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Handheld Interaction Design - (why context is important)

One of the barriers to good phone usability is the necessity of trying to map lots of functions to a very small number of buttons and a tiny screen. There has been talk of interfaces that are pervasive and “nomadic” such as the kind described by the Oxygen Project at MIT. The approach taken by the researchers there was to use displays and controls in the environment around the user instead of the one only provided by the mobile device itself. For example, if the phone is near a TV or a PC, that bigger display could be used instead of the one on the device. They also excessively utilize free form speech as a mode of interaction with the device to improve the user experience. Ofcourse in the confines of a lab with unlimited resources all this works fine but in the real world these research hacks are still to be proven out.

Another approach is to try to make the interfaces more intelligent and “aware”, and use context and history to try to eliminate some of the required entries at any given point for an application; by having the device figure things out for itself… For example, rather than requiring the user to set whether the phone should be on vibrate or regular mode, the phone could detect its location and look at the user’s calendar, and use those to tell if the user is in a meeting, in a movie theater, or at her desk.

At Carnegie Mellon, researchers have been trying to develop a “cognitive personal assistant” for commanders in the army. By having a device or a set of applications behave in a context aware manner researchers are able to show marked differences in efficiency and improved communication.

Amit and I have felt from the beginning that for people to work more effectively while they are mobile we need to build interfaces that are “context-aware” and this concept comes up time and again in literature in the HCI-handheld space (the cognitive p-a is an example). Very rarely have we seen applications that are developed with this in mind. Context is as important as effective interaction design. Infact doing one in a vaccum without the other leads to an ineffective mobile experience for the user.

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This entry was written by kiran and posted on August 14, 2006 at 12:05 pm and filed under Mobile Applications. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment(Latest is displayed first) or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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2 Comments so far (Add 1 more)

  1. The importance of context to mobile communication devices is not debatable. However, the ability of engineers to develop context-aware devices that can automatically make decisions for users based on current location is certainly debatable. Not only do I think it is a bad idea, because a location is more than a location and is typically a place in which what is happening and how it is happening gets negotiated by people in communication. Rules governing interaction do not map to locations. Think about all the places you treat like your office. The overall approach to location-aware computing is best considered in light of research in embodied interaction, like that of Paul Dourish, or the considerations given to cultural practices as infrastructures, just as important as hardware infrastructure for mobile communication devices, like you see in the research of the People and Practices Research group at Intel.

    1. Larry Irons on September 21st, 2006 at 6:01 pm

  2. Interesting concepts. I too would love to see this sort of advance design in mobile but believe it’s a long way off.

    That said I think that the mobile industry as a whole still needs to nail the basics before moving on to more advanced concepts like this. Although UI’s and hardware intereface designs are getting better, they still leave a lot to be desired. Applications are still largely silo’s with poor workflow integration necessary for mass market usability. IMHO attempts to automate tasks such as the concepts described above sound neat but only lead to more confusion. The real answer is making work flows easier and more intuitively to control their devices. Usability testing is not emphasised enough today and many mobile software platforms are inflexible to institute even simple changes. This needs to change. On the web, we’ve all become accustome to platforms where you can update a website in hours or even minutes. With mobile handsets, interface and application changes require 9-12 months of planning for most handset functions. These are fundamental flaws in the foundation of interaction design for mobile that need to be solved before more advanced concepts can be realistically added to the mix.

    2. Tucker Snedeker on September 20th, 2006 at 11:35 pm

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