The Impact of Indoor/Outdoor Context on Smartphone Interaction During Walking

Krukar J, van Eek, A.

Abstract

It is unclear how users' interaction patterns with personal technology change, as they move between indoor and outdoor spaces. Understanding the impact of indoor/outdoor context could help to improve adaptive user interfaces of location-based services. We present a field experiment, in which participants were asked to complete a cognitive task appearing on a smartphone, while walking subsequent indoor and outdoor route segments. Results demonstrate that the average time to complete the task was significantly longer, when the same task was encountered outdoors, compared to indoors. The recorded eye tracking data show that the rate at which participants were glimpsing the smartphone (anticipating the task to appear on the screen) was decreasing steadily over time, but increased again after re-entering an already known building. This indicates that the indoor/outdoor context has a significant impact on at least two distinct aspects of interacting with personal technology during walking: the user's ability to quickly respond to a simple task requiring thinking, and the user's spontaneous willingness to visually control the display. Most importantly, it is shown that the influence of the indoor/outdoor context on these two aspects manifests itself with two distinct patterns. The findings are discussed with regard to different attentional requirements of indoor and outdoor spaces during walking.