From Appearing to Disappearing Ephemeral Adaptation for Small Screens
In Proc. ACM OzCHI 2014 international conference. pages 41-48. 2014.
Sarah Bouzit, Denis Chene, Gaëlle Calvary
Sydney, December 2014
Abstract
This paper presents two forms of adaptive menus for small devices (smart phones). Contrary to the Ephemeral appearing adaptation proposed by Findlater et al. [7], we claim for disappearing adaptation. The first form is named In Context Disappearing (ICD); the second one Out of Context Disappearing (OCD). The principle of ICD is to display predictive information in a prompting window placed above the main list. The prompting window disappears gradually while maintaining the context always visible and directly accessible. In case of low level prediction, ICD enables the user to reach its target without waiting for the disappearing effect. The principle of OCD is almost the same except that the disappearing prompting window covers the full page and thus is out of context like Findlater’s approach. Our study shows that for small devices “fading out” a contextual window is better than “fading in”. We demonstrate the benefit of these new forms of adaptation through an experiment with 24 subjects. We conclude that (1) ICD and OCD adaptive lists support faster selection than the Control condition when the prediction is good without being slower in case of bad prediction, and that (2) ICD is faster than OCD in case of bad prediction.