From appearing to disappearing ephemeral adaptation for small screens

This paper presents two forms of adaptive menus for small devices (smart phones). Contrary to the Ephemeral appearing adaptation proposed by Findlater et al. [7], we claim for disappearing adaptation. The first form is named In Context Disappearing (ICD); the second one Out of Context Disappearing (OCD). The principle of ICD is to display predictive information in a prompting window placed above the main list. The prompting window disappears gradually while maintaining the context always visible and directly accessible. In case of low level prediction, ICD enables user to reach its target without waiting for disappearing effect. OCD principle is almost the same except that the disappearing prompting window covers the full page and thus is out of context like Findlater's approach. Our study shows that for small devices "fading out" a contextual window is better than "fading in". We demonstrate the benefit of these new forms of adaptation through an experiment with 24 subjects. We conclude that (1) ICD and OCD adaptive lists support faster selection than Control condition when the level of prediction is high, slower in case of bad prediction, and that (2) ICD is faster than OCD in case of bad prediction.