ESTRUCTURA DE LAS CUENTAS DE ACTIVO, PASIVO Y PATRIMONIO DEL 2010

As stated before, mobile personalization refers to mobile applications that provide information and services tailored to a particular user, and their context of use, in order to provide an enhanced user experience. This tailoring can be done either by the user, or the system, or a combination of both. For example, a service provider can provide information via the mobile application on a particular athlete, based on users‟ settings,

or suggest a stadium map automatically, according to a user‟s current location at a LSE.

A personalized mobile application contains four modules, which cooperate to perform the functions of classification of information, to collect relevant contextual factors, and to personalize itself accordingly (Riecken, 2000; Kim, 2002; Adomavicius and Tuzhilin, 2001; Billsus et al. 2002; Trigg et al. 1987). See Figure 6.1.

Use r Interface Content Determination Module Content Classification Module Content Collection Module Content Presentation Module

M obile Pe rsonalization System

Mobile Service Provider

User & their context

Figure 6.1 Modules forming a mobile personalization application

Content classification module. The content classification module includes

services/information provided by the mobile service provider. The classification involves analyzing the information/services, dividing it into elements and creating and storing metadata, which describes the information and the elements.

Context collection module. This module contains relevant information about the user

and their context, which has been defined during previous studies. For example, it can collect user‟s location information by GPS. All the gathered information is sent to the content determination module for analysis. The context collection module also keeps monitoring context changes during the process, including for example, users‟ locations. These changes are sent to the content determination module, which then makes a real-time analysis to determine if there are content changes necessary. This

context collection process can be user-initiated, or system-initiated, or a combination of both approaches, as discussed in the literature.

A user-initiated approach is under explicit user control (Dix et al. 1998). The user may set his/her context information in the profile and then this setting will be used for all subsequent usage of mobile services, although the user can change the setting when there is a need.

A system-initiated approach refers to where an application automatically analyses and classifies the context of the user, and updates the information automatically (Billsus et al. 2002), without user intervention.

Content determination module. The content determination module involves deciding

the relevant data on the basis of the metadata and the context collection module. This module undertakes analysis of data according to some algorithms and deduces the information tailored to each individual (Trigg et al. 1987). It determines the content for the user, but when the setting is incorrect, the user should be able to change it. The content determination module can also learn from itself and improve its algorithms.

Content presentation module. On receiving the content information from the content

determination module during a service initialization stage, this module presents the content according to some pre-defined schemes in the user interface.

Mobile personalization user interface. The user interface is the gateway between a

person and a system. The user interface provides a means of input, which allows the users to manipulate the system, and a means of output which allows the system to produce the results of the users' manipulation (Johnson, 2000). The user interface of an application does not only refer to how it looks; it is how easy it is to learn, how well it recedes into the sub-consciousness of experienced users, and how well it supports users' tasks (Preece et al. 2002).

This chapter focused on designing a user interface for mobile personalization that can enable certain functions based on user requirements (in Chapter 4) and personalize itself according to the relevant LSE contextual factors (in Chapter 5). Instead of building up a whole working system, the design was developed into high-fidelity prototypes in order to reduce the time and cost of development, and to maximise flexibility in conducting experiments early in the development process.

6.3 Methodology

6.3.1 User-centred design

As the overriding philosophy of this research is one of user-centred research (Preece et al. 2002), the design also placed the user at the centre of the design effort, and undertook an iterative process to design and test a mobile prototype. The design applied multiple user-centred methods, and below is a short description of the methods used for the mobile personalization design, including methods particularly suitable for Chinese users.

Questionnaires were used to reveal patterns in peoples‟ behaviour and preferences for

the design ideas which were developed based on previous studies. They ranged from very structured, with a series of categorical responses, to having very open questions where free responses were given. The questionnaires generally answered the „what‟ questions about users.

Scenario-based interviews were used to explore with users the reasons for their

preferences (as revealed in the questionnaires) and how they would behave in certain situations. Scenarios were generated to describe the functions and context of use, based on previous studies (in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5). Successful use of scenarios requires ways of capturing user needs, and taking into account contexts of use of a system (Fulton and Marsh, 2000). Combined with the scenarios, the interviews were more effective than traditional interviews because they were based on immersion of the user within a (simulated) context, and led more directly to a definition of solutions.

Card sorting was employed in the interaction design phase for increasing the

application‟s usability. The process involved sorting a series of cards, each labelled with a piece of content or functionality, into groups that made sense to the participant. It provided insights into users‟ mental models, showing how users tacitly group, sort and label tasks and content within their minds (Preece et al. 2002).

Paper mock-ups are low-fidelity prototypes which were designed to visualize the

design concept in the early design process, before any code is written (Cooper and Reimann, 2003). Walking through the mock-ups with users allowed people to picture

the design and to attempt different aspects of specific tasks. Early in the design stage, this process revealed the areas with which users had difficulty.

Simulations are high-fidelity prototypes which were generated to imitate the real user

interface (Cooper and Reimann, 2003). The act of simulation involved representing certain key characteristics of the user interface. During the final design phases, the user interface was programmed on a PC and installed on a mobile application to allow users to work with the simulation.

Emotion Cards (Desmet, 2000) were applied to facilitate the communication with

Chinese users, in light of the Chinese culture of discouraging speech (Kim, 2002; Lin, 1977; Peng, 1997; Liu, 1988). The Emotion Cards helped Chinese users objectify their experience and to serve as an aid for starting a conversation with the researcher, and this approach helped Chinese users to overcome their reserve about verbalizing their feelings. Typically, a participant would select a card that best expressed his or her experience in relation to an aspect of design, and this would initiate a deeper conversation with the researcher.

A User Advisory Board. Chinese users work better with those who are familiar to them

(Yeo, 2001). The research created a User Advisory Board that was involved throughout the whole design cycle. The board consisted of a group of four users who had experience of personalizing mobile applications (e.g. mobile phones, mp3 players) and had watched a LSE in an open stadium within the previous six months. They were aged between 26 and 31 and split equally between males and females.

6.3.2 Design phases

The design process in this research considered four main design aspects (content, conceptual, interaction, presentation). These are regarded as the most important in the HCI literature (Cooper and Reimann, 2003; Preece et al. 2002) and impact differently on the five components of user experience (UE). The links between design components and main UE impact are shown in Table 6.1 below:

Table 6.1 Impact of design aspects on user experience

Design aspect Meaning Main user experience

impact

Content design The information (including functionality) that is presented or made available to the user

User, social and usage context factors Conceptual design The physical nature of the application

including the basic way in which it works

Product and usage context factors

Interaction design The way in which a user works with the application

Product and usage context factors

Presentation design How content is actually presented to the user Product and cultural factors

The four design stages are described in the sections below. Since they are sequential (and also iterative), later design stages will incorporate the findings from earlier stages. Consequently, later stages will also take into account the UE components that are more relevant to the early design phases.