General Terms

The difference between using one mobile phone and another can feel like learning a new language based on our extensive experience designing mobile applications for spatial data navigation, faceted search, and glanceable information, we have developed design principles for unifying the various aspects of the internet connected mobile phone (“smartphone”) user experience. This paper presents TapGlance, a design proposal for a novel mobile phone user interface. TapGlance adapts its presentation to different levels of user attention, provides ubiquitous faceted search, and uses a zooming metaphor to unite inter- and intra-application navigation. Because our interface relies on a spatial metaphor it can also be adapted to non-textual representations and thus useful to broader populations. This paper describes our design goals, design process, and the resulting TapGlance design