Link

Virpi Roto Nokia Research Center, Nokia Group, Finland
Antti Oulasvirta Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, HUT, Finland

International World Wide Web Conference archive
Special interest tracks and posters of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web table of contents
Chiba, Japan
SESSION: Embedded web papers table of contents
Pages: 775 - 781
Year of Publication: 2005
ISBN:1-59593-051-5

Abstract:
When browsing Web pages with a mobile device, the system response times are variable and much longer than on a PC. Users must repeatedly glance at the display to see when the page finally arrives, although mobility demands a Minimal Attention User Interface. We conducted a user study with 27 participants to discover the point at which visual feedback stops reaching the user in mobile context. In the study, we examined the deployment of attention during page loading to the phone vs. the environment in several different everyday mobility contexts, and compared these to the laboratory context. The first part of the page appeared on the screen typically in 11 seconds, but we found that the user's visual attention shifted away from the mobile browser usually between 4 and 8 seconds in the mobile context. In contrast, the continuous span of attention to the browser was more than 14 seconds in the laboratory condition. Based on our study results, we recommend mobile applications provide multimodal feedback for delays of more than four seconds.

My Discussion:
A neat paper with some intruiging recommendations for mobile UI designers. UIs requiring minimal attention is a pretty unmined field since most UIs assume they have the user's full attention, and the proper use of attention-getting messaging is still a large unknown. I liked the paper, if only for its description of the field methods.