Mobile Travel Guide: An Initial Study of Contents and Appearance

Mohammad Hafiz Ismail

, Nor Liyana Mohd Shuib

, Aznoora Osman

, Nadia Abdul Wahab

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences,Universiti Teknologi MARA, 02600, Arau, Perlis, Malaysia. Email: MohammadHafiz@perlis.uitm.edu.my

Faculty of Computer Science & Information TechnologyUniversity of Malaya, 50603, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Email: liyanashuib@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT

The paper presents the result of a study conducted on a prototype mobile travel guide to improve its usability of mobile application. It discusses the findings in terms of suitable contents and interface design for such application that is implemented for devices with limited screen size. The prototype of mobile travel guide consists of travel information that aids its users in their journey at a particular destination. The prototype has been tested on the field against 12 participants, aged between 10 to 39 years old who has between 4-12 years of experience of using mobile phones. This study has summarized the differences between two distinct user group based on their age and their reaction to the prototype contents and appearance.

Keywords: Usability, mobile, user evaluation, location-based services

1.0 INTRODUCTION

The progression of technology has led mobile phone and PDA to become ubiquitous in our every day lives. Mobilephones nowadays are not only restricted to making calls or receiving multimedia messages, but also provideinformation-based services and infrastructures [1,2,3]. This ultimately allows phone to evolve into a small computingdevice with the ability to integrate third-party application, paving the way for application developers to produceportable software on mobile phones [4]. The advancement of technology also made phone manufacturer to producesmaller devices to meet market demands, eventually producing mobile phones that suffer from small screens [5].

Small screens when coupled with the number of features and application available on today‟s

devices have drivenmobile phone much harder to use [6], leading to a number of studies undertaken to improve mobile phone usability[7].Among of the infrastructures introduced on mobile devices is Location-Based Service (LBS) that allows application toretrieve spatial coordinates from the phone and integrate them with an extensive range of services that utilizeslocation information [8]. LBS enable application developers to produce software which can sense the user currentlocation, and present them with choices or action related to their current environment. One of the applications thatbenefits from LBS is tourism, where it can provide assistance to users while travelling with local information orservices based o

n the users‟ current location [9

].A common travel guide application such as this tends to contain a vast amount of application. This would presents achallenge to software developers as a typical mobile phone screen space is much more limited when compared toone on Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) or on a normal computer which was done by previous studies[10,11,12].This presents challenge to application developer to develop an application which has to utilize the screen size of amobile phone in order to present meaningful information to travelers while maintaining application usability.The purpose of this paper is to present our finding and lessons that we learn during the course of performing initialstudy of designing content and appearance of Mobile Travel Guide application for mobile phone in order to increaseits usability for its target users.

2.0 THE PROTOTYPE

The prototype Mobile Travel Guide was developed using Java Micro Edition (JavaME) Location API (JSR-179)support and implemented on Nokia Symbian Series 60 phone. JSR-179 support enables application to be aware ofits current location and display the relevant information immediately to user.The reason for selecting JavaME platform is because it is the most widely supported platform for developing third-party application for mobile phones. JavaME is also supported across several mobile phone manufacturers andvendors that made it much portable than other application platform available to mobile phones.

Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

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The main menu of the application prototype implements Fisheye[13] user-interface elements as shown in Figure 1with emphasis given to icons to represent the type of services or point-of-interest that the user wishes to enquire. Theicons on the Fisheye make it easier for users to select their desired item. Information displayed on the main menu isalways available and never changes.Fig. 1: Main menu using Fisheye user interface

The sub-menu of the application is represented by a List-style user interface (Figure 2) as it contains informationrelated to the current location. The information listed on the sub-

menu changes according to users‟ current

-locationto giving context to their surroundings.Fig. 2: Sub-menu using List style user interfaceThe user is also given the ability to interact with the mobile phone application by having the option of viewing theinformation and making a call to services that might interest the user.

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Fig.

3: The detailed information view with „Call‟ softkey

Additionally, the prototype also features the screen transition effect that help users to differentiate the context whennavigating through the

various aspect of application‟s menu.

2.1 Evaluation of Prototype

The usability study was done with 12 participants ranging from 10 to 39 years old. The purpose of the study was todiscover the preferences of the users in terms of the prototype contents and appearance. We categorised those aged10-19 years old as teenagers and those aged 20-39 years old as adults. We believed that both age groups have a lotof differences in their preferences towards the prototype as well as similarities too. The evaluation was done in auniversity campus and a college for three consecutive days. It was conducted in the field because the prototyperepresents a consumer application, which can be used by anyone who travels. Thus, we wanted to pick members ofthe public randomly rather than recruiting them according to certain criteria in advance.Each user was first introduced to the prototype. They were given a brief explanation on the evaluation criteria and thetasks to be executed. There were five tasks which focused on finding information pertaining to travelling such as

hotels, restaurants, shopping centre, tourists‟ hotspots and local facilities and services. The tasks included making a

phone call to a three-star hotel and a taxi service once the information about them is displayed on the phone screen.Users were observed while performing the tasks. Once the evaluation was complete, each user was informallyinterviewed to record their response towards the prototype, its contents and its user interface design.

3.0 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS

This section will discuss the findings from the usability study. It will summarize the contents preferred, including itsorganization and appearance of contents which comprises of visual cue and animations.

3.1 Contents and Its Organization

The prototype consists of information about hotels, restaurants, shopping heaven, places of interest and localamenities. During the informal one-to-one interview, every participant gave feedback in improving the prototype as tofulfil his or her specific requirements. Teenagers (10-19 years old) would like to access information on sports centre,recreational park, stadium, football match schedule, cinema and bowling alley. They also wanted comprehensiveinformation of public transport. It seemed like entertainment and recreational information were the utmost importantfor the young travellers. However, the adults (20-39 years old) were more serious in using the prototype as anavigation assistant. They suggested implementing a map together with instruction of direction to guide the users inreaching the target destination. Currently, the prototype is not equipped with map, thus users can only viewinformation like the destination address and distance (in kilometre) from the current location. The map will eventuallyaid its users in determining the route to take along the journey. Nonetheless, some of the adults mentioned about

Proceeding of the 3rd International Conference on Informatics and Technology, 2009

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