User-Centred Design of Flexible Hypermedia for a Mobile Guide: Reflections on the HyperAudio Experience

Abstract

Published paperAbstract. A user-centred design approach involves end-users from the very beginning. Considering users at the early stages compels designers to think in terms of utility and usability and helps develop the system on what is actually needed. This paper discusses the case of HyperAudio, a context-sensitive adaptive and mobile guide to museums developed in the late 90s. User requirements were collected via a survey to understand visitors' profiles and visit styles in Natural Science museums. The knowledge acquired supported the specification of system requirements, helping defining user model, data structure and adaptive behaviour of the system. User requirements guided the design decisions on what could be implemented by using simple adaptable triggers and what instead needed more sophisticated adaptive techniques, a fundamental choice when all the computation must be done on a PDA. Graphical and interactive environments for developing and testing complex adaptive systems are discussed as a further step towards an iterative design that considers the user interaction a central point. The paper discusses how such an environment allows designers and developers to experiment with different system's behaviours and to widely test it under realistic conditions by simulation of the actual context evolving over time. The understanding gained in HyperAudio is then considered in the perspective of the developments that followed that first experience: our findings seem still valid despite the passed time.

Adaptive, intelligent presentation of information for the museum visitor in PEACH

“…HIPS has been a project focused on hyper-interaction (Benelli et al 1999); it evolved from the earlier HyperAudio experience ; post hoc considerations in Petrelli and Not 2005). Its novel contribution has been the overlapping of contextual and personalized information on top of the physical space.…”

The influence of personality factors on visitor attitudes towards adaptivity dimensions for mobile museum guides

“…The HIPPIE system was evaluated by domain experts and educators (Oppermann and Specht 2000), with very positive results. For the HyperAudio adaptive system, a pervasive survey was conducted to elicit user preferences regarding personalization (Petrelli and Not 2005); the authors mainly focused on user modeling, concluding that user profiles should be abandoned in favor of visit types as a basis for adaptation in museums. A somewhat different approach is to look for insights about the importance of more abstract dimensions in a principled way, and then use prototypes and user evaluations as tools to support the discussion, such as in the seminal work of Horvitz (1999).…”

Consistent Modelling of Users, Devices and Sensors in a Ubiquitous Computing Environment

“…The first addresses the invisibility scenario. This is a novel but potentially important personalised ubiquitous computing application, which has much in common with more established work that delivers information based upon the user's location (Hatala and Wakkary, 2005;Petrelli and Not, 2005). The second scenario, Locator, goes beyond the many systems that have used various sensor technologies to model people's location, exploring the flexible personalisation of modelling people's location and activity.…”

“…It seems that quite modest user models have been useful for recent ubiquitous computing systems, such as (Hatala and Wakkary, 2005;Petrelli and Not, 2005). As Kobsa observes, the demands of personalised applications will determine the characteristics which should be provided by a user model representation.…”