Design guidelines for managing metadata for personal content on mobile devices

Abstract

Personal media content is increasingly accessed by mobile devices and services. Small handheld devices may give access to thousands of personal media items such as photos, music and messages, but managing the vast amount of content on a small device with a limited user interface (UI) is becoming tedious. Searching content with metadata -- that is, descriptive data about the content -- facilitates locating of particular piece of content. However, in addition to rapidly increasing amount of content, the amount and extent of types of metadata attached to each content object is also growing. Thus, metadata management itself is becoming a burdensome task. We present our study on how to improve metadata management and make it motivating on mobile devices. We conducted 26 interviews and two workshops with users to study users' needs and design requirements for metadata management. As a main result, we present UI design guidelines for personal content related metadata management on mobile devices.