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Towards a Set of Design Guidelines for Multi-device Experience

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Abstract

Thanks to the hyperconnected world in which we live, we are surrounded by devices. Many of these devices can communicate with each other, and even they can support the same application so that the user can have multiple forms of interaction. However, developers should be careful when considering the control level left to users, since the applications may become unusable. Whether the system or user decides the distribution of the available devices, Graphical User Interface (GUI) consistency must always be preserved. Consistency not only provides users with a robust framework in similar contexts but is an essential learning element and a lever to ensure the GUI efficient usage. This paper proposes a set of consistency guidelines that serve as a means for the construction of multi-device applications. As a case study, DistroPaint was evaluated by experts who identified consistency violations and assessed their severity.

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... Existing studies contribute to HCI research by presenting and addressing issues related to cross-platform systems and applications. These issues include the challenges and opportunities of designing an interactive cross-platform [26,27]; terminologies and trends in cross-devices [25,28]; designing the development of multi-application and users' interface experience [29][30][31][32]; and evaluation and comparison of crossplatform mobile applications and tools [33,34]. Limited studies have explored and assessed crossplatform user experiences [5,10,14,35]. ...
... Firstly, most previous studies are technical in nature, focusing on design science and software engineering. These studies focused on the compression of cross-platform frameworks [25,33], designing user interfaces [29,30], and evaluation performance [22,32]. ...
... Brudy et al. [5] provides an overview of cross-device research trends and terminology to unify common understanding for future research. A number of researchers have contributed to the body of knowledge concerning the design and development of cross-device systems (e.g., [21,[36][37][38][39][40]). Dong et al. [21] explored the barriers of designing and developing multi-device experiences. ...
... Through a series of interviews with designers and developers of cross-device systems, the authors identified three challenges pertaining to designing interactions, complexity of user interface standards, and lack of evaluation tools and techniques. Other work, such as O'Leary et al. [37] and Sanchez-Adame et al. [38], provide designers toolkits and guidelines for cross-device user interfaces for context shifts and consistency, respectively. These studies reflect the relevance of the work presented in the paper, and for the rest of this section we explore the evaluation methods previously utilised in the area of cross-device evaluations. ...
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