Multipurpose Public Displays: Can Automated Grouping of Applications and Services Enhance User Experience?

Abstract

Transitioning from bespoke single-purpose displays to multipurpose public interactive displays entails a number of challenges. One challenge is the development of usable mechanisms that allow users to explore the functionality and services on such displays. This article presents a field trial that employs AutoCardSorter, a tool that uses semantic similarity and clustering algorithms, to automatically group the available applications of a public interactive display into categories based on the developer-provided descriptions of each application. The results demonstrate that the grouping generated by AutoCardSorter improved both performance and self-reported usability measures compared to practitioners' existing grouping. In addition, the study investigated the interplay between grouping and interaction modality (i.e., public display vs. desktop). Results tend to support that grouping affects more the user experience with a multipurpose interactive display, but findings were insignificant. This work provides a way for public displays to dynamically update their offered services without sacrificing usability.

Information Architecture: Using Best Merge Method, Category Validity, and Multidimensional Scaling for Open Card Sort Data Analysis

“…A common assumption is that navigation structures are most efficient when content is organized congruent with the common user's mental model of the domain at hand. Card sorting is a widely used method to elicit such mental models and therefore usability designers commonly use it in the process of creating navigation structures (Katsanos et al, 2014;Puerta Melguizo et al, 2012;Schmettow & Sommer, 2016).…”

Supporting Public Participation through Interactive Immersive Public Displays

“…Single-purpose vs multi-purpose displays: according to previous work (Katsanos et al, 2014), if a public display just provides one single "application" or interface, it can be understood as a single-purpose display. In contrast, a multi-purpose public display is a display that provides multiple types of applications or services (e.g., information browsing, games, galleries, and polls) concurrently (Katsanos et al, 2014). The essential difference between single-purpose and multi-purpose public displays is the number of applications on public displays (Kostakos and Ojala, 2013).…”