framework that considers context, adoption and customization. They argue e.g. that “people tend to go sightseeing in groups” (p. 16) and suggest that future systems to consider tourism as a social activity. Furthermore, Brown and Chalmers [7] have performed an ethnographic study of how city tourists organize their activities and describe how they work in groups and collaborate around digital tour guides and maps, i.e. they focus on the collaborative nature of the tourist experience and present design implications for tourist technologies, arguing for better support of this joint experience. Designing for mobile devices is challenging in many ways. The small-screen interfaces have attracted the interest of many scholars [16; 17]. Marcus [17] refer to this as babyface design and list the challenges to include “limited spatial and color resolution, limited font choice, limited space, and information visualization in the form of miniature charts, maps, and diagrams, particularly table/list navigation” (p. 514). Dunlop and Brewster state that mobile devices “share a common problem: attempting to give users access to powerful computing services and resources through small interfaces, which typically have tiny visual displays, poor audio interaction facilities and limited input techniques” [18, p 235]. They argue that designers of mobile systems face five challenges, i.e. designing for mobility, designing for a wide audience, designing for limited input/output devices, designing for (incomplete and varying) context information and designing for users multitasking at levels unfamiliar to most desktop users [18].

3 Method We started out with performing three workshops with managers of five tourist agencies and representatives for regional development of Halland, a county at the Swedish west coast in order to better understand the different aspects of tourism. We focused on identifying barriers and challenges in designing IT support for all phases of the tourist life cycle [5] (hereafter referred to as pre-trip, in-trip and post-trip), but we also identified different common groups of multi-users. Several techniques were used at these workshops, such as brainstorming [19], scenario building [20], image boarding [21], and story telling [22]. The output from these workshops was used as input to the second activity. The second activity was the development and evaluation of a mobile tourism guide. In an iterative process with students, researchers and project partners we went from developing paper sketches to a high-fi prototype of a mobile service implemented in a mobile phone (see section 4.2). For example, at the end of the second workshop the participants were asked to fill out a small questionnaire with questions regarding their experience of the prototype and their preferences of the service to be, which was considered when revising the prototype.

The mobile systems allows for a field-based evaluation approach, even though not easy to perform [16] as the data collection such as video recording, shadowing and think-aloud protocols may be difficult to obtain [23]. Kjeldskov et al. [14] used four different evaluation approaches and state that they identified unique problems in their field test compared to the other approaches, e.g. lack of social comfort when using the device in public. Furthermore, Duh et al. [24] conclude that they found more types and occurrences of usability problems in the field than in the laboratory when comparing results from different evaluation methods. With this in mind we decided to follow the recommendations of Kjeldskov et al. [14], i.e. that researcher should continue to collect data in the field, and decided to test the prototype in the field, in this case in the city center. As one of the intentions with the evaluation was to study multi-user interaction with the prototype, we used 5 different groups of people (two groups with three persons and three groups with two persons) and one single person for comparison (Table 1). They were all between 19 and 29 years of age, representing a segment interesting for the region (see section 4.1). Table 1. Test respondents. Group 1 2 3 4 5 6

Respondent 1 Female 25 years Male 22 years Male 20 years Male 23 years Male 28 years Female 27 years

Respondent 2 Female 29 years Male 24 years Male 21 years Female 19 years

Respondent 3 Male 22 years Male 20 years

Female 23 years

The test was divided into two different parts. The first part was task oriented, and the respondents got six different tasks to solve, every task with a specific usability aspect in mind. An example of a task was “Use the service to find the way to the Picasso park. Use the information provided by the service and answer the following question…”. The respondents were asked to “think aloud” [25] and were videotaped and voice recorded during the tests. The respondents were also shadowed to observe those parts of the interface causing problems and how they interacted around the prototype. The second part consisted of semi-structured interviews [26] with all respondents after the tests. The interview guide was divided into themes related to interface, device and interaction. We used a detailed grounded analysis [27] of the data collected in the field to produce a list of usability problems concerning interface, interactivity and device. Though, the analysis made for this paper specially focused on identifying usability and use problems concerning multi-users and multi-contextuality.

4 Empirical activities In this section we will present our findings according to our empirical activities, i.e. a) the outcome of the workshops, b) the development of the prototype, and c) the results from the field-test. 4.1 Workshops The workshops were divided into three themes, each corresponding to a phase in the tourists’ life cycle, i.e. pre-trip, in-trip and post-trip. During these workshops we identified three concepts for creating target groups for tourism in the region (Figure 1), of which most represent multi-user groups as described in the introduction.

Figure 1. Concepts of target groups.

• • •

Age groups: families with small children, families with teenagers, senior citizens, families with elderly people, couple without children, singles, youngsters, single parents etc. Interest groups: golfers, yachtsmen, walkers, cyclists, sun-worshippers, bathers, riders, people with interest in nature etc. Social groups: cultural groups, income groups, handicapped etc.

To illustrate these different target group concepts and their special needs we performed an image-board exercise (Figure 2). Thereafter we let the group build scenarios around the tourism activity of four target groups selected by the participants, i.e. a couple or group between 20-30 years, families with small children, rich senior citizens, and a gang of buddies in their forties. Furthermore, we identified different problems Figure 2. Image-boarding. in providing IT support for all phases of the tourists’ life-cycle. Many of the problems identified could be traced to four problem areas, i.e. a) too many heterogeneous expensive systems that is hard to integrate, b) lack of IT competence, c) lack of time, and d) problems with online marketing. We established that we initially should focus on the in-trip phase since it was the least developed regarding IT support. We decided to build and evaluate a local tourist

guide. This prototype was also evaluated by the participants in the second workshop before making the final evaluation. Five out of eight considered it easy to navigate the information in the prototype. Some adjustments were made from this evaluation. 4.2 Prototype Initially it was decided that the mobile tourist guide should be built on a map metaphor in line with the recommendations of Cheverest et al. [10], combining the map and guide book as suggested by [7]. We decided on incorporating icons to facilitate interaction, as key advantages of icons is that they take up little space which is essential on small screens and if well designed they would be intuitively recognized [28]. We started out with initial sketches on paper before building the high-fi prototype for a mobile phone. Inspired by earlier mobile tourist guide research [10; 12] we decided to incorporate two different tours of places worth seeing in the town, to meet the different interests of potential tourists. We used material provided by the tourist agency. The user made a choice by clicking on an icon always present in the middle of the menu at the bottom of the screen (Figure 3). In the menu a map icon to the left was also present, allowing the user to return to the map at any given time. When a tour was selected a squared layer including the information about the different sights was placed on top of the map, which was still visible (Figure 4). This information could consist of a text, pictures or audio. Text was presented as an ingress allowing the user to choose to read the full text. Audio was indicated with icons (Figure 5). Every choice made by the user provided a new squared layer with information that was overlaid on the map and could be removed by clicking the X in the top right corner (Figure 4). When starting the prototype, initial instructions about icons, arrows etc. were given (Figure 5) and a help function was always available in the menu.

Figure 3. Map

Figure 4. Information square

Figure 5. Instructions

4.3 Evaluation We start this section by a short summary of the evaluation concerning interface, interaction and device. Thereafter we discuss the results from a multi-user and multicontextuality perspective.

Regarding the interaction with the prototype, none of the groups experienced any problems with the menu but half of the groups had problems with the icons. Especially the arrow that indicated more reading was criticized. One of the respondents said that it had to be more distinguished, otherwise it could be mistaken for a building on the map. Another respondent suggested to combine the icon with additional text, e.g. “read more”. Also the correctness of the icon that symbolized a point of interest (POI) was discussed by the respondents. Otherwise the general opinion was that the structure was good and intuitive. The map metaphor was the foundation for the interface. All groups but one used the map to orient themselves and to get directions for the next POI. They either used the street names or the marked landmarks. A few of the respondents suggested that a scale on the map would be helpful to indicate the distance between the next POI. Some of the respondents stated that it was hard to read the small text, and some suggested that the font size should be adjustable. All but one of the groups did not experience problems with interacting with the device through the pen. However, several complains where maid according to the sound, which was perceived as too low. Several respondents had suggestions and opinions about the actual mobile tourist service. They appreciated the opportunity to be able to choose from their own interests but requested more information and location about e.g. restaurants, shops, hotels and events. Also a GPS-function was discussed as an improvement of the service by some of the respondents. During the interviews a few of the respondents pointed out the importance of designing the service to meet the needs of persons with a sight or hearing handicap. The multi-user perspective mainly concerned interaction, information presentation and the device output. Interacting with the prototype as a group sometimes led to problems such as one respondent wanting to read the text at the same time as another wanting to hear the speaker voice. There was a request to design the service so that this could be done simultaneously. The amount of text was also experienced as a problem when using the service in a group. The respondents felt it hard to read the text all at once and sometimes let the device go around in the group, one reading after the other leading to the others having to wait. Others read the text simultaneously, often by looking over the shoulders of the one holding the device. One respondent said: “if we are two I prefer to read, but if we were several one needs to use ones little ear”. However, the sound of the device was experienced as too low resulting in the respondents standing or sitting very closely together in order to hear the sound. Two groups tried to raise the volume, which was already set to the highest level by default, and expressed their disappointment of having problem hearing what was told. In some cases they abandoned the audio and let one of the respondents in the group read the text out loud instead. The multi-contextuality perspective mainly concerned the surroundings and weather conditions. Several indications of disturbing sounds from the surroundings where experienced, e.g. sounds from bypassing cars and motor cycles, church bells, music played at the town square, and bird calls. When the respondents chose the speaker voice in the prototype it was frequently drowned by the surrounding sounds. When one of the respondents started an audio-file a motor cyclist passed by and the

respondent thought that the sound did not work and was surprised as he heard the speaker voice when the disturbing noise disappeared. The weather conditions changed during the evaluations. At one occasion the respondents experienced a few drops of rain and were concerned about the device that hosted the prototype. At another occasion the sun was shining creating reflexes at the screen making it difficult for the respondents to view the content on the screen. One respondent remarked that she needed to turn the device hold by the other person to view the screen due to the sunlight and that this made it a disadvantage to be two persons using the service at once. Two other groups also experienced problems due to the sunlight resulting in the respondents pulling the device from the one that hold it or making a cover of a piece of paper. Some of the respondents felt like they missed out on watching the surroundings as they were too focused on the prototype and remarked that it spoiled their social interaction.

5 Discussion and conclusion In this paper we have focused on a multi-user and multi-contextuality perspective on mobile services by developing and evaluating a mobile tourism guide. We started out by discussing the stages of the tourist life cycle [5] in relation to IT support needed. Brown and Chalmers [7] argue that all phases involve group activities, indicating that the multi-user approach is also relevant in the pre- and post-trip phases. In the pre-trip phase several users could gather around the computer to book their vacation and a system should be able to attract and support for example all family members’ interests. The post-trip phase also includes multi-user activities as the group reassemblies to share their memories and look at photographs. This could be supported by multi-user diaries and photo ablums. As Brown and Chalmers [7] suggest, pre-visiting can also take place during the in-trip phase, as the tourist gather information about places and planning what to do, which certainly also is a multi-user activity. We have empirically shown that there are problems related to multi-users and multi-contextuality perspectives of mobile service design. Factors concerning the multi-user perspective mainly related to interaction, information presentation and device output whereas factors concerning multi-contextuality mostly regarded the influence of surroundings and weather conditions. The design challenges identified could be summarized to regard the following areas: a) visibility of content, b) audibility of speaker voice, c) indoors/outdoors use and d) personalization. The visibility of the content of the screen when multiple users are simultaneously using the service was regarded as a problem by the respondents. Suggestions by the respondents were to provide the possibility to enlarge the text. There were suggestions about the map, e.g. to include a scale to indicate distances and to add more information about street names and landmarks. The use of icons should be carefully selected to secure the understanding of all users.

The audibility of the service was considered a problem. The speaker was drowned in the surrounding traffic noise etc, causing the users to tightly group together in order to apprehend the story told. The respondents would like to be able to increase the volume, which is a problem belonging to the device and not the service itself, and be able to listen to the audio and read the text simultaneously. There were also remarks about the expression of the speaker voice. There was no consensus to a preferred voice as the opinions varied from wanting much feeling to preferring a “dead voice” as in a switch board. As indicated by previous research [7; 12], the service could be used both indoors and outdoors and should be designed accordingly. Some respondents took their time to examine and learn the service before they went and used it at locations and remarked upon the possibility of additional content. The design for indoor use could involve additional content with more extensive reading and tour tips. As indicated by some of the respondents, the size of the group also influences the design of the service, indicating the need to provide personalization options for different group sizes or target groups. As the respondents suggested, additional information regarding restaurants, shops, hotels and cultural events would improve the service. This additional information could also be packaged according to age, interest and social aspects as suggested as the three concepts for potential target groups in the workshops. This research has contributed to the area of mobile system design by adding the multi-user and multi-contextuality aspects to the design challenges to be met in future research. Future research could also involve personalization to special target groups in tourism. Acknowledgments. We would like to thank to the students Joel Utgren and Adam Wikström, who participated in the project, for the development and testing of the mobile tourist guide presented in this paper.

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