The whole world under your fingertips: novel mobile user interfaces for social media
Nowadays people are regularly using Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and other services on mobile devices. One design trend is to bring events in these services to the mobile phone in real time.For example, in April, 2013, Facebook Home provides a replacement to mobile devices’ home screen that allows users to view and post content without launching dedicated applications. Designs as such impose significant impact on people’s lives, which need to be carefully explored in the design and development process. Doctoral research by Yanqing Cui has explored this exact research question by developing pioneering social media designs between 2006 and 2011.
One of key aspects in this PhD research is a novel user interface concept for mobile social media, called Linked UI. Using this user interface, people can see relevant content from all their social media applications combined to unified views. People can see the recent content from all the related services when they glance at a mobile device. More details about this concept are available on this webpage: http://research.nokia.com/research/linkedui/.
Over fifty people tested the developed user interface for several weeks. When using the interface, people find it meaningful to be aware of others’ activities, context, and status at minimal efforts. As a user commented, ‘I feel as if the world is under my fingertips. I am better connected to my friends, as I am better aware what they are doing’. Given small slices of time in mobile contexts, people often expect to see ‘just enough’ functionalities. Most of them like the system to automatically prioritize the online events instead of treating all of them with the same importance.
This dissertation’s work was done in Nokia Research Center (Helsinki). The influence of this work is visible in the notification home of Nokia in-house N9 smartphones. The same design trend is continued in Windows Phone that Nokia adopted in its Lumia series.
Public defence of a doctoral dissertation on Friday, 17 May
The doctoral dissertation of M. Ed. Yanqing Cui in the field of user experience titled “Social Networking Services on Mobile Devices: User Interface Designs and User Experience Studies” will be publicly examined at the Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering of Tampere University of Technology (TUT) in room TB222 in the Tietotalo building (address: Korkeakoulunkatu 6, Tampere, Finland) at 12:00 on Friday, 17 May 2013.
The opponent will be Professor Matt Jones (Swansea University, UK) and Professor Panos Markopoulos (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands). Professor Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila from the Department of Pervasive Computing at TUT will act as Chairman.
Yanqing Cui (35) comes from Shandong, China, and worked at Nokia Research Center (Helsinki) during this doctoral study.
Further information: Yanqing Cui, tel. +358 44 521 3648, yanqing.cui@gmail.com