User Interfaces for Navigation and Exploration in Folksonomies on Mobile Devices and Evaluation of their Usability in Mobile Use Contexts

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Rainer Malaka
• Subject Area: Human Factors, Ergonomics, Human-Machine Systems
• Term: from 2011 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 192903452

This research project addresses the design, development and evaluation of user interfaces for navigation and exploration of folksonomies on mobile devices in a user-centered design process. Folksonomies are information structures that emerge from tagging activities by users. While on desktop devices the typical visualisation of folksonomies is the tag cloud, so far hardly any approach exists for a suitable presentation of folksonomies on mobile devices. Moreover, the extended design space for folksonomies on mobile devices that contains a number of contextual data beyond time and place information has not been addressed appropriately yet in research although it yields many potentials for novel, innovative applications in a variety of mobile application scenarios. Therefore, the significant goal of this project is to gain new insights about presentation and interaction options for using folksonomies that are optimized for mobile use cases. In the first funding period we designed and developed three prototypes for different application scenarios that investigate distinct aspects of the research question. Prototype 1 focuses on the properties of interactive tag clouds for exploring large text documents on mobile devices, prototype 2 investigates mobile user interfaces for using folksonomies in context in an urban gardening project, and prototype 3 connects mobile interaction with folksonomies with interactive walls to explore and analyze large folksonomy data sets. For all three prototypes we designed innovative user interfaces and evaluated them already at early stages with users. This proposal contains next to a progress report on the current results the planned work programme for a second funding period over 12 months. This period is essential in order to finalize the previously started works. This contains the evaluations of the prototypes in lab and in real context settings as well as the concept and realization of a toolkit for the generation of interactive visualisations of folksonomies on mobile devices. At the end of the project the design parameters that have proven to be appropriate will be summarized in guidelines for the design of mobile user interfaces for folksonomies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants