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the Gallery application by adding a command to
the application.
The upload tool needed to be configured to
use the Flickr Internet service for publishing im-
ages. If a user did not have an account to Flickr
before starting to use the service, he needed to
create the account by using a Web browser. After
the configuration, the upload tool was ready to
be taken into use. The user could set the upload
tool to automatically poll Flickr at certain intervals
and download the latest public images from his
contacts and all other users of the service. The
updating could also be done manually.
While Image Exchange was a prototype,
Gallery was a more feature complete product.
Especially, the tool was able to show a list for
user's contacts in the Flickr service and the user
could directly access the contacts' images using
the list. Image Exchange did not yet have this
functionality implemented. The participants
were asked to ignore the features (especially the
feature for having contacts in the service) that
were available in the upload tool and Flickr but
not in our prototype application. However, this
did not always happen as seen in the results of
the user study.
described themselves as PC power users while
the rest were basic users. Half of the participants
had a smart phone, the other half a basic phone.
Nine participants owned a digital camera, and
five used their phone also as a camera. None of
the participants were users of the upload tool ap-
plication used for comparison nor the Flickr Web
service, but they mainly used Facebook (2008)
and e-mail to share images.
The participants were paid a small reward after
the test period and they did not have to pay the
data costs during the test period. We did not reveal
the origin of either application during the study.
Procedure
Group 1 used Gallery first and switched to Im-
age Exchange after seven days. Group 2 used the
applications in the opposite order. We chose to
conduct the field study in this way to ensure that
the testing order of the applications did not affect
the results. The participants were not given instruc-
tions on how to use the applications, because we
wanted to simulate the situation where real users
take a mobile photo sharing application into use
for the first time. The participants were given
Nokia N95 devices, which had both applications
pre-installed.
We sent one or two tasks to the participants
by text message every morning. Together with
the message, we sent a multiple-choice question,
which they had to answer before the next morn-
ing. The questions formed a set to evaluate the
usability aspects of the applications. Below, you
can find an example of a task:
Participants
We used two groups in the field study both in-
cluding five participants that were friends with
each other and daily in contact. The target was
to follow social interaction in a group of friends
who all use the same mobile application and cor-
responding photo sharing Internet service. The
participants were students from a university ages
ranging 19-25 years. Two of the participants were
female and eight of them were male. We decided
to recruit students as they belong to the target
group of social Internet services and are already
actively using such services.
The participants did not have technical back-
ground, but some had interest towards technology
and considerable IT skills. Seven of the participants
Discuss about images and add comments to images
that other users of the service have published.
How easy was it to comment images on a mobile
device? 1=Very hard.. 5=Very easy
We selected 6 goal-oriented tasks for each
period. The tasks included basic use cases for a
photo sharing application: Registration, upload-
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