What TURAP is

Concept

Each product or service that has been used throughout a collaborative activity creates an experience related to who has participated to the interaction and this kind of experience is called user experience. After interacting with the products there is a reaction in which the user will accept or reject aspects of the product at hand. This decision is influenced by external aspects, coming from the context of use, as well as those that the user built at that moment.

Having knowledge about the environment and targeted public characteristics to adapt the product to that target public is important to create a good user experience. However, concerning mobile computing it is a challenge. Mobile devices promote access to resources and applications in anywhere by a huge number of people and, thus, there are a variety of contexts and user types to be understood and adapted to the product. Services and frameworks, such as Google Play Services for Android, Core Location Framework for iOS and Windows Phone Runtime Location API for Windows Phone come to aid data extraction about the context, but there are still challenges to maintain the application always adapted due to a huge number of context variations.

Given this dynamicity, the great difficulty is to develop a product that harmonizes with the user as well as the context of use, producing good experiences. Bill Schilit, Norman Adams and Roy Want at the first IEEE workshop of Mobile Computing Systems and Applications (WMCSA 1994) mentioned that, even in the set of variations there are usage patterns. According to the authors, there are certain interactions that users regularly conduct when they are in the library, kitchen or office. Understanding their habits and routines is to recognize the relationship between context, user and product, making it possible to draw conclusions as: the user “x” always uses the product “y” in a way “n” in the context “k”. Having this knowledge allows us to predict the user’s wishes in a certain context. As a result, we can enhance usability until he reaches the best one and thus give him a good experience.

TURAP follows this concept to figure out usage patterns and help the application understand the context and user to thereby provide good user experiences.

TURAP, or “Tracker of Users’ Routines and Aware Pointer”, is a framework for Android applications that enables to identify users’ interaction routines and, based on usage patterns, points interactions forecasts according to the context. The framework aims to support professionals involved in the development of mobile applications identifying routines, predicting user navigations and providing a good user experience.

How to Use

TURAP is still in a initial fase, where some publications has been realised and improvements has happened under researchers reviews.

As soons as possible, the framework will be able to everybody use and help future improvements.

Publications

Paper: “Improving the User Experience on Mobile Apps Through Data Mining”
Event: 20th IEEE International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design (CSCWD 2016)
Authors:Tássio de Oliveira Silva Auad, Luiz Felipe Carvalho Mendes, Victor Ströele de Andrade Menezes and Jose Maria Nazar David

Paper: APRIMORANDO A EXPERIÊNCIA DO USUÁRIO EM APLICATIVOS MÓVEIS ATRAVÉS DA MINERAÇÃO DE DADOS
Event: Caderno de Estudos de Sistemas de Informação CES/JF (SEER CES/JF)
Authors:Tássio de Oliveira Silva Auad and Luiz Felipe Carvalho Mendes