Augmented Reality (AR) has been proved useful to guide operational tasks in professional domains by reducing the shift of attention between instructions and physical objects. Modern smartphones make it possible to use such techniques in everyday tasks, but raise new challenges for the usability of AR in this context: small screen, occlusion, operation "through a lens". We address these problems by adding realtime feedback to the AR overlay. We conducted a controlled experiment comparing AR with and without feedback, and with standard textual and graphical instructions. Results show significant benefits for mobile AR with feedback and reveals some problems with the other techniques.
Personal information management (PIM) is an important and hard research problem. Previous systems suffer inflexibility because of strict hierarchies and immobility. I present an alternative approach, based on associations and moving beyond today's desktop metaphor, to provide ways of managing information while mobile. To illustrate the concepts, I introduce the Associative PDA, a prototype we have designed and evaluated. Finally, I discuss some design principles, which will guide my future work.
Although usability is the core aspect of the whole HCI research field, it still waits for its economic breakthrough. There are some corporations that are famous for their usable products, but small and medium-sized businesses tend to prefer features over usability. We think, the primary reason is that there are no inexpensive methods to at least prevent huge design flaws. We propose the use of test specifications. Once defined for a domain, these allow non-usability experts to systematically verify the usability of a given system without any users involved. We picked a sample domain with some basic tasks and found strong indication of our hypothesis: test specifications can be applied by non-experts and are able to find major design flaws. Future work will extend this method to more complex tasks and evaluate the economic benefit.
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