Habito News

What is Habito News

Habito News is a research tool that we use to investigate how to make a smartphone change its user interface to better suit the individual user.

We are particularly interested in how people read the news on smartphones and user interfaces for news apps.

Download the app today and contribute to our research!

Habito
News

Habito News: A research tool to investigate mobile news reading

The research work behind Habito News involves monitoring user’s news reading behaviour, recognising patterns of such behaviour in order to building user models, and finally developing an automated adaptive user interface that would personalise news reading experience on mobile devices.

An overview of the research questions:

1. How do people vary in accessing and reading the news on smartphones? What are the stereotypical news readers profiles?

2. How can smartphones news apps detect and learn individual user’s patterns of interactions?

3. How can smartphone news apps exploit a news reader profile to adapt its interface and interaction?

4. How different users would benefit from different forms of a smartphone news app?

List of publications:

Marios Constantinides (2015)
Apps with habits: Adaptive Interfaces for News Apps
ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) EA, Seoul Korea, 4 pages.
M. Constantinides, J. Dowell, D. Johnson, S. Malacria (2015)
Exploring Mobile News Reading Interactions for News App Personalisation
MobileHCI'15, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2015, 6 pages.
M. Constantinides, J. Dowell (2016)
User Interface Personalisation in News Apps
Workshop on News Recommendation and Analytics (INRA'16), at UMAP, Halifax, Canada, 2016, 4 pages.

A sneak peek at our MobileHCI paper

Take home message:

Mobile news readers can reliably characterised within three types.
A preliminary analysis of user's interactions with Habito News showed the feasibility of automatic detection of user's newsreader type.
Different mobile newsreader types benefit from different forms of the app.

People

Marios Constantinides PhD Candidate

Email:m.constantinides@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Marios's research interests revolve around Human-Computer Interaction and Machine Learning. In particular, his research focuses in the areas of adaptive user interfaces, user modeling and personalisation. He is interested in understanding users interaction behaviour, creating personalised and adaptive user interfaces, especially in the mobile environment.

John Dowell Senior Lecturer

Email:j.dowell@ucl.ac.uk

John's research investigates advanced forms of user interface with a focus on adaptive interfaces and agent interfaces, media multi-tasking interfaces, and visualisations for reasoning and decision-making. The work has application to smartphone apps, smart meeting rooms, collaborative learning environments, and dynamic systems control. Funding has been provided by the research councils, european union, industry and central government agencies.

Privacy Policy

Habito News is a research tool developed with the aim of improving peoples' news reading interactions. By downloading and using it, I agree to participate in a study that investigates mobile news reading behaviour, aiming to provide a more personalised news service. I understand that my participation is entirely voluntary.

I agree with the following points:

1. The purpose of this research is to understand peoples' news reading behaviour and ultimately provide automated user interfaces that personalise news reading experience.
2. I understand that I will fill in a short survey after registering with Habito News and I will provide my interaction logs for the period of the trial.
3. The app runs a background service that collects your interactions with the user interface of the app. In any case the app does not monitor your interactions with other apps, so you do not have to worry about privacy issues.
4. The researchers do not foresee any risks to me for participating in this study, nor do they expect that I will experience any discomfort or stress.
5. I understand that I may withdraw from the study at any time. All of the data collected will remain strictly confidential.
6. Only people associated with the study will see my responses. My responses will not be associated with my name; instead, my name will be converted to a code number when the researchers store the data.

Learns your news reading patterns ... turns mobile news reading into a pleasant activity