An exploratory study of input modalities for mobile devices used with museum exhibits

New mobile device features and the growing proportion of visitors carrying mobiles allow the range of museum exhibit design possibilities to be expanded. In particular, we see opportunities for using mobiles to help exhibits scale up to support variable-sized groups of visitors, and to support collaborative visitor-visitor interactions. Because exhibit use is generally one-time-only, any interfaces created for these purposes must be easily learnable, or visitors may not use the exhibit at all. To guide the design of learnable mobile interfaces, we chose to employ the Consistency design principle. Consistency was originally applied to desktop UIs, so we extended the definition to cover three new categories of consistency relevant to ubiquitous computing: Within-Device Consistency, Across-Device Consistency and Within-Context Consistency. We experimentally contrasted designs created from these categories. The results show small differences in learnability, but illustrate that even for one-off situations learnability may not be as important as usability.

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