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Task Continuity and Mobile User Interfaces

Published: 25 November 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Task continuity is an important inter-usability attribute, for enhancing user transitioning experience. Mobile devices are commonly used in cross-device interaction, in combination with desktops or laptops devices. However, a lack of studies explored and compared factors affecting task continuity when users transit to and from the different types of mobile user interfaces: native mobile application, mobile website and mobile responsive website. To address this, we conducted a user study, with twenty-four voluntary participants, to investigate factors affecting task continuity when users switch between desktop website and the different types of mobile user interfaces. We used think-aloud protocols, observation and questionnaire to gather data. During our experiments, each participant switched between desktop and mobile interfaces to perform inter-related tasks. Inconsistency was a principle factor affecting task continuity when participants switched from and to mobile native applications and mobile websites. The difficulty in controlling user interface components and the slow loading of contents were two main factors affecting task continuity when users switched to continue working on mobile websites and mobile responsive websites.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
MUM '18: Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia
November 2018
548 pages
ISBN:9781450365949
DOI:10.1145/3282894
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 November 2018

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Author Tags

  1. Inter-usability
  2. Mobile User Interfaces
  3. Task Continuity
  4. User Transitioning Experience

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MUM 2018

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MUM '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 37 of 82 submissions, 45%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 190 of 465 submissions, 41%

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