Abstract: Smartphones are a pretty big deal. Many of us now begin our day with our phone’s alarm clock. On the way to work we read email while listening to music. We navigate to novel locations with instructions to turn left in 500 yards. At the end of the day, we relax by queueing up YouTube content on our phone to watch on the big screen television. All of this is done on a small computer, which weighs the same as 12 coins, and has a tiny 4-inch screen. Smartphones really are a pretty big deal.
In this talk, I will describe our recent work that has investigated how low-level design decisions influence the way that people use and interact with their phone. First, I will consider how the auto-locking feature on a phone can dissuade users from regularly interleaving attention between other ongoing activities (Brumby & Seyedi, mobileHCI 2012). Second, I will consider how current generation smartphones handle incoming-calls, and explore alternatives to the dominate full-screen notification model, which forcibly interrupts whatever activity the user was already engaged in (Böhmer et al., CHI 2014). Finally, I will give in a preview of our recent work-in-progress that is investigating how people locate icons to launch apps on their phone.
Speaker Bio: Duncan Brumby is a Senior Lecturer at University College London working in the UCL Interaction Centre. He received his doctorate in Psychology from Cardiff University in 2005, after which he was a post-doc in Computer Science at Drexel University, until joining UCL in 2007. Dr. Brumby’s research has been published in leading HCI and Cognitive Science outlets. His work on multitasking has received best paper awards at CHI (2014, 2012, 2007), and his work on interactive search is one of the most-cited articles from the Human-Computer Interaction journal 2008-2010. To support his work, Dr. Brumby has attracted funding from the EPSRC. He is Associate Editor for the International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, is an Associate Chair for the ACM CHI conference (2012-2015) and ACM mobileHCI conference (2012-2013), and is a member of the EPSRC College.