Multimedia Technologies

Purpose – The underlying objective of this literature review was to investigate what kinds of semiotics researches have been employed in user interfaces design and usability evaluation, and how were they employed.

Design/methodology/approach – This research follows a systematic literature review process that consists of three key stages: planning the review, conducting the review, and reporting the review. Starting with an initial set of about 1,000 research articles, 65 were selected for this review, using an inclusion and exclusion criteria. Qualitative and quantitative data were extracted from the selected literatures following a data extraction strategy in six themes of data extraction. The extracted data were synthesized to formulate the stated research questions to obtain the review goals.

Findings – This systematic review identified research strengths, gaps, and challenges. Apart from this, further research possibilities were also explored in this review. For research, the review showed clear needs for more researches to increase both the number and the quality of studies that can be focused on the research gaps identified by this systematic review related to: outcome validation; cultural issues consideration; user interfaces of mobile applications and websites; semiotics perception in usability evaluation; and further improve the value and applicability of research ideas. For practice, the review showed the significance of semeiotics in user interface design and usability evaluation to develop users' intuitive interfaces for boosting the system's usability.

Originality/value – Based on a systematic literature review, the paper not only depicts the current status of semiotics research in user interface design and evaluation, but also provides a number of implications for research and practice. Thus, the review contributes to the scientific community of user interface design and evaluation, as well as suggesting the actual advances in the state of the practice in semiotics research on user interface.

Attaching a large external display can help a mobile device user
view more content at once. This paper reports on a study investigating how different configurations of input and output across displays affect performance, subjective workload and preferences in map, text and photo search tasks. Experimental results show that a hybrid configuration where visual output is distributed across displays is worst or equivalent to worst in all tasks. A mobile device-controlled large display configuration performs best in the map search task and equal to best in text and photo search tasks (tied with a mobile-only configuration). After conducting a detailed analysis of the performance differences across different UI configurations, we give recommendations for the design of distributed user interfaces.

In this paper we present Heritage+, an integrated platform for interactive access of different types of media elements through an unified interface. A unique aspect of Heritage+ is that it deals with document images as distinct media type and implements tools and techniques for browsing and querying document images along with other media elements like video sequences and images. Further, Heritage+ proposes a new scheme for encoding and use of ontology for accessing multi-media collection. In the context of document images, the ontology specifies the document class-specific semantics of the logical components that help in an automated semantically meaningful linking of documents and their components with heterogeneous media-type resources. Further, Heritage+ supports conceptual query of document images along with other media elements. This multi-functional access interface to the document images is provided in Heritage+ using a novel model guided document image segmentation scheme and word-image based indexing scheme.

The focus of this chapter is on the quality of service (QoS) aspects involved in transmitting multimedia information via mobile systems. Multimedia content and applications require sophisticated QoS protocols. These protocols need to manage throughput, delay, delay variance, error rate, and cost. How errors are handled in a multimedia session can have significant impact on the delay and delay variance. Coding and compression techniques also influence how the final presentation is transformed by the impediments encountered on a mobile network. Providing the user with the ability to negotiate between cost, quality, and temporal aspects is important, as this allows the user to strike a balance between these factors. In moving from 2G to 3G, and, over the next decade to 4G mobile networks, the ability to transmit multimedia information is going to improve constantly. Nonetheless, providers must develop viable economic models and user interfaces for providing differentiated QoS to the users.