Designing Opportunistic User Interfaces to Support a Collaborative Museum Exhibit

This research explores how to support collaborative learning practices when science museum visitors employ their own personal mobile devices as Opportunistic User Interfaces (O-UIs) to manipulate a simulation-based museum exhibit. The sophisticated graphical capabilities of modern mobile devices have the potential to distract visitors, a phenomenon known as the heads-down effect. To study the impact of O-UI design on collaboration, a highly-dynamic "complex" O-UI was contrasted against more simplistic, "remote-control" OUI design, in the context of a cancer-treatment simulation. As expected, when groups used the "complex" O-UI, there was less visitor-visitor interaction, but unexpectedly, their conversations were of higher quality. They also engaged in better task division and displayed better task performance. The increased attention "simple" O-UI users were able to devote to monitoring one another's actions seemed to encourage emergent competitive behaviors, which disproportionately affected the engagement of female visitors. "Complex" groups showed no gender-related differences in engagement.