Many limitations exist for application development on mobile devices: limited screen resolution,

limited processing power and stylus interaction impose great challenges for mobile application developers. Popular image browsers use scroll bars to cycle through image thumbnails and locate images of interest to inspect in full resolution. My interest was to design and implement an image browser that eliminates the need to use scroll bars by using Treemaps for laying out images’ thumbnails on a

single screen and Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUI) to navigate through images. After the product was created in Embedded C++ and GDI, I designed and ran a usability study to test users’ performance and satisfaction with the new interface compared to traditional image browsing interfaces. My major hypothesis is that laying out images on a single screen will help users to visually identify themes of each group of images (folder) and be able to locate images faster than using an interface allowing users to identify groups by folder names and select folders of interest to inspect images inside it.

While the different in results were not statistically significant, indicating that users are likely to be as fast and make as many errors identifying images in various image browsing products, subjective measures indicated higher user satisfaction using Pocket PhotoMesa since the interface was more fun to play with and easier to use.

 

Pocket PhotoMesa was acquired by WindsorInterfaces in the summer of 2003.

 

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