Measuring the effect of distractions on mobile users’ performance

M. Crease

Human Web Group, NRC-IIT, Fredericton, Canada

Users of mobile applications in everyday life are required to be aware of their surroundings yet evaluations of such applications often allow the participants to focus entirely on the evaluation task. This is largely due to practical considerations as the undertaking of an evaluation in an uncontrolled environment such as a busy street is fraught with difficulty. These difficulties may be logistical - it may be hard to control the environment and capture data – and ethical – participants may be exposed to injury if being asked to perform a complicated task in a real life environment. This paper describes work investigating how different forms of distraction affect user performance in a controlled usability lab setting.

The distractions a mobile user faces are many and varied. A user may be required to navigate through a shopping mall or listen to a colleague’s conversation. These distractions are relevant to the user and must be responded to. Other distractions such as flashing billboards or distant police sirens are irrelevant to the user but may still affect the user’s ability to perform the task at hand. How the user responds to these distractions may vary as well. A tourist may search the Internet for more information regarding the interesting architecture on a nearby building while he/she would step out the way of oncoming traffic.

A series of evaluations that form an initial investigation into the form and effect of external distractions will be described. These evaluations require the participants to monitor distractions projected onto the laboratory walls while performing their primary task. Participants are required to acknowledge certain distractions by pressing a button on the user interface of their mobile device. The effect of different forms of distraction - and the absence of distraction – on task performance will be compared.

This paper will describe the evaluations undertaken and will outline future work planned in this area. It is hoped that this work will better enable researchers to run evaluations for mobile applications in laboratory settings.

Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2005 , 5^th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 30 August - 2 September 2005, Wageningen, The Netherlands.

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