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Article Reviews: Thoughts on using physical tags with mobile users (view:all)
posted Thursday, 3 April 2008
The following are drawn from two articles;
1. Requesting pervasive services by touching RFID tags. Riekki, Salminen and Alakarppa (2006) Pervasive Computing
2. Reach out and touch: using NFC and 2D barcodes for service discovery and interaction with mobile devices (2007) O'Neill, Thompson, Garzonis and Warr, Proceedings of the 5th International Pervasive 2007 conference.
These two articles focus on the usability aspects of this technology. There are a couple of key points which can be derived from their results. Firstly, users like a visual clue as to what the tag is going to do. Riekki et al., propose that users feel more secure with enhanced tags (include a visual indicator of the outcome) as it gives information about the expected system behaviour. Although they did observe that people did interpret the icons differently, I.e., an envelope was interpreted as a SMS on a phone, but an email on a computer. Also, in managing the visual tags they preferred a few tags, so perhaps a general tag, and a couple of enhanced tags. Otherwise it became tag overload and utility decreased. The final result was that people weren't comfortable with swiping tags with their phones in public.
Some thoughts for the 2D barcode project at Bath is that we need to try to automate a visual clue to the activity of the tag when we generate the tag. This needs to be simple, so focus on the general tag - which contains text information, and a SMS, phone, and web icon for those actions.
The article by O'Neill et al., supported some of these usability issues, in particular tag overload on a physical space. However, this article added dvalue in terms of the the support implications for the roll out. They suggest that there is no benefit on introducing initial training for users on reading 2D barcodes on final performance. This was because of factors such as "users' previous familiarity with camerphones, and partly due to the obvious location of the camera on the phone and the visual feedback on the display of the camera image". That said they did provide an information pack including background, how and why you might want to read a tag.
The lessons we can draw from this into our study, is in terms of user support then we don't need to to stressed about the training, however, we will need to provide a central resource, which acts as a one page introduction. We will also need (as previously mentioned by Matt in the team) that we'll need to provide a link point form the physical posters / overheads etc., about what is this tag?
1. Requesting pervasive services by touching RFID tags. Riekki, Salminen and Alakarppa (2006) Pervasive Computing
2. Reach out and touch: using NFC and 2D barcodes for service discovery and interaction with mobile devices (2007) O'Neill, Thompson, Garzonis and Warr, Proceedings of the 5th International Pervasive 2007 conference.
These two articles focus on the usability aspects of this technology. There are a couple of key points which can be derived from their results. Firstly, users like a visual clue as to what the tag is going to do. Riekki et al., propose that users feel more secure with enhanced tags (include a visual indicator of the outcome) as it gives information about the expected system behaviour. Although they did observe that people did interpret the icons differently, I.e., an envelope was interpreted as a SMS on a phone, but an email on a computer. Also, in managing the visual tags they preferred a few tags, so perhaps a general tag, and a couple of enhanced tags. Otherwise it became tag overload and utility decreased. The final result was that people weren't comfortable with swiping tags with their phones in public.
Some thoughts for the 2D barcode project at Bath is that we need to try to automate a visual clue to the activity of the tag when we generate the tag. This needs to be simple, so focus on the general tag - which contains text information, and a SMS, phone, and web icon for those actions.
The article by O'Neill et al., supported some of these usability issues, in particular tag overload on a physical space. However, this article added dvalue in terms of the the support implications for the roll out. They suggest that there is no benefit on introducing initial training for users on reading 2D barcodes on final performance. This was because of factors such as "users' previous familiarity with camerphones, and partly due to the obvious location of the camera on the phone and the visual feedback on the display of the camera image". That said they did provide an information pack including background, how and why you might want to read a tag.
The lessons we can draw from this into our study, is in terms of user support then we don't need to to stressed about the training, however, we will need to provide a central resource, which acts as a one page introduction. We will also need (as previously mentioned by Matt in the team) that we'll need to provide a link point form the physical posters / overheads etc., about what is this tag?
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