Improving the User Experience of a Mobile Photo Gallery by Supporting Social Interaction - Human-Computer Interaction and Innovation in Handheld, Mobile and Wearable Technologies - page 227

in which participants used the applications and
services. This is an interesting aspect as usually
people might first become very enthusiastic about
a new service or application but the excitement
subsides over time. In this study, the usage of a
photo sharing service on a mobile device was a
relatively new method for the participants, which
means that they were excited about it during the
first period. Still, Group 1 increased their activity
after switching from Gallery to Image Exchange.

upload tool was missing the enjoyment aspects of
use, which are essential for a mobile application
used for social communication. The participants
of the study were more socially active when using
Image Exchange, which indicates that better user
experience encourages users to use social Internet
services more actively.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT

I would like to thank Davin Wong, Janne Kaas-
alainen, Toni Strandell, Timo Pakkala, and Tuomas
Tammi for their support in authoring this paper.
Financial support from Nokia Foundation and Wi-
huri Foundation is also gratefully acknowledged.

CONCLUSION

In this chapter, we introduced a mobile photo
sharing application, Image Exchange, that is fully
integrated to a corresponding Internet service;
thus, offering an easy and fun way to share and
interact with images. In particular, we put special
attention on making the user experience of the
implemented features as positive as possible.
The research goal was to find out whether social
interaction is best nourished when users are using
a gallery application that is deeply integrated to the
Internet service compared to a solution existing
on the market today, which uses an add-on tool
to enable photo sharing.
To evaluate Image Exchange, we conducted
a field study with 10 participants to compare a
state-of-the-art gallery application with an Internet
service upload tool to Image Exchange. The results
of the study show that 8 out of 10 participants
preferred Image Exchange and it also scored bet-
ter in more detailed usability and user experience
ratings. Image Exchange was especially appreci-
ated because of user experience and speed. The
gallery application used for comparison scored
reasonably well in general and usability related
questions but not in the user experience evaluation.
This means that the usability or general evalua-
tion did not reveal how satisfied the participants
were with the service nor did they explain the
participants' application preference. The state-
of-the-art gallery application combined with the

REFERENCES

Ahern, S., Eckles, D., Good, N., King, S., Naa-
man, M., & Nair, R. (2007). Over-Exposed?
Privacy Patterns and Considerations in Online
and Mobile Photo Sharing . In Proceedings of
the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in
computing systems (CHI 2007),p.357-366. San
Jose, CA:ACM Press.

Ahern, S., King, S., & Davis, M. (2005). MMM2:
mobile media metadata for photo sharing . Pro-
ceedings of the 13th annual ACM international
conference on Multimedia, Hilton, Singapore.

Ahern, S., King, S., Qu, H., & Davis, M. (2005).
PhotoRouter: destination-centric mobile media
messaging , p. 209-210. In Proc., MULTIMEDIA
2005. San Jose, CA: ACM Press

Ames, M., Eckles, D., Naaman, M., Spasojevic,
M., & House, N. (2010, Feb.). Requirements
for mobile photoware. Personal and Ubiquitous
Computing , 14 (2), 95-109. doi:10.1007/s00779-
009-0237-4