Proceedings of Advanced Interface Design

2006 Volume 2

Contents

57 Different Text Input Techniques for PDA Anil Kumar Singh

61 Web Browsers for Handheld Devices

Nicholas Anagnostou 66 Evaluation Of Mobile Tourism Guides

Anurag Ahluwalia 71 Recommender Systems for Tourism

Alex Mair 74 Social Ascpects of Handhelds: From Mobile Phone To Mobile Computer

Charalampos Minas

Different Text Input Techniques for PDA Anil Kumar Singh

University of Strathclyde 4B, Braid Square, Glasgow, G4 9YB

(0044) 7939078458

aksingh@cis.strath.ac.uk

ABSTRACT In this paper I would like to discuss different input techniques available for PDA except voice based input techniques.

Keywords History of PDA, Input Techniques for PDA, stylus input, Advanced Qwerty Keyboard, Virtual Laser Keyboard and Think outside stowaway Bluetooth keyboard.

1. INTRODUCTION Modern PDA, which is also known as “Personal Digital Assistant” is result of work of almost three decades. During this period PDA has seen many changes to what it is today, several major companies like Apple, Compaq, HP, Motorola, Sony, IBM, Samsung, Psion/Symbian and Palm etc have played a significant role. A Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) is a lightweight, hand-held computer, designed for use as a personal organiser which may equip with communications capabilities. Most PDAs run on operating systems like Window CE, EPOC or PalmOS as an operating system. Currently, a PDA is not only used as an organiser but also for communication, data transfer etc. Presently, total PDA sales are only about fifteen percent of total PC sales, but in 2008, PDA sales will reach about thirty three percent of total PC sales (eTForecasts, 2002). Due to the ongoing high demand lots and lots research is going on in the field of different input techniques for PDA. As technology is on rise now most of the PDA is equipped with applications like Word Processor, Microsoft Excel, email Services and Internet Browser. To use these applications now user has to enter words faster and accurately as compared to earlier.

2. Conventional type Input Techniques 2.1 Twelve Button Keypad Twelve buttons keypad is traditional and most widely used keypad in mobiles and early PDAs. It is most commonly known as IntelliPad. Most of the PDA’s are still equipped with this keypad as alternative input method. To type desired character user press corresponding key one or more time. Example if user wants to type “k” then user will press 5 number key 2 times and similarly three times for “L”. But this type of keypads are not meant for typing fast and it become very difficult to input for the applications available like Word document and Spread sheet.

These keypads are not enough for text input at high speed and high accuracy.

Figure 1 Conventional 12 key mobile keypad (Source:

www.yorku.com) The most common feature in this kind of keypad is T9 text input technology. With T9 technology each key can be pressed only one times per letter same as we do it in desktop. When you press a sequence of keys, T9 software finds all the words that can be spelled with the sequence of keys and lists them with the words users think is most appropriate. User can see the all options for each key pressed by pressing next key (0 key). T9 comes with few thousands of words. At many places you will feel that T9 software does not understand the word he is trying to enter. If you want to enter any your own word in the mobile, you can add it to the dictionary so that next time mobile can recognise that word when you will try to enter it next time. T9 software also has the ability to learn things slowly. Example if you try type word like “cool”, T9 software will always suggest you more common word “book”. But as you use “cool” word more frequently T9 software will learn it and from next time when ever you will try to enter “cool”, before completing your typing it will display word “cool”. Still technology like T9 is not the answer for fast and accurate text input. When user has to write long mail or has to use word document then it is very difficult to use technology like T9. To overcome this solution many PDA are equipped with miniature Qwerty keyboard like Sony Ericson 910i and Sony Ericson 990i, Which work exactly like normal keyboard. Both hard and soft version of mini Qwerty keyboards are available in different PDA.

3. Stylus based Input techniques

3.1 Soft Keyboard Almost every PDA who ever supports handwriting recognition technology includes a soft keyboard. This is easy to use and provides high accuracy in text inputs. There many keyboards are available like Dvorak keyboard (Lewis el), Alphabetic keyboard (Norman and Fisher) and chord keyboard (Gopher and Raij). Users need a good practice to use these soft keyboards to input text with high speed. Many software available which provides user soft keyboards, which can be operated by stylus. Example “Spb Full Screen Keyboard 3.0.1” Spb Full Screen Keyboard is a popular text input tool for PDA. It covers the entire screen of the PDA and user can type text with the help of stylus or even with the help of finger tips also which makes it very fast and accurate soft qwerty keyboard.

Figure 2. Spb Full Screen Keyboard (source:

www.spbsoftwarehouse.com)

3.2 Handwriting Recognition Method Space is always the problem for PDA and that’s why there was always a race to provide effective way of input text in PDA. Most of the PDAs are available with touch screen functionality that is why many companies came up with the solution of handwriting recognition techniques and user can write down on the touch screen of PDA.

Figure 3. Microsoft’s Handwriting Recongnising software

Handwriting recognition techniques are use to convert human handwriting into text. This is known as on line handwriting recognition. First handwriting device was released in 1990 by Apple named Newton. This was the first ever devices which used stylus to write down on screen to input text. Later well known company Palm developed new software called Graffiti. This technology was entirely different then traditional technology which used in Newton. Graffiti used very simple line-stroke system rather then roman alphabet. Later Microsoft also released software for handwriting recognition which one of the best software available with the highest accuracy rate. This software is used for Tablet PCs. Handwriting recognition is not an easy work. It takes time PDA to understand and recognise handwriting of a user. User has to teach PDA about his handwriting to make highly accurate. Handwriting recognition software understands each letter shape as a unique pattern for that letter, and converts each shape to its corresponding letter.

Figure 4 Graffiti Alphabets (Source: MacKenzie, I. S., Zhang,

S. X., & Soukoreff,) There is lots of Handwriting Recognition software available in the market which were developed and designed by many major companies. Here I will discuss few of main technology available to the world as handwriting recogniser. Like calligraphy, Microsoft Transcribers and palm Graffiti etc.

3.3 Cirrin Technology Cirrin technology is design and developed by Mankoff and Abowd in 1998. This is uni stroke technology it allows user to write text without lifting his stylus from the screen. In normal stylus soft keyboard wiring user lift his stylus for every character in Crinni technology user continuously write character with out

lifting stylus and it increases the speed of writing. User lift stylus to provide space.

Figure 5. Cirrin Technology based interface (Source:

MacKenzie, I. S., Zhang, S. X., & Soukoreff)

4. Futuristic Keyboards

4.1 Virtual Laser keyboard (VKB) Virtual Laser Keyboard (VKB) was founded by the company named VKB Tech in Year 2000. Virtual Laser Keyboard is most commonly known is VKB is the answer to qwerty keyboard for PDA to perform accurate and high speed typing for email, word document and Spread sheet etc. Virtual Laser keyboard is work on Laser technology, it projects a full qwerty keyboard on any flat surface and user can use it as a normal full sized qwerty keyboard.

Figure 6. Virtual Laser Keyboard (Source: http://www.vkb-

tech.com) Due to the very light weight and laser technology creates Full sized Qwerty keyboard, which is easy to carry almost anywhere and can be used on any flat surface and it provides all function keys, SHIFT, full NUM Pad etc. it is more convenient to use than any other foldable keyboards. There are no mechanical moving parts in the Virtual Laser Keyboard. It provides a projected image of keyboard that is the perfect portable input device for PDAs. Virtual Laser Keyboard (VKB) requires no special training or software skills to use. VKB is very light weight and only weighs two ounces base unit is the size of a normal mobile phone which project a image of Qwerty keyboard on any flat surface. Virtual

Laser Keyboard (VKB) base unit contains a replaceable rechargeable Lithium-Ion battery. It provides the Virtual Keyboard with its own internal power supply, so it does not consume any battery power of the PDA. The battery lasts for 3 – 4 hours, which is more then enough to complete basic work like emailing, typing any word document and spread sheet work. Virtual Laser keyboard (VKB) is compatible with many PDA and with many devices and operating systems.

Device Compatibility: O2 XDA I, O2 XDA II, Orange SPV e200, Palm Tungsten T3, Palm m505, HP2210, HP5550, Operating Systems: Pocket PC 2002, Pocket PC 2003, Smartphone 2003, Palm OS5.X, Palm OS4.X, Win XP, 2000, NT, 98.

4.2 Think outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard Think outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard is a collapsible Full sized Qwerty Keyboard. Stowaway keyboard work on Bluetooth technology so that means this keyboard can be used with any Bluetooth enable PDA or mobile devices. The stowaway keyboard is very small, in folding stage it only 139mm x 99mm x 13mm and measuring 251mm x 148mm x 13mm when open. This is very light in weight and weighs around 150g and can be carrying out any where. All keys are padded with rubber which makes typing more comfortable, faster and accurate.

Figure 7. Think outside stowaway Bluetooth keyboard (Source: http://www.thinkoutside.com)

Using the keyboard is very easy, open the keyboard and it will turn on the keyboard, fold it back will turn off the keyboard. It work on two AAA batteries so it does not consume any power from the PDA. This keyboard can be work with any kind of Bluetooth enables PDA or handheld devices; the only problem with this keyboard is it works on specific type of Bluetooth versions. It works with either Widecomm or socket Bluetooth stack. Keyboard is connected through ActiveSync and after setting up few configurations it is fully prepared to use. Bluetooth does not require line of sight so it is very easy to use keyboard from any where there is no need to have your PDA and keyboard in one line or close to each other like in the case of

infrared technology that makes it very handy and easy to use in any condition.

5. Speech recognition for input text As PDAs is becoming part of everyday life for business and personal use. They still suffer from the same problem which they had earlier of slow text input rate. Most of the people can type very fast on normal computers than on available methods in PDA. There is lots of research is going on speech recognition technology and using it as one of the input techniques for PDA. What ever you will say will be directly converted into text for PDA. Lots of software are available which can convert your voice in text, but they all work very good in a silent or a less noisy environment. PDA is designed for using outside office environment or some noisy place at that kind of place these software does not give appropriate result, as they get effected very easily with the noise. Still lots of companies are working together to over come from this problem. May be in couple of year time all new PDA will be equipped with speech recognition text input techniques.

5. REFERENCES [1] MacKenzie, I. S., Zhang, S. X., and Soukoreff, R. W. Text

entry using soft keyboard, Department of Computing and Information Science University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada N1G 2W1, 1999.

[2] Sabrina Nguyen. Accessibility and Profitability: Word Prediction Technology. Georgetown University December 2004.

[3] Amalyan Tygran. T9 or text predicative input. Available at: http://www.digit-life.com/articles/mobilet9/. Last Accessed: 13/04/2006.

[4] Thomas. SPB Full Screen Keyboard. Available at: http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2003Jul/bpd20030716020844.htm. Last Accessed: 15/04/06.

[5] Jennifer Mankoff and Gregory D. Abowd. Cirrin: A word-level unistroke keyboard for pen input. GVU Center, College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, 1998.

[6] Virtual laser Keyboard (VKB). Available at: http://www.virtual-laser-keyboard.com/. Last Accessed: 16/04/06

[7] Reviewed by: Bonnie Cha, Edited by: William O'Neal. VKB Bluetooth Virtual Keyboard. Available at: http://reviews.cnet.com/VKB_Bluetooth_Virtual_Keyboard/4505-6460_7-31293682-2.html. Last Accessed: 16/04/06.

[8] Think outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard, Available at: http:// http://www.thinkoutside.com/. Last Accessed: 17/04/06.

[9] Reviewed by: Bonnie Cha. Think Outside Stowaway Universal Bluetooth keyboard. Available at: http://reviews.cnet.com/Think_Outside_Stowaway_Universal_Bluetooth_keyboard/4505-3134_7-31125478.html. Last Accessed: 18/04/06

Web Browsers for Handheld Devices Nicholas Anagnostou

Strathclyde University Department of Computer and

Information Science Glasgow, 64 Rottenrow East, James Goold Hall, G4 0NG, Scotland, UK

nanagnos@cis.strath.ac.uk

ABSTRACT Browsing the Web with a small screen handheld device is a task faced with many challenges. Many browsing techniques have been developed that take into consideration the limitations posed on these devices in terms of screen size, computational power, network restrictions and interaction. The methods to overcome these problems fall into four general categories: scaling, manual authoring, transducing and transformation. Specific implementation of these methods that are explored in this paper are browsers like SmartView, Power Browser and WEST, that employ a host of intelligent techniques like thumbnail views, link summarization and flip-zooming to improve user experience when browsing the Web with a handheld device.

Keywords Web, browser, mobile, PDA, phone, design.

INTRODUCTION In the last two decades, humanity has witnessed the explosive growth and evolution of computer, telecommunications and networks technology. The leaps in these respective fields have paved the way for the creation of devices that fit our palms and yet have more computational power than a desktop computer ten years ago, allowing at the same time the ability to communicate with other people all over the world.

On top of these abilities, more and more of these devices are now able to interact with the Internet. Mobile access to information has been hailed as a key to individual productivity and is already a crucial part of many people’s lives. But while these advances have fueled the speculations and forecasts of an era of ubiquitous, “anytime, anywhere” access to the Internet being near, this dream has not yet been realized.

The main obstacles of using handheld devices to access the Internet have to do with constraints endemic to their size and computational capacity, along with the limitations of existing mobile networks, browsers and Web content design. Various solutions have been proposed in the relevant literature to address

these problems and amend user experience when browsing the Web with a handheld device.

The aim of this paper is to focus on the solutions that have been suggested for the creation of mobile-specific browsers. The paper starts with an overview of the differences between browsing the Web with a PC and a handheld device. It then moves on to give an outline of the general methods for putting web content onto small devices. The next section focuses on examples of influential mobile-specific browsers and related technologies found in the literature. The paper concludes with the main ways to wirelessly serve Internet content to handheld devices.

PC – HANDHELD DIFFERENCES A number of differences exist between using a desktop PC and a handheld device to browse the Internet. These differences are such that simply transferring applications from the desktop to the handheld is a sure recipe for failure. In this section an overview of the highly unlike characteristics of the two platforms will be given, to illustrate why the current browser interaction model for desktops is not well suited for handhelds.

First and foremost is the sheer size of the screen. While most desktop monitors support at least a 800x600 display resolution, a big mobile phone screen is 208x320, whereas a handheld screen is 320x240. These sizes vary, but in general screens in these devices are a lot smaller than their desktop counterparts.

With most of the existing Web material having been designed with the PC in mind [7], browsing the Internet with a handheld involves excessive horizontal and vertical scrolling, creating serious usability issues. Recent studies [5] have shown that users with small screen devices are more conservative regarding their link exploration behavior and are more likely to fail in the browsing tasks they have undertaken.

Secondly, interaction elements like pointing devices and keyboards that are taken for granted in desktops are either non existent in handhelds or small and cumbersome to use. This calls for different navigation and interaction approaches for small-screen browsers. Even for devices with touch sensitive screens and pens, there is the limitation of one hand or button browsing, essential in cases where the user is driving or walking.

Thirdly, the computing resources and network bandwidth at the disposal of PCs are much greater than those of handhelds. Even with the considerable computational power that the latter devices harbor today, downloading and viewing the full web page might be problematic, due to network throughtput cut-offs (i.e. 32k), memory constraints, network speeds, battery life etc.

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A comprehensive list of differences can be found in [11].

WEB CONTENT AND SMALL SCREENS As we have already seen, putting web content into a small screen device is an undertaking faced with various obstacles and challenges. A number of techniques have been proposed to tackle these problems. Before giving specific examples of mobile-specific browsers that implement those techniques, it would be useful to give an overview of the general categories under which these methods fall. The categories are four [9] (see figure 1):

• Scaling • Manual authoring • Transducing • Transforming

Scaling Although certain handheld devices with high-resolution color displays and sufficient memory can display full-sized pages, this results in excessive scrolling from the user’s part, as mentioned earlier. To avoid such problems, a web page can be shrunk, scaled down to fit the device’s screen (figure 1a). This alleviates the scrolling problems, but introduces new ones, like decreased readability and ease of interaction. This situation becomes increasingly worse as we reach the lower end of the mobile device’s screen size spectrum.

Manual Authoring The method that offers one of the best user experiences when browsing the Web with a handheld is manual authoring or re-authoring (figure 1b). In this case, human editors change the web page layout or create summaries, providing an interaction design specifically focused on the target device. While this approach overcomes the device-specific limitations, it demands a investment in time and money to be fulfilled. Thus, only a small content of Web content has been manually authored, in Europe and the US.

Transducing The usage of algorithms, heuristics and other automated techniques for web-content re-authoring has gained increased popularity due to the fact that it is cost efficient and streamlines Web access. Transducing (figure 1c) involves HTML and image translation into formats compatible with the target devices. An example is WAP1 mobile phones. These devices use WML2 as their markup language, so in order to access Web content written in HTML, a gateway acts as an intermediate between the Web and the device. The gateway translates HTML content into WML and vice versa, allowing the mobile phone access to the Web. This approach has been dubbed the Client-Proxy-Server model. The proxy retrieves the requested content and transduces it into a compatible format. Finally, the web page is presented to the user’s mobile device as a set of screens to overcome size, display and network protocol limitations.

1 Wireless Application Protocol 2 Wireless Markup Language.

Transforming On top of their translation capabilities, transducing systems have also the capacity of content modification (figure 1d). These systems can transform the structure and layout of a Web page, in an attempt to simulate a professional Web designer’s editing. The modifications include the creation of summaries by using semantic compression, new links and thumbnail creation and more. A common practice when using this method is to split a web page into multiple sub-pages, specifically suited for smaller screen factors, truncating redundant links and creating new navigation links. An example of this approach is the SmartView technology, developed in [12]. Though very useful, this method leads to many requests being made to the web-server for the retrieval of the sub-pages and can lead to the user loosing his sense of location when navigating [1].

Figure 1. Methods for displaying Web content on handheld devices

MOBILE-SPECIFIC BROWSERS In this section of the paper some examples of handheld browsers are given. The choice of browsers was mainly based on their influence on the relevant literature, their value as representatives of the aforementioned technique categories. Due to space limitations and the plethora of their numbers, commercial browsers have been left out, but for those interested, a comparison between some of the most common commercial products can be found in [10]. The mobile browsers or mobile browser-related technologies on which the next section focuses are the following: SmartView, Power Browser and WEST.

SmartView The SmartView technology, developed in [12] in 2002, is based on an overview plus detail approach. It is founded on the premise that both designers and users desire the same “look and feel” for Web content across different devices [4]. On this basis, the representation of Web content on a handheld device should be similar to that experienced in a desktop context. Since space on a small screen is limited, the representation can only take the form

of an overview instead of a directly legible format. Finally, interaction techniques that allow quick access to the detailed view need to be in place. SmartView takes into account the fact that typically Web pages are comprised of a number of logical content units. The units are discovered by using page layout structure analysis and are usually simple HTML fragments that can be rendered to fit the small handheld screens. Users can select any of these units and view them independently from the rest of the content. The Web page thumbnail provides the overview and indicates the content units by outlines (figure 2a). Users can select the unit of their preference by tapping on one the units with a stylus (figure 2b). When the browser is on SmartView mode, the execution of a link tells SmartView to create the target page’s thumbnail overview.

(a) (b)

Figure 2. Web page thumbnail overview and detailed view The current SmartView implementation is based on a service hosted outside the handheld device but there are plans either to implement it completely client-side or make it part of the whole web publishing process.

Power Browser Another influential browser is the Power Browser [6]. The system is based on the presence of a proxy server and a crawler named WebBase. The crawler fetches pages at the neighborhood of the user’s current page and ranks them using the PageRank algorithm. The logic behind its implementation is to avoid any server-side content adjustments. Since it was developed in 2000, its focus is on devices with low-resolution monochrome displays and even though it can display some images, it is mainly text-based (figure 3b). Power Browser takes advantage of the implicit structure of a web page. The main browser display consists of a set of “link descriptions” generated heuristically from anchor text, URL structure or ALT tags, relevant to a specific link. This results in a tree structure display, similar to that of nested folders in a file system, which includes not only the links of a single page, but of linked pages as well (figure 3a). The indentation level is marked by vertical lines to conserve space.

(a) (b)

Figure 3. Tree link structure and text display on a Palm Pilot An example of the link summarization process performed by the Power Browser proxy is the removal of links with “stop descriptions” like “click here” and their replacement with a description based on the URL. In addition, the system performs link redundancy reduction, by removing duplicate links in a page, so that each link on the tree structure is unique. Additional characteristics include text shortcuts, pen gestures (essential in the navigational scheme proposed by the browser), link ordering (original, alphabetical, page ranked) and tree structure animation, to help user orientation when accessing tree nodes.

WEST WEST [3] is a mobile-specific web browser, designed in 1999 for use on devices with small screens and limited resources. The system consists of two parts, a proxy server that takes an HTML page and transforms it into a format compatible with handheld devices and a client application, running on the user’s device, which allows the user to view and interact with the web pages provided by the proxy. The reason for transferring the main part of HTML page processing to the proxy server is to relieve the resource-stripped handhelds from demanding tasks and at the same time save bandwidth, by removing unneeded information proxy-side. WEST mainly employs flip zooming, a tile-based technique for visualization, which allows users to navigate a data set of ordered discrete objects. In WEST, these objects are cards3 and decks4 of cards. WEST provides three display modes:

• Thumbnail view: a “focus+context” presentation comprising miniature card views.

• Keyword view: a presentation of keywords extracted from each card.

• Link view: similar to the keyword view, but instead of keywords presents the links available in each card.

3 The result of the division of HTML page into smaller sub-pages. 4 Card groupings

(a) (b) (c) Figure 4. a) Thumbnail view b) Keyword view c) Link view The browser draws upon methods from various research areas such as information retrieval to locate appropriate keywords in the pages and reduce text, and information visualization techniques to display information on small screen devices.

Additional Paradigms In addition to the aforementioned examples, several other influential browsers and browsing techniques for handhelds and mobiles can be found in the relevant literature, but haven’t been described due to limited space. Examples include the WebThumb browser [14], which provides callouts for selected content areas, Summary Thumbnails [2], which combines readable thumbnails and semantic zooming, and the RSVP browser [8], which uses RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation) to create preview images of links from a page.

WIRELESS WEB CONTENT DELIVERY There are several ways to access the web using a handheld device, based on the underlying network technology that is used to transfer the data between the device and the Web. For example, if a device understands HTML and the connectivity is provided by a Wi-Fi network, then it is possible to directly connect to the Web. This is not the case though with most of the handheld devices since mobile communication networks, due to their particular implementation so far, cannot directly connect a device to the Internet. To bridge this gap, two main wireless data protocols are currently in use: WAP and i-mode.

WAP WAP is an open standard, created to serve internet contents and services to wireless clients, such as mobile phones and terminals. It is a list of protocols and specifications managed by the Open Mobile Alliance, consisting of more 200 companies that represent more than 90% of the global handset market. Sites specifically designed to be accessed by WAP-enabled are called WAP sites. Despite extreme optimism in its early days, WAP has yet to fulfill the initial expectations it inspired due to various usability problems. This situation is expected to change with the various improvements made to the standard in its last version (WAP 2.0). It was estimated that in 2001 there where around 18 million WAP users worldwide [13].

I-mode The road taken in Japan in regards to wireless internet services was different. There the service that was widely adopted was i-mode, deployed by DoCoMo in 1999. With well-designed services and business model, i-mode became a success paradigm. It is a world parallel to the Web, since i-mode enabled devices can only access only i-mode specific services, although e-mail, images and sound files are the same with the ones used on the

Web. I-mode uses a combination of open standards and DoCoMo proprietary protocols. It is estimated that 50 million i-mode users exist today, with 45 million of them in Japan alone.

CONCLUSION More and more mobile devices used just for communication purposes or as diaries and note taking tools are beginning to transform into mobile computers, capable of accessing the Internet “anytime, anywhere”. Computing resources are on an upward curve and wireless network bandwidth capacity is steadily increasing (i.e. 3G and 4G communication networks). On of the last fortresses to fall is usability. As browsing models for small screen devices develop and mature, and as the devices themselves demand less and less effort and concentration to be used, the era of pervasive computing will come closer. Handhelds have the capacity to be a crucial factor in realizing the “always on”, ubiquitous access to information envisioned by Mark Weiser and to embed their selves for good in our daily lives.

REFERENCES [1] Artail, A.H., Raydan, M. “Device-aware desktop web page

transformation for rendering on handhelds”. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 9(6), pp. 368-380, 2005.

[2] Baudisch, P., Lam, H. “Summary Thumbnails: Readable overviews for Small Screen Web browsers”. In Proc. SIGCHI, pp. 681-690, 2005.

[3] Bjork, S., Bretan, I., Danielsson, R., and Karlgren, J.”WEST: A Web Browser for Small Terminals”. In Proc. UIST, pp. 187-196, 1999.

[4] Blackwell, A.F, Milic-Frayling, N., Rodden, K., Sommerer, R. “SmartView and SearchMobil: Providing Overview and Detail in Handheld Browsing. Mobile and Ubiquitous Information Access, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v2954, 2004”.

[5] Buchanan, G., Jones, M., Marsden, G., Mohd-Nasir, N., Boone, K., “Improving Web interaction on Small Displays”. In Proc. WWW, pp. 51-59, 1999.

[6] Buyukkokten, O., Gracia-Molina, H., Paepcke, and Winograd,T. “Power Browser: Efficient Web Browsing for PDAs”. In Proc. CHI, pp. 430-437, 2000.

[7] Chen, Y., Ma, W., Zhang, H. “Detecting web pages structure for adaptive viewing on small form factor devices”. In Proc. WWW, pp. 225–233, 2003.

[8] de Bruijn O., Spence, R., Chong, A. “RSVP browser: web browsing on small screen devices”. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 6(4), pp. 245–252, 2002.

[9] Hilbert, M.D., Koh, K.T., Schilit, N.B., Trevor, J. “From Desktop to Phonetop: A UI for Web Interaction On Very Small Devices”. In Proc. ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, pp. 121-130, 2001.

[10] Jones, M.W. Mobile browser rendering. http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/operaStuff/devices

[11] Kaikkonen, A., Roto, V. “Navigating in a Mobile XHTML Application”. In Proc. SIGCHI, pp. 329-336, 2003.

[12] Milic-Frayling, N., Sommerer, R. “SmartView: Flexible Viewing of Web Page Contents”. Poster paper at the 11th WWW conference, 2002.

[13] Net sites. http://netsites.biz/statistics.htm [14] Wobbrock, J.O., Forlizzi, J., Hudson, S.E., and Myers, B.A.

“WebThumb: Interaction Techniques for Small-Screen Browsers”. In Proc. UIST, pp. 205-208, 2002.

EVALUATION OF MOBILE TOURISM GUIDESAnurag Ahluwalia

Department of Computer and Information Sciences

University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, U.K.

Telephone – 0141 2463153

aahluwal@cis.strath.ac.uk

ABSTRACT In this paper I would like to discuss the various usability aspects of mobile tourist guide systems that are used by tourists. This would include evaluating the mobile tourist guide systems based on various aspects of their functionality and usability by the users. These systems are based on the fundamentals of context aware computing due to the ever changing co-ordinates of the user (location, places etc). Mobile tourist guides can demonstrate the best applications of context aware computing. Applications can take the advantage of contextual information such as user location, time, people and places near to the user and the activities that are being undertaken by the user and guide a user accordingly. This actually frees the user from the constraints of the desktop computer or a paper based guide and help him become more mobile while touring. Knowledge of the user’s current location and the history of recent locations visited, are used to provide services that we come to expect from a real tour guide. These systems are generally for indoor and outdoor use are developed on a number of different hand held platforms such as PDA, palmtops etc. Though we know that tourism presents a vast potential for the use of new mobile technologies, while designing these systems we largely forget the tourists behavior and the problems that they might face.[1] We also discuss the general usability and ergonomic related issues that have emerged in our context aware applications development and try to evaluate them by applying various techniques and approaches.

Keywords Context aware, mobile tourist guides, evaluation, usability, wireless, interactive, field trail, information, PDA, techniques, handheld devices, computing, wireless, quality, walkthrough.

1. INTRODUCTION There are many interactive wireless handheld computing devices which run of various operating systems like Palm OS, Microsoft PC and Symbain. All these devises are connected through some wireless cellular network such as Qualcomm, Handspirng etc. [8]

These devices can also be connected to personal networks like LANS (Local area networks) which allow communication among devices within a personal operating space. These kinds of technologies enable people to access there data anytime and anywhere. [8] There have been various context-aware navigation systems that have been developed which later have taken the shape of tourist guides incorporating features of mobile technologies.

Figure 1 – Handheld mobile computing devices – PDA’s

Evaluating the usability of these systems is a critical aspect that offers a lot of challenges to us. Choices must be made keeping in mind the techniques that would be incorporated while doing data collection and analysis [5]. I would like to throw some light on the various approaches that are involved in evaluation mobile systems. These devices are closely associated with the immediate surrounding of the users and have to learn first and then react to what the needs of the users might be. I studied three basic forms of evaluation techniques namely field-evaluation, laboratory evaluation and heuristic walkthrough Not only does this paper describe these approaches and their related outcomes but also reflects on the advantages and disadvantages for evaluating the usability aspects of mobile guides. This whole purpose of evaluations is to provide a deep understanding and insight into the usefulness and readiness of the system and provide us with ideas for design refinement and bring new concepts to light. This lead to development of better systems.

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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. University of Strathclyde, Computer and Internet Technologies Copyright 2005 Anurag Ahluwalia

The problem that one might face while doing evaluation is that there is no such paradigm formulated to undertake evaluation of mobile guide systems. This is due to the fact that little research has been done on the challenges that are posed by usability of mobile guides. Thus we have to first face the following questions:-[5]

• How should we go about evaluating mobile guides and where should we start?

• Predicting the methodological challenges that we might face.

• Pros and cons of the usability evaluation approaches

• How do we carry out field evaluations for the guides?

• Are there any social and technical problems that we might encounter while carrying out evaluations?

• Which technique should we prefer over the other? I would like to investigate and document the evaluation of mobile guide based on the approaches that I had mentioned earlier. This would the sole purpose of this short paper. A data analysis would also be reported later on

2. A PROTOTYPE MOBILE GUIDE There are a lot of mobile guide systems available and trying to encompass the functionality of every one of them would be a Herculean task which would be out of the scope of this paper. Rather I would like to emphasize some of the common elements that are being found in the most of the guide systems giving an example of the few where and when required. This is because this study is largely based on in-depth study of the various mobile tourist systems available and not studying a particular system.

Figure 2 – A handheld mobile guide system (PDA)

Some the systems though would be a good mention are CRUMPET (Creation of User-friendly mobile Services Personalized for Tourism), TRAMMAT Project (based in

Melbourne, Australia for supporting public transportation. GUIDE System, Cyber Guide, Deep Map, Cyber Assist etc all of them providing Location based Services to mobile users. Most of these systems have been chosen because of there uniqueness or influence that they have had on the development of later systems that have successfully made it to the consumer market. I believe that evaluation of these systems is a way to discuss the issues that the mobile devices have to address in there completeness. It is more about finding alternative to the compromises that have been made while designing these systems when compared with traditional desktop computer systems. The functionality aspect of the prototype must be successful in implementing basic route-planning facilities for the specified travel system or location. It should be able to combine the users current co-ordinates as a combination of textual instructions and maps. It must have a browser equipped with a certain technology just like WAP. The networking of the device can be established using a GPRS data connection which connects the device directly to the internet to pull information. Acquiring position can be done by a GPS enabled service. [5, 4, 8] I would like to reflect on the basic fundamentals that lie behind a simple electronic mobile tourist guide that would probably be used as a prototype for the study of their evaluation. So a simple prototype would focus on the following key features that can be put under the magnifying lens for evaluation: [5, 7, 8]

• Providing travel information to users who have formal or informal plans of travel.

• To provide an effective route-planning information platform. It informs the user about the whole route containing route descriptions.

• Making the users aware about the commencement of the journey so that they can make to the destination on time.

• To provide access to travel information such as time, distance and route changes where ever they are required on a critical basis by the user.

• Able to cope with positional information that may vary due to quality or even when the information in partially available.

• Ability to cope with situational circumstances like server resource crunch or restriction while at the same time dealing with a continuously changing situation of the user.

• Recommending services to the tourist based on his/her personal interest and current location.

• Providing interactive maps which can be zoomed highlighting sites of interest and tours.

• Proving information about tourist attractions, pictures and directions.

• Correction of direction if the user takes wrong direction depicting correct context-awareness.

• Roaming facilities where the system adapts in a user-friendly way to networking service and the availability of the wireless connection.

Thus keeping these factors in place the system should be able to compute a suitable output which presents a travel plan that could be most convenient and easy for the user.

3. TECHNIQUES FOR EVALUATION Here we try to investigate the advantages and disadvantages that the evaluation techniques have while assessing the usability of mobile guides. I would like to emphasize on four of the most commonly used approaches which will be backed by case study and the expected outcome of those case studies.

3.1 Field Evaluation This is an in-situ collection of date where it is analyzed in- vitro.This mainly applies exhaustive analysis of user-based data. Here the main aim is to validate whether the requirements set at the beginning of the project meet the basic requirements to a set of end-users. This also helps real-time evaluation of the system where the response of the system is based on the input provided by the user on various contextual paradigms can be recorded. Various methodologies that can be adopted to carry out such tasks. Think aloud sessions being one of them for audio – video recording. Maintaining a log of users interaction with the system to follow the navigational patterns of the user while using the system. Interviews can be conducted with the users which could reveal there own subjective interpretations after they have used the system. [5,9]

Figure 3 – Field Trial being carried out

Shadowing users while they are using the actual system could also help us in narrowing down the parts of the system/interface that caused problems and difficulties to the users. This is a better technique that interview because it is carried as the user is using the system and might forget to report the difficulties that he encountered during the interview.[5]

In a typical field evaluation scenario four to five subjects are involved and are given a task that would involve the application of all the basic requirements out of a context-aware mobile guide system. The pre-requisite being that the users have certain proficiency in using computers and PDA devices. Realistic tasks involved route planning, timetable lookup, map searching and zooming while traveling. [5,9]

Test subjects have to lookup for information in the mobile guide and then perform real-time tasks. If these tasks are carried out properly then they should reveal some usability issues.

In terms of test users we can broadly identify these problems in the following categories [5]

• Critical Problem - Did the problem recurred across all users? Did it stop users and caused hindrance to users while completing task?

• Serious Problem – Did they frequently recur? Was the completion of task inhibited or slowed down while completing task? Were the users eventually able to complete the tasks?

• Cosmetic Problem – No frequent occurrence or any kind of inhibition to users. Users were eventually able to complete the tasks.

3.2 Laboratory Evaluation This is an exhaustive analysis of user based data carried out in a well equipped lab. The data collection and analysis is conducted on an in-vitro basis. As opposed to the flexibility imparted to users during the field trail method here the setting is of a very controlled nature. It also provided a good platform for evaluation with the other techniques. The task given is similar to field trail the only difference being that the users are seated this time. They are not required to carry out any physical or real task as was done by their counterparts in the field trial method. [5,9]

It incorporates high-quality audio-video setting with ceiling mounted cameras for an all-angle capture. Test subjects are asked to hold the devices within a limited physical area.

Figure 4 - Laboratory evaluation of mobile guide

Here the positioning was simulated while the mobile guide accessed live time-table information. It basically involves the following subjects – test subject and researchers and at least one monitor who was encouraging the test subject to think aloud and ask questions for clarification. There are also data loggers present to observe the evaluation through a one-way mirror respectively. The data analysis remains the same as in the field trial method.[5]

3.3 Expert/Heuristic Walkthrough This is an evaluation method where the usability is judged by experts using the fundamentals of HCI. Conducted in the same laboratory where the walkthrough is conducted by a set of

heuristics developed specifically for the purpose of this evaluation. We have to carefully choose experts in HCI and usability, each performing individual walkthroughs of the mobile guide. Tasks remain the same but they have to blend both the aspects of heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. In a general scenario the host welcomes and guides the evaluators. First the experts are given a chance to explore the device without involving any heuristics. The evaluators then assess the device against heuristics and then carry out the set of task assigned thus evaluating the outcome against the guidelines set by heuristics. A post session workshop is then conducted where the evaluators discuss the problems that they had faced regarding the usability of the device. [5,9]

Figure 5 – Heuristic Walkthrough Session in Progress

If the evaluators are broadly able to draw on their knowledge of usability by not confining themselves to mobility issue or the mobile guide heuristics alone, then this can be regarded as a successful walkthrough process. 4. EVALUATION – A COMPARITIVE STUDY Evaluation ensures quality of any information system and is a great tool with that respect. A growing number of attempts already have been carried out in this field where using empirical and relative strengths and weakness of different approaches are evaluated under different set of conditions. [5] Mobile computing paradigms are often present in a dynamic setting where they are expected to learn and respond simultaneously. These electronic tourist guides provide information to the users that correspond directly to their immediate physical location and objects that are in their surrounding. [5] They also have to respond to the activities that the user is undertaking or is planning to undertake in the near future. This gives rise to several questions that need to be answered regarding the choice of appropriate techniques for evaluation the usability of mobile guides. Field based or laboratory based? Just usability experts or involvement of uses? How would we analyze the data? I personally feel doing a field related evaluation would result in better outcomes than the laboratory related work could do. What ever evaluation technique we might follow neglecting a field

based approach would totally defeat the whole purpose of what we would like to achieve. The reason being that it is indispensable to evaluate something without taking it into its actual working environment. This would also help us in better understanding of both laboratory based and field-based evaluation and testing approaches. There are many views on whether which technique would suffice better than the other. Some are in the favor that nothing compares better to a laboratory setup as it renders better experimental control and better data quality. On the other hand they might lack the adequate environment for simulating the context that would surround an actual user. Field based approach would certainly add a high degree of reality but they are not easy to carry out. [5] They would involve various techniques which might make the collection of data a very cumbersome task. This is because in field based approach we might have to carry out tasks like established evaluation techniques and data collection instrumentation such as multi-camera video recording, think – aloud session which may pose serious difficulties if carried out in natural settings. Physical movement of user would also complicate the setting and cause serious hindrance in data collection task.

5. DATA ANALYSIS Analyzing data collected by carrying out these three evaluation techniques would identify and describe usability problems experienced with the use of the mobile guide prototype. Grounded analysis being used in the case of field and laboratory evaluation and post-evaluation workshop used in the case of heuristic workshops. Any analysis would be incomplete without proper compilation and comparison of the data. This can be done by the researchers who carried out the evaluation process so that critical findings can be recorded for future purpose. [5]

After compilation of the results it should be organized in some sort of list order form. Then the participant researchers could be invited again to collaborate and reflect on this data. The researchers involved in the collection of the data need to collaborate and involve themselves in discussions of identified problems and monitoring compilation of the results of all the approaches carried out. This would then help in giving severity rating according to the usability issues identified. [5]

6. CONCLUSION After carrying out this study I can assert that any evaluation done would be much better than ignoring evaluation at all. Having complex issues arise later during the use of the product could be eliminated positively by carrying out proper evaluation and analysis of the outcome of evaluation. This would not only refine and improve the mobile guides to a huge level but also instill significant new improvements.

These devices would be future of mobility and people would consider them as objects necessary for broadening their lifestyle. They will pose new challenges to us again and again which have to be met by thorough advancements in our evaluation methodologies. Best practices in the design and development of mobile guides then can be foreseen.

7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My sincere thanks to Dr. Mark Dunlop and Ms Michelle Montgomery Masters for providing expert guidance all throughout the course. I would also like to thank my fellow team members- Mr. Kamal Venugopal, Mr. Gopinath Nandkumar and Mr. Alex Mair for providing support I had from them during the course of completion of this project.

8. REFERENCES [1] Brown, B., Chalmers, M., Tourism and Mobile Technology

Proceedings of the Eight European Conference on Computer Helsinki, Finland (2003), http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~barry/papers/TourismECSCWfinal.pdf [Last accessed : 11-06-2006]

[2] Poslad, S., Schmidt-Belz, B., User Validation of a mobile Tourism Service, Workshop “HCI in mobile Guides”, Udine (Italy), (Sept, 2003) http://bibemp2.us.es/turismo/turismonet1/economia%20del%20turismo/turismo%20y%20nuevas%20tecnologias/user%20validation%20mobile%20tourism%20service.pdf [Last accessed : 14-06-2006]

[3] Poslad, S., Schmidt-Belz, B., Laukkanen, M., Laamanen, H., Verissimo, M., Zipf, A., Aras, H., Creation of User-Friendly Mobile Services Personalize for Tourism (2002)http://fit-bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de/pub/bscw.cgi/d33570579/CRUMPET%20trial%20report.pdf [Last accessed : 14-06-2006]

[4] Schmidt-Belz, B., Laamanen, H., Zipf, A., Aras, H., Creation of User-Friendly Mobile Services Personalize for Tourism (2002) http://fit-bscw.fit.fraunhofer.de/pub/bscw.cgi/d33570558/Heidelberg%20Trial%20report.pdf [Last accessed : 14-06-2006]

[5] Kjeldskov, J., Graham, C., Pedell, S., Vetere, F., Howard, S., Balbo, S., Davies, J., Evaluation the Usability of a Mobile Guide: The Influence of Location participants and Resources. http://www.cs.auc.dk/~jesper/papers/drafts/BIT-TramMate-draft.pdf [Last accessed : 16-06-2006]

[6] Schmidt-Belz, B., H., Laamanen, H., Zipf, S, Location-Based Mobile Tourist Services – First User Experience(2002) http://dookie.geoinform.fh-mainz.de/~zipf/CRUMPET-ENTER03-final.pdf [Last accessed : 14-06-2006]

[7] Kray, C., Baus, J., A Survey of Mobile Guides (2003) http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/~kray/pub/2003_mguides.pdf [Last accessed : 16-06-2006]

[8] Kotz, D., Chen, G., A Survey of Context-Aware Mobile Computing Research, Dartmouth College, http://www.caip.rutgers.edu/~jorgen/locationawareness/chen00survey.pdf [Last accessed : 16-06-2006]

[9] Cheverst, K., N. Davies, K. Mitchell, A. Friday, and C. Efstratiou. “Developing a Context-aware Electronic Tourist Guide: Some Issues and Experiences”, in Proc. of ACM International Conference on Computer Human Interaction (CHI’2000), The Hague, Netherlands, ACM Press, pp. 17-24, April 2000. http://www.guide.lancs.ac.uk/CHIpaper.pdf [Last accessed : 12-06-2006]

[10] Dunlop, M. D., Morrison, A., McCallum, S., Ptaskinski, P., Risbey, C., and Stewart, F., "Focussed palmtop information access combining starfield displays and profile-based recommendations", in F Crestani, M Dunlop, S Mizzaro, Mobile and Ubiquitous Information Access: Proceedings of workshop on Mobile and Ubiquitous Information Access, , 2004 http://www.cis.strath.ac.uk/~mdd/research/publications/04dunlop_lncs.pdf [Last accessed : 12-06-2006]

Recommender Systems for Tourism

Alex Mair Strathclyde University

Department of Computer and Information Sciences

Glasgow Scotland G1 1XH

amair@cis.strath.ac.uk

ABSTRACT This paper shall describe the information filtering requirements that are applicable to tourism. Firstly by considering collaborative filtering and the inherent problems that occur, with consideration given to how to minimize those problems, and the algorithms commonly used. Content-based filtering is then considered, and how it can be used to improve the recommendations provided by a collaborative filter.

Categories and Subject Descriptors H3.3 [Information Filtering]: Recommender Systems, Collaborative Filtering, Content-based filtering.

General Terms Algorithms, Performance, Design, Human Factors.

Keywords Recommender Systems, Collaborative filtering, Content-based filtering, Algorithms, Tourism.

1. INTRODUCTION Being able to automatically recommend places of interest and activities for tourists has great potential within the tourism industry. Both [2] and [9] note that recommendations are a common means of deciding a tourist destination. With developments in context-aware applications and wireless communications, there is a massive opportunity to provide tourists with “information tailored to both their personal and environmental contexts”[2]. Thus a tourist would be able to have places of interest, indicated, information given, predicted ratings and other users reviews for those locations given as they travel. The locations would be of specific interest to the user. This type of recommendation can be done by information filtering.

2. INFORMATION FILTERING [7] describes three forms of information filtering: cognitive (or content-based), social (or collaborative) and economic. A content-based filtering system would allow for recommendations based on content, for example, museums or theatres. A collaborative based filtering system matches people with similar interests and tastes. It does not take into account content, but only that in a group of people of similar interests, if one finds a place of interest, then the probability is that the others in the group will also find it of interest. Collaborative filtering allows for the rating of items. Economic filtering relies on cost-benefit assessments and explicit or implicit pricing mechanisms. The two types of filters that are most applicable to a tourist recommender system are the content-based and collaborative filters.

3. COLLABORATIVE FILTERING 3.1 Introduction Collaborative filters accumulate a database of items rated by the user; this can be done explicitly or implicitly. Explicit rating is where the user enters a rating, based on a number scale. This could be a binary scale i.e. the item is of interest, or is not of interest. Or on a larger scale, perhaps up to 100. However, [11] notes that in practice, there is no need to extend beyond a seven point scale. Implicit ratings are collected by monitoring the users actions. The effectiveness of implicit rating has been researched for web based systems, [4] finds that there is a correlation between the length of time spent on a page, and the amount scrolling that is done within the page. In a mobile tourist setting if a location is linked to an item of interest, then a rating can be implied from the time spent in that location i.e. the longer a user stays at a location the more likely they are to like that item of interest associated with that location. The collaborative filter then analyses the users ratings with the ratings of other users within the database. Unrated items are then given a predicted rating based on what the user likes and what other users like; those items for the user which are rated above a certain threshold by the system can then be recommended to the user.

3.2 Problems Collaborative filters have been successful applied to films e.g. MovieLens, music e.g Ringo, and news feeds e.g. USENET. However, [5] identified three problems with collaborative filtering;

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. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. CIT Strathclyde University,AID, 2006. Copyright 2004 ACM 1-58113-000-0/00/0004…$35.00.

The Early Rater Problem - when an item first appears in the recommender system, there are no user ratings to make predictions on. Additionally, early predictions for the item will tend to be inaccurate. This problem also applies to the case of when a user is new to the system, and there is a lack of data to base predications on. The Sparsity Problem - the number of items in the recommender system is generally much larger that the numbers of users, this makes it hard to find items that have been rated by enough users to make accurate predictions. The Gray Sheep Problem - there are users whose opinions do not consistently agree or disagree with any group of people. Of these three weaknesses the first two are recognised to be the main problems with collaborative filtering. The early rater problem can be partially overcome by requiring new users to rate a number of items when they initially start to use the filter, for the Ringo music recommender first time users are asked to rate 125 artists [11]. The more a user profile is populated, the more accurate the system will become. The sparsity problem can also be partially overcome, by the use of implicit ratings. Research on the GroupLens system [10] found that users were reading more articles than they were rating, and that some users may not explicitly rate at all. However, even with the use of implicit indicators to gather more data the sparsity problem will occur when there are a significantly higher number of items compared to users. One last problem that is associated with collaborative filtering is the processing required to obtain predicted ratings. On one system there may be millions of users, with millions of items, the time and processing cost, of looking for similarity between users, and then for giving predictions for items is too high. This has been partially solved by the use of models. Hence, as noted by [12] the two fundamental “challenges in collaborative filter based recommender systems are accuracy and scalability”. It should be noted that collaborative filtering is open to abuse. For example, if a hotel wished to gain a better ranking from the filter, then it would be possible for them to enter the system multiple times as different users and give high ratings for their hotel (and low ones for their competitors). If designers of the system are aware that there is a possibility of this occurring, then measures such as, the detection of autonomous logging-on and rating can be prevented. The idea of trust can also be introduced into user profiles, this trust can be applied at the level of the profile of a user, and also at the level of the items within that profile [8]. Trust in an item can also be obtained by allowing users to give comments on that item; other users can then use that information to help inform their judgment.

3.3 Memory and Model Based Algorithms There are two classes of algorithms used for collaborative filters; these are memory-based algorithms and model-based algorithms.

Memory-based algorithms use the entire dataset of system users and ratings. When looking for similarity these algorithms use a notion of distance between item ratings of users. The most common algorithm employs the Pearson correlation coefficient. The preferences of similar users are then used to predict ratings for unrated items. Model-based algorithms use the dataset to construct a model which is then used for predictions; many of these algorithms are based on machine learning algorithms. Examples of these algorithms are neural network classifiers or Bayesian networks.

3.4 Tourism and Risk One of the strengths of collaborative filtering is that the system does not need to know what an item is. The items involved in tourism would be things such as museums, restaurants, and activities. These items would have associated information, such as location, opening times, etc. A recommender system for tourism, should not only be able to give a predicted rating for an item, but must also be able to describe, or give details for that item. As the items that are included in the system must be described, then the possibility of also applying a content-based filter exists. A tourist could then request a recommendation for a restaurant, and be provided with a rated list of restaurants within a required area. Further filtering could then of course be applied, for example, average cost, type of cuisine, etc. In tourism there may be a high associated risk involved with recommendations a system makes. If a news reader recommends an article that is of not interest to the user, then the user is only required to spend a few seconds of their time to make that decision. However, the cost of recommending a restaurant to a tourist, and for them not to like it, has the associated cost of the evening’s meal, which could be significant. It is therefore important that a recommender system for tourism have a high precision, or “accuracy” in the items it retrieves i.e. all items that the system recommends should be of relevance to the user.

4. CONTENT-BASED FILTERING The GroupLens project is a collaborative filtering system for Usenet news, providing individual discussion lists for users [6]. Research on the GroupLens project showed that a combination of collaborative filtering with content-based filtering provided a system that obtained better recommendations than those that just used one type of filtering [10][5]. However, [11] identified three limitations with content-based filtering; Items have to be identified by content, for some forms of information this may not be able to be done automatically. There are no possibilities for serendipitous finds; recommendations are done by finding more of what has been seen before. They cannot filter items based on quality, style or point-of-view. For a tourist recommender system there is requirement that the items in the dataset to be identified by content. The last two

limitations are of concern however. Serendipitous finds may bring unexpected surprises to the attention of the user, and could be the talking point of a tourists holiday, “you’ll never believe what we did”. The system could recommend activities that they would never think of doing themselves, but something that they would probably really enjoy. Therefore, from the point of tourism, ruling out serendipitous finds would not be good. Being unable to give a predicted rating for an item would also not be beneficial for a recommender system for tourism. Tourists would like to know the quality of the item suggested. Since items have to be identified by content due to the nature of the items, the limitations of a content-based filter can be overcome with the addition of a collaborative filter. Therefore in a tourism setting it would seen reasonable to combine the two types of filter, as this would result in better recommendations for the user, and minimize the risks involved.

5. CONCLUSION There is great potential for the use of recommender systems in tourism, particularly when used with mobile technologies. This allows users access to personally relevant information which is contextually aware of the surrounding environment. There are however problems in obtaining a high quality recommendation in the high risk field of tourism. The main problem within tourism is that of the early rater. This applies to users new to the system, and also to the rating of new items. When a user first uses a recommender system it is necessary to build a user profile that can be used as a measure of similarity against other users in the system. This has the disadvantage of taking time to build up, and until sufficient data is obtained then inaccuracies will occur. As many people now refer to the internet for information regarding their holiday destinations, it would seem practical that users could build up their profiles before they even come on holiday. Users could register on a Tourist Board web site, and while browsing through the site implicit rating could be obtained for item. The opportunity for rating item explicitly could also be made available. The use of models could also be used to advantage in tourism. If a user matches the patterns of a particular model, then the model could be used to initially recommend items to the user. That model would then adapt over time allowing a more personalized recommendation. The use of content-based filters not only increases the recommendations provided by a pure collaborative filter, but would be necessary to meet the specific needs of tourism.

6. REFERENCES [1] Berka T. and Plöβnig M., 2004, Designing Recommender

Systems for Tourism, Salzburgresearch. Available URL: http://www.salzburgresearch.at/research/gfx/enter_ploessnig.pdf. Last accessed: 16th April 2006.

[2] Cheverst K. et al, 2000, Developing a Context-aware Electronic Tourist Guide: Some Issues and Experiences, Proceedings of CHI 2000 Conference on Human factors in Computing Systems, Netherlands.

[3] Claypool M. et al, 1999, Combining Content-Based and Collaborative Filters in an Online Newspaper, ACM SIGIR Workshop on Recommender Systems - Implementation and Evaluation, 1999, Berkeley CA, USA.

[4] Claypool M. et al, 2001, Implicit Interest Indicators, Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

[5] Good N. et al, 1999, Combining Collaborative Filtering with Personal Agents for Better Recommendations, Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial Intelligence, Orlando, Florida, USA

[6] Konstan J. et al, 1997, GroupLens: Applying collaborative filtering to Usenet news, Communications of the ACM, Mar 1997; 40, 3.

[7] Malone T. et al, 1987, Intelligent Information-sharing Systems. Communications of the ACM, May 1987, Vol 30, Number 5.

[8] O’Donovan J. and Smyth B., 2005, Trust in Recommender Systems, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, San Diego, California, USA.

[9] Prestipino M., 2004, Supporting Collaborative Information Spaces for Tourists, Conference Proceedings Mensch and Computer 2004, München, Germany.

[10] Sarwar B. et al, 1998, Using Filtering Agents to Improve Prediction Qualitiy in the GroupLens Research Collaborative Filtering System, CSCW 98, Seattle Washington, USA.

[11] Shardanand U and Maes P., 1995, Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating “Word of Mouth”, CHI ’95 Proceedings.

[12] Suryavanshi B. et al, 2005, A Fuzzy Hybrid Collaborative Filtering Technique for Web Personalization, 3rd IJCAI Workshop on Intelligent Techniques for Web Personalization, Edinburgh, Scotland.

SOCIAL ASCPECTS OF HANDHELDS: FROM MOBILE PHONE TO MOBILE COMPUTER

Charalampos Minas Postgraduate Student

University of Strathclyde

Department of Computer and

Information Science

cminas@cis.strath.ac.uk

ABSTRACT Although technological advances are the leading edge that provide the user with the opportunity to use handheld devices and advanced mobile services the adoption and bloom of those systems and services are based on user acceptance. The current paper focuses on the user acceptance of handheld mobile devices. The paper examines the extent to which individual characteristics (i.e. exposure to technology, age), region and culture, and technology characteristics (i.e. interface) influence the use and adoption of mobile handhelds. In addition the focus is on factors that if taken into account can provide usable systems to all people [12].

1. INTRODUCTION Mobile handheld devices such as Pocket PCs, Palms, and mobile phones are steadily become embedding in our environment. Handhelds are becoming more popular as they evolve into powerful and compact devices. A common element of handhelds is their capability to access information on the web. This feature is increasingly used by many people. This is depicted by research findings: in May 2003, Japan had approximately 63 million mobile Internet users.

2. THE DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES This chapter provides an overview of the development of mobile handheld devices and mobile internet. Particularly, the focus is on the shift from simple devices equipped with basic applications to high sophisticated devices.

2.1 Handheld Devices During the last few years mobile handheld devices such as mobile phones and PDAs have been transformed into high sophisticated devices. Although they were originally designed to hold basic functions, the contemporary handhelds are equipped with various applications and access to services [1]. Probably the most illustrative example is mobile phones. Mobile phones were initially developed for communication however, as technology proceeded they have been equipped with high resolution screen, cameras, Bluetooth technology, and wireless internet access that allows web browsing enhancing their functionality. Mobile handheld devices can be categorised according to their input

facilities and the ergonomics into mobile phones, PDAs, and communicators [3].

2.2 Mobile Internet The evolution of mobile handheld devices and the significant grow in mobile telephone market during the 1990s gave rise to mobile internet. Mobile Internet can be defined as services that enable users to access the Internet and browse over sites optimized for mobile devices through technologies like WAP, GPRS, 3G and i- mode [2].

Mobile internet was launched on the market in the late 1990s. WAP and I- mode are the two dominant technologies for wireless internet communication with mobile phones. WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) was introduced in 1999. The creation of WAP aimed at providing the infrastructure that enables mobile phones to send and receive data from the internet [3]. By the end of 2000 most European, Asian, and to a lesser extent US service providers had introduced WAP services and phones. Despite the high expectations for the new service, the introduction of WAP was accompanied by failure.

Unlike WAP the introduction of the Japanese i- mode was a clear success. I- mode was launched by DoCoMo in 1999 enabling users to access the web, manage email, and download information from their mobile phone [4]. I- mode managed to create a critical mass of users, obtaining approximately eleven million subscribers by 2000 and growing at a rate of 45, 000 new subscribers per day [6]. In the years that followed market growth was tremendous. Other cellular phone operators introduced their own mobile internet services - KDDI launched EZweb and J- Phone launched J- Sky. In 2003 there were 78.6 million mobile phone subscribers, of which “84 per cent were using some kind of internet browsing service” [12].

3. TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE So far it must have been clear to the reader that wireless internet via mobile devices is becoming increasingly popular. Although rapid technological innovations are the leading edge that provide the user with the opportunity to use handheld devices and advanced mobile services the adoption and bloom of those systems and services is based on user acceptance. This is illustrated by research findings, which suggest that only a few people adopt new technologies because of their novelty [7].

A number of frameworks have been developed in order to explain the adoption of technology products and services. These

frameworks incorporate various factors that shape people’s attitudes towards technology. For instance, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) associates usage behaviour with user and environment characteristics [3]. TAM suggests that “perceived ease of use” and “perceived usefulness” influence an individual’s attitude towards technology. TAM is of particular interest when we take into account the fact that what people perceive as useful or usable may vary according to their age, education, location, and culture origin.

Accepting that, a sufficient understanding of the motivations and circumstances surrounding mobile device use and adoption from the perspective of consumers themselves is required. The current chapter discusses the extent to which individual characteristics, region and cultural factors, and technology characteristics influence people’s attitudes towards technology and lead to technology acceptance or rejection.

3.1 Individual Characteristics Individual characteristics have been increasingly recognised as major determinants of technology acceptance. To start with, research findings have identified a correlation between age and the use of data features such as text messaging [13]. Literature suggests that older people are less likely to use text messaging because they are not familiar with high tech devices and hence, they prefer voice communication [13]. The close association between age and technology acceptance is also addressed by the Input-Process-Output model (IPO). IPO, which focuses on consumer adoption and usage of mobile devices, stresses inter alia user characteristics as a key determinant that affects the implementation and adoption of mobile handheld devices [8]. Particularly, IPO suggests that age affects how people weight expenses and convenience related to mobility.

Another explanatory factor of technology adoption is an individual’s prior exposure to mobile device. It is argued that people who have extensively use a mobile handheld device express a great confidence in the handheld and they are less willing to try out new features (i.e. keystrokes) [13].

Finally, cultural origin is closely related to people’s attitudes towards mobile technology. Studies have revealed that cultural origin leads to different perceptions of technology, which in turn affects its usage. A research by Sarker and Wells showed that “power distance”1 influences the way people perceive informality regarding text messaging [8]. Participants from higher power distance cultures such as Korea saw text messaging to superiors or elders as inappropriate. On the other hand users from Norway, which is a lower power distance culture, did not perceive text messaging as an offensive way to communicate with work supervisors. As Sarker and Wells note the only hesitation of participants from low power distance cultures in terms of the use of text messaging in a more formal context was the common use of slang and abbreviation terms [8].

3.2 Region and Culture Cultural influences are significant factors for understanding technology adoption. Culture has been investigated in regards to way of life and particularly the beliefs and values that people in a country share. Comparative studies across several countries have 1 Power distance has been introduced by Geert Hofstede to

describe the level of respect of a culture for authority.

examined motivations of using mobile handheld devices and services.

The 2002 Mobile Survey conducted by Yankee Group showed that people in the United States see mobile services as redundant [10]. In contrast mobile internet services in Japan are growing steadily. Trying to explain this discrepancy scholars have focused on differences in social behaviour. People in Japan closely communicate and “share common means of engaging in social activities” [7]. Accepting that, it is argued that sending and receiving messages on handheld devices are in great demand in order to enhance interpersonal communication.

In addition, technology has clearly different forms of adoption depending on the needs of each society, which are formulated by the existing social and cultural structure. For example, the use of the internet in America and Japan is characterised by discrepancies. People in America show a greater tendency to use the internet for searching information about products and services, while in Japan internet usage is more at the level of entertainment [7]. This is explained by examining the circumstances surrounding internet usage in the two countries. In Japan consumers are exposed to enormous advertising messages while commuting via boards standing on all major streets, magazines, and papers. Moreover, retail outlets are a main feature of all Japanese cities and they are located close to offices, public transportation stations, and homes [7]. In contrast, the expansion of suburbia in America has made the access to various locations such as retail outlets difficult affecting at the same time the way people shop, educate, and socialise.

3.3 Technology Characteristics Literature suggests that the interface characteristics of handheld devices and network performance are elements that strongly influence their implementation and acceptance [13].

3.3.1 Interface Characteristics The small screen of handhelds is considered to be the major

limitation of mobile devices. Users of wireless internet services are often critical of the display constraints as they find it difficult to search and find information [14]. The problem is exacerbated by the excess of information and graphics in most web pages. As a result only a small region of a page is visible at a time [15]. Navigation is also of big

concern. Users who are trying to read from small displays are often

confused due to extensive amount of scrolling (horizontally and vertically). Many studies have attempted to improve the display of the content of web sites on small screens by introducing various features. A notable example is SmartView, which is a browser feature that analyses web pages and divide them into partitions allowing users to structurally navigate through a web site [15].

Figure 1. Pocket PC

4. HUMAN- CENTERED DESIGN As we have already seen people are diverse and have different needs and limitation. Thus, when designing new technologies a number of factors should be taken into account in order to provide suitable systems for all. The current section will discuss shortly three key elements – disability, age, and culture - and it will address potential challenges that each one of these raises.

Disability: New technologies should be accessible by people with disabilities. The use of graphical interfaces by sensory disabled (people with visual and hearing impairment) is difficult. The use of sound and touch enable people with visual impairment to access graphical interfaces [14]. Accessibility can be also improved for non- signers through the use of gesture recognition that provide translation of signing to speech or text [14]. Moreover, physically impaired (i.e. people with hand disabilities) find it difficult to control input mechanisms such as keyboard. Hence, alternative techniques such as the eyegaze system can be applied [14].

Age: Contrary to many people’s beliefs, older people are not unwilling to use and adopt new technologies. However, possible disabilities and unfamiliarity with technology are two factors that may deter them from using new technologies [14]. Therefore, the design has to be clear and simple in order to provide usable technology for all.

Culture: Cultural differences should be taken into account when designing new technologies in order to make them accessible to different countries. First of all, applications should be able to be customised in order to meet all needs of customers of various cultural origins [1]. For instance, software applications (i.e. mobile browsers) have to be compatible with different types of language. In addition, it should be mentioned that colours and symbols are perceived different in different countries and therefore are two factors of concern. As it goes, for a technology to be successful, it should conform to the various standards used in each country.

In cases where these socio- cultural diversities are not taken into account, certain groups of people are being excluded at a social and cultural level.

5. I- MODE Vs WAP Taking all the factors mentioned above into consideration it would be interesting to examine the adoption of the two dominant mobile Internet services - I – mode and WAP. As we have already seen the introduction of i-mode in Japan has been followed by a huge success, while in Europe the usage of WAP remains limited.

Getting through the literature, it becomes evident that a number of factors put obstacle to WAP success. Usability issues played a significant role in the failure of WAP. One of the key limitations was the monochrome small screens that displayed 5 to 8 lines of text [1]. Furthermore, navigation confusion was caused by the use of Wireless Modified Language (WML) that led to lack of useful WAP sites. A research conducted by Jacob Nielsen showed that users did not manage to carry out simple tasks such as checking news headlines or finding TV program information [1]. Consequentially, the lack of usability led to poor functionality

and deterred the development of a flexible and robust system. Another limitation was cost. Services were charged by the time and given the slow connections and the difficulty of using the WAP services the cost was high keeping potential customers away.

On the other hand the spread of i- mode was enormous. Probably the main advantage of i- mode was the use of CTHML that allowed the conversion of existing web pages to i- mode. Thus, users had access to 20, 000 unofficial pages. Unlike WAP, i- mode was an on- going connection and subscribers were charged according to the volume of data transmitted.

Some commentators attribute part of the success of i- mode to Japanese culture and the readiness of people to adopt new technologies. It is true that Japanese people and especially Japanese youths are keen on new technologies. This is mirrored in the Japanese mobile phone market that approaches 82.7 million subscribers. Mobile phone is embedded into the Japanese society and they have become ubiquitous [16]. This pervasiveness has led to the emergence of the Ketai Culture. Finally, it should also be mentioned that in Japan the number of WAP users exceeds the number of those in European countries.

6. CONCLUSION The focus on this paper has been on user acceptance of mobile technology. It has been argued that socio- cultural factors such as age, cultural origin and an individual’s prior exposure to handhelds are closely related to user adoption of technology. Additionally, a strong determinant of technology acceptance is region. It has been argued that people who live in different countries may adopt the same technology in a different way. Finally, handheld devices have limitations that affect technology adoption. Due to small screens web pages are not displayed properly. Searching and finding information becomes difficult, which in turn leads to navigation problems.

Lastly, the adoption of i- mod and WAP has been discussed. The failure of WAP was mainly due to usability errors, while the success of i- mode is related to the use of CTHML, the permanent connection to the internet, and the readiness of Japanese people to adopt new technologies.

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