Tag Archives: research

The ideal handsets

A slightly interesting article about innovation at Nokia is accompanied by some fun user-generated concept phones from their research.

Link: Nokia’s Dream Phones (businessweek.com)

How phones change relationships

Book about how mobile communication devices are changing social relationships.
“The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is “there”; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to [...]

MobileHCI conference in September

“The MobileHCI series provides a forum for academics and practitioners to discuss the challenges and potential solutions for effective interaction with mobile systems and services. It covers the design, evaluation and application of techniques and approaches for all mobile and wearable computing devices and services.”
Link: MobileHCI 2008 (telin.nl)

Computing experiences in 2020

Microsoft Research is offering up a vision for computing in 2020. The very detailed document is thought provoking stuff, and even better it offers up some very specific questions about design challenges that fall out of that vision.
“Many new forms of mobile interaction are on the horizon. Mobile devices will allow us to connect with [...]

When users “do” the ubicomp

Continuing with the idea that ubiquitous computing is messy, Antti Oulasvirta writes about his research in Interactions, which includes the following recommendations:

Minimizing overheads that create temporal seams between activities;
Making remote but important resources, such as connectivity or cables, better transparent locally and digitally;
Propagating metadata on migration of data from device to device;
Supporting ad hoc uses [...]

Mobiles and the developing world interview

Marek Pawlowski spoke with JD Moore about mobiles and developing countries for the upcoming MEX conference. Watch the 20 minute video below.
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JD Moore talks to Marek Pawlowski about mobile user experience in developing markets
Link: In-depth video [...]

Identifying people’s needs in ubicomp

“In large ubiquitous computing environments it is hard for users to identify and activate the electronic services that match their needs. This user study compares the newly developed service matcher system with a conventional system for identifying and selecting appropriate services. The study addresses human factors issues such as usability, trust and service awareness. With [...]

Speaking to your calendar

”[We describe] a calendar management application to demonstrate our vision for intuitive interfaces that enable humans to communicate with their mobile phones via natural spoken dialogue. For this vision to be realized, many technology advances must be made: we must go beyond speech recognition/synthesis, and include language understanding/generation and dialogue modeling. Another factor critical to [...]

Nokia patent on gestural UI

“By now, probably everyone who cares, knows that Nokia is working on a next generation, Apple Multi-Touch like user interface – Nokia S60 Touch. But beyond pretty video pictures and generic headings like ” new sensor framework”, “UI accelerator kit”, etc; Nokia is pretty tight lipped about how the new S60 Touch will actually work…I’ve [...]

Norms of missed calls

“This article explores the practice of “beeping” or “missed calling” between mobile phone users, or calling a number and hanging up before the mobile’s owner can pick up the call. Most beeps are requests to call back immediately, but they can also send a pre-negotiated instrumental message such as “pick me up now” or a [...]

Using Push-to-Talk

A research study into the use of Push-to-Talk.
“This work suggests a number of issues for designers of future mobile voice communication systems, some of which have already influenced the feature set of our own lightweight audio communication system. One challenge is to provide means for users to maintain exclusive boundaries of access for certain [...]

The future of mobile entertainment

“Nokia recently released a press release about a report it had comissioned, ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’ which talked about the future of entertainment. The main trend identified was the coming of ‘Circular Entertainment’ (content created, edited and shared within a peer community rather than traditional media sources). Nokia have now released a number [...]

Shaking interactions

“A new system uses a phone’s speaker and vibrator to make a device feel and sound like it contains liquid when it is running out of power. The same technique can be used to indicate when new messages have arrived, by simulating the sense of balls rattling around inside a box.”
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