Designing for Mobility

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• Designing for Mobility

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Agenda

• Mobility defined
• The need for mobility
• Mobility usability concerns
• Guidelines for mobile devices
• Anything, Anytime, Anywhere
• The Martini solution
• Web of Technology
• Implicit HCI
• Programming for Mobility

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Mobility Defined

• Belotti og Bly (1996)
• Local and long-distance mobility.
• Local nurses doctors at hospital ward
• Long-distance sales- repairmen
• Kristoffersen Ljungberg (1999)
• Wandering near local
• Travelling near long-distance on the road
• Visiting long-distance at customer (more
  space)

Bellotti, V. Bly, S. (1996) Walking away from
the desktop computer Distributed collaboration
and mobility in a product design team. In K.
Ehrlich and C. Schmandt, editors, Proceedings of
the ACM 1996 Conference on Computer Supported
CooperativeWork. ACM, ACM Press
Kristoffersen, S. and Ljungberg, F. (1999)
Mobile Use of IT. In proceedings of the 19th
information systems research seminar in
Scandinavia, edited by Käkölä, Jyväskylä, Finland.
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The need for mobility
Not so nice BUT available from the couch
Nice but NOT available from the couch
Which do you choose?
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Of course we want it

• We would love to check the TV-guide
• On the bus
• In the couch at home
• In the office
• Even on the toilet
• We would like to be able to do a lot of things
• Check emails
• Check the weather
• Check the status of the feeding machine

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Mobility usability concerns

• Several issues
• Poor Interaction Device support
• Small output devices (screens)
• Some limited to text
• Some monochrome
• Minimal input devices
• Limited CPU resources
• Limited battery power
• Limited bandwidth
• Price of network access

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Design Guidelines for Mobile Devices

• Several Design Guidelines (Nokia 2004)
• Nokia Produces several high quality
• Ex Series 60 phones Usability Guidelines
• Example 4.1 Navigation

Nokia. (2004) Series 60 Developer Platform 2.0
Usability Guidelines For Enterprise Applications
http//www.forum.nokia.com/main/1,6566,21,00.html?
fsrParam1-3-/main/1,6566,21_10,00.htmlfileID582
8, 5. oktober 2004
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Design Guidelines for Mobile Devices

• Guidelines from (Nokia 2004)
• Navigation
• Basic Interaction Style, Main Menu
• Options Menu, Scrolling
• Shortcuts,
• Text Entry (Entering Information)
• Consider the possibilities
• Make text entry easy
• Respect the users work
• Information Presentation
• Chunking information
• Text, Graphics, Colors, Sounds, Errors,
• Connectivity with a Server
• Handling connections, Syncronizing

See also Scott Weiss book on Handheld Usability,
Wiley, 2002
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Guidelines are not enough

• As (Nokia 2004) states
• One need to
• Know the user and context of use (p. 8)
• Test with real users and often (p. 8)
• Choose simlicity (p. 8)
• Use rapid prototyping with paper prototypes (p.
  11)
• BUT still there are other dangers to consider

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The Martini solution

• Anything, Anytime, Anywhere
• Lets take WWW and make it mobile
• The result WAP
• Ramsay Nielsen (2000)
• WAP Usability. Dejá Vu 1994 All over Again
• WAP failed miserably due to a lack of
  understanding of the special usability issues
  concerning mobility
• WAP was designed for mobility a paradox
• The content was not and marketing lied

Ramsay, M. Nielsen, J. (2000) WAP Usability.
Deja Vu 1994 All Over Again. Special Report of
the Norman Nielsen Group
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Déjà Vu I

• The usability of current WAP services is
  severely reduced because of a misguided use of
  design principles from previous media, especially
  principles of Web design. This situation is
  exactly equivalent to Web design problems in
  1994, when many sites contained brochureware
  that followed design principles that worked great
  in print (say, big images) but didnt work in an
  interactive medium example of a WAP design from
  Excite that uses four screens to present two
  screens worth of material. Such lavish design
  may work well on the Web if users have a
  big-screen PC, but on a smallscreen device,
  designers must boil each service down to its
  essence and show much less information. (Ramsay
  Nielsen 2000, p. 4).

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Dejá Vu II

• Users also seemed unable to quite get over the
  fact that WAP is not the Internet made portable.
  Whether it was ever meant to be that is open to
  question. It is tempting to lay much of the blame
  for this misconception at the door of the
  marketing departments who want to exploit mobile
  telephony. Nevertheless, there was, at the same
  time, a clear demand from users for a portable
  version of at least some of the Internet. So what
  does this mean for WAP? (Ramsay Nielsen
  2000, p. 68)

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Dejá Vu III

• on the one side, the networks and content
  providers offered long lists of sites and
  services providing pretty much everything a WAP
  user might want. But to users, this was a recipe
  for disaster. The long menus required
  thumb-numbing scrolls. Categories in themselves
  were a good start, but once the user clicked
  through, the guiding role of the screen was often
  abandoned. This left users with a bewildering
  array of sites that frequently were not quite, if
  at all, what they wanted. The result? A mildly
  irritated user slowly and surely becomes
  increasingly more fractious and disenchanted with
  the system as a whole (Ramsay Nilsen 2000, p.
  69)

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What does work

• Do NOT try to convert PC solutions 11
• Make specialized versions
• Introduce only the needed elements of the
  overall information space (Nielsen
  Søndergaard 2000)
• Support intelligent use
• Implict HCI (Contextual Awareness)
• Web of Technologies (Nielsen Søndergaard 2000)

Nielsen, C. and Søndergaard, A. (2000) Designing
for mobility an integration approach supporting
multiple technologies. In Proceedings of the 1st
Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction.
Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden
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Web of Technologies - existing
While on the couch much of it
While at the PC all of the overall information
space
While in the bus, on the toilet, at the office
only part of it
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Web of Technologies - symbiotic
While at the office access all of the overall
information space plan ahead
In the supermarket easy access
through Symbiotic Web
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Web of Technologies
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Implicit HCI - Context Awareness
(Mann 1994, 1996 1997)
Mann, S. (1994) "Mediated Reality". TR 260,
M.I.T. Media Lab Perceptual Computing Section,
Cambridge, Ma.
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Implicit HCI - Context Awareness

• RFID
• Positioning
• BlueTooth
• GPS
• WLAN
• IR
• Pervasive Computing
• Ubiquitous Computing

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Programming Mobility

• WAP WML / XHTML / cHTML
• Most cell phones support WML today (many XHTML)
• Java J2ME MIDP CLDC (v. 1.0 2.0)
• Most cell phones support v. 1.0
• Symbian C
• Some symbian phones appearing
• Micrsoft SmartPhones (Windows CE)
• .NET Framework, eMbedded C / VB