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Investigating selection and reading performance on a mobile phone while walking

Published: 07 September 2010 Publication History

Abstract

More and more people interact with their mobile phone while walking. The presented research analyzes; firstly, the negative effect of walking when considering reading and target selection tasks, such as weaker performance and higher workload. Here, we focused on one-handed interaction with a touch screen whereby the thumb is used as the input device. Secondly, we analyze how these negative effects can be compensated by increasing the text size and the size of the targets to select on the mobile phone. A comparative user study was conducted with 16 participants who performed target acquisition and reading tasks while standing and walking. The results show that whilst performance decreases, cognitive load increases significantly when reading and selecting targets when walking. Furthermore, the results show that the negative effect regarding target selection can be compensated by increasing the target size, but the text reading task did not yield better performance results for a larger text size due to the increased demand for scrolling. These results can be used to inform future designs of mobile user interfaces which might provide a dedicated walking mode.

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  • (2024)Verifying Finger-Fitts Models for Normalizing Subjective Speed-Accuracy BiasesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765328:MHCI(1-24)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
MobileHCI '10: Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services
September 2010
552 pages
ISBN:9781605588353
DOI:10.1145/1851600
  • General Chairs:
  • Marco de Sá,
  • Luís Carriço,
  • Program Chair:
  • Nuno Correia
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 07 September 2010

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Author Tags

  1. mobile interaction
  2. reading
  3. target selection
  4. walking

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MobileHCI '10

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MobileHCI '10 Paper Acceptance Rate 46 of 225 submissions, 20%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 202 of 906 submissions, 22%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)An LLM-driven Transcription Task for Mobile Text Entry StudiesProceedings of the International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia10.1145/3701571.3701586(264-279)Online publication date: 1-Dec-2024
  • (2024)Situational impairment due to walking with conversational versus graphical interfacesProceedings of the 19th International Audio Mostly Conference: Explorations in Sonic Cultures10.1145/3678299.3678307(77-85)Online publication date: 18-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Verifying Finger-Fitts Models for Normalizing Subjective Speed-Accuracy BiasesProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36765328:MHCI(1-24)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2024
  • (2024)GestureShirt: Eyes-Free Interaction while RunningCompanion of the 2024 on ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/3675094.3677557(244-248)Online publication date: 5-Oct-2024
  • (2024)GestureShirt: Exploring Gestures in Front of the Body for Truly Mobile Interaction while RunningAdjunct Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3640471.3680443(1-6)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2024
  • (2024)Gaze on the Go: Effect of Spatial Reference Frame on Visual Target Acquisition During Physical Locomotion in Extended RealityProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642915(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Heads-Up Multitasker: Simulating Attention Switching On Optical Head-Mounted DisplaysProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642540(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)Micro Visualizations on a Smartwatch: Assessing Reading Performance While Walking2024 IEEE Visualization and Visual Analytics (VIS)10.1109/VIS55277.2024.00017(46-50)Online publication date: 13-Oct-2024
  • (2024)User Experience of Visualizations in Motion: A Case Study and Design ConsiderationsIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2024.345631931:1(174-184)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
  • (2024)The impacts of situational visual impairment on usability of touch screensMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-024-18689-983:34(81685-81709)Online publication date: 9-Mar-2024
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