Investigating Mobile Device-Based Interaction Techniques for Collocated Merging

In mixed-focus collaboration, group members create content both individually as a kind of groundwork for discussion and further processing as well as directly together in group work sessions. In case of individual creation, separate documents and contents need to be merged to receive an overall solution. In our work, we focus on mixed-focus collaboration using mobile devices, especially smartphones, to create and merge content. Instead of using emails or messenger services to share content within a group, we describe three different mobile device-based interaction techniques for merging that use built-in sensors to enable ad-hoc collaboration and that are easy and eyes-free to perform. We conducted a user study to investigate these merging interactions. Overall, 21 participants tested the interactions and evaluated task load and User Experience (UX) of the proposed device-based interactions. Furthermore, they compared the interactions with a common way to share content, namely writing an email to send attached content. Participants gave valuable user feedback and stated that our merging interaction techniques were much easier to perform. Furthermore, we found that they were much faster, less demanding, and had a greater UX than email