T research examines the effects of hyper-contextual targeting with physical crowdedness on consumer responses to mobile ads. It relies on rich field data from one of the world’s largest telecom providers who can gauge physical crowdedness in real-time in terms of the number of active mobile users in subway trains. The telecom provider randomly sent targeted mobile ads to individual users, measu...

This paper presents a mobile handheld device, called “Ponycom”, for virtual community access and communication purposes. The research approach is user centred, i.e. the needs and requirements of a specific user group, namely the members of virtual stables, are examined. Based on the results, a design concept of a dedicated mobile handheld device for active members of virtual stables is presente...

Some movements within modern architecture particularly emphasise the importance of matching buildings to their surroundings. However, practicing such ‘‘contextual architecture’’ is highly challenging and typically not something the future inhabitants of a building are well equipped for participating in. This paper explores the potentials of using mobile phone technology for facilitating such cl...

To better understand the pharmacy medication dispensing process and its relationship with packaging and labeling, two studies were conducted: one was a contextual inquiry involving the interview of 13 experienced pharmacists and pharmacy technicians; the other was a usability test of 30 pharmacists and pharmacy technicians specifically related to a particular product family in a simulated pharm...

This article reviews the literature on the role that children can play in the design of information technology applications intended for young users themselves. It discusses several relevant design theories—user-centered design, contextual design (CD) or inquiry, participatory design (PD), cooperative inquiry, informant design, and learner-centered design—looks at usability issues in relation t...

Younger adults use both semantic and phonological cues to quickly and efficiently localize the referent during sentence comprehension. While some behavioral studies suggest that older adults use contextual information even more strongly than younger adults, ERP studies have shown that this population, as a group, is less apt at using contextual semantic cues to predict upcoming words. The curre...

Communication associated with artifacts serves a critical role in the creation, refinement, and selection of conceptual ideas. Despite the close relationship between ideas and surrounding communication, effective integration of these two types of design materials are not well-supported by exiting design tools resulting in ad-hoc and ineffective strategies for managing communication during the d...

This paper describes our participation in the TREC 2012 Contextual Suggestion Track. The goal of the track is to evaluate systems that provide suggestions for activities to users in a specific location, at a specific time, taking into account their personal preferences. As a source for travel suggestions we use Wikitravel, which is a community-based travel guide for destinations all over the wo...

We investigated the potentials and acceptance of tangible tabletop (TT) interfaces in functional and neural rehabilitation. Our goal was to analyse whether TT systems are adequate for rehabilitation and its sub categories and whether these tools have the potential to create an added value for both patients and therapists. We further investigated conventional practices and rehabilitation tools t...