Exploiting the icon arrangement on mobile devices as information source for context-awareness
Matthias Böhmer, Gernot Bauer · 2010
The contextual relevance of a service can only be determined by the human himself. However, a measure for relevance is required for context-aware service delivery. In this paper, we draw attention to icon arrangement on mobile devices as a new source of information for adaptive menus. We conducted contextual inquiries to investigate how people arrange icons on a grid-based menu. Our results show that context has an impact on how users arrange their menus: during different activities they prefer different icons to be placed at specific positions. We discuss layout options for icon menus and argue how the relevance can be approximated by observing the icon arrangement. Our results informed the design of a context-aware client for mobile services, which is presented as a prototype.