Adaptive interfaces for mobiles within the workplace environment

Abstract

Smart mobile devices are increasing in popularity as people are being engaged in continuous interaction with these devices mainly because of their mobility advantage. Enterprises have noticed the trend and advantages of such devices and therefore are introducing mobile devices into the workplace where usability is of the essence. Tailored information has been considered important since the rise of internet. The internet contains a wide range of information which may only be of interest to a segment of the population. Research has been done to analyse user patterns of usage to determine which information he/she might prefer during the next session of use. This increases the chance that the information presented interests the user and therefore usability and efficiency of the system are increased as the user reduces cognitive load to search for the required information. This research combines the two areas into a single solution to create an experiment where an Enterprise Software has an Adaptive module to provide tailored information on a tablet device. Considering the magnitude of modern Enterprise Software and the restriction in size of tablet devices, the Adaptive module will aid users by prioritising the most important elements of the system. This will provide a more usable and friendly way application which will help users perform better. By analysing actual scenarios and workflow patterns with a domain expert, a number of cases where adaptation can help where extracted and an experiment was created on the discussed scenarios. A controlled experiment was then performed to determine the effect adaptations had on the users in terms of efficiency, usability and awareness of the complete feature set of the system. The research done and the results obtained are encouraging and lay the foundations for further research to be based on Adaptive interfaces on mobiles within the workplace environment.