Navigation Design for Mobile Access to Knowledge-Transfer Platforms

Although mobile interactivity is becoming a crucial issue in user-interface design, for content-rich application development, such as educational hypermedia systems, there is no consensus about how to represent, present, and manipulate content and navigation in a user-centered way. For browser- or GUI-like access facilities the drivers of design are rarely content structures or user tasks, but rather standard access facilities of hypermedia systems or user profiles. We propose to focus in navigation design on knowledge-transfer tasks and the domain the content is stemming from. We show a design solution for hypermedia-based knowledge transfer that captures different front ends to a platform. The platform as enabler provides several innovative functionalities for learners and coaches, in particular coupling communication facilities directly to didactically relevant content elements. In this paper we discuss the mapping of desktop-based access to mobile user interfaces. Navigation is based on domain-specific views and filtering as well as manipulation privileges conform to the role of users. Visual encoding is used to facilitate the navigation procedure given the limited space of current mobile devices (PDA, phones and the like). It turns out that the access paradigm to content, in our case the self-directed learning approach, triggers the requirements for user control and individual navigation.