Proximity Based Adaptation of Content to Groups of Viewers of Public Displays

Responsive design adapts web content to different viewing contexts to deliver an optimal viewing and interaction experience. Recent work proposed a model and framework for proximity-based adaptation of web content as a new dimension for responsive web design. While it was shown that the model improves the perception and user engagement for single viewers, until now, the effect had not been investigated for multiple simultaneous viewers who may be at different distances from the display. In this paper, we report on an initial study that evaluated and compared the effects of using the average distance of viewers as the basis for handling adaptation of content to multiple viewers with a classic one that adapts content based only on display characteristics. Our results show that the adaptive model provides a better view of the content and improves user engagement, but can be confusing when serving multiple viewers.