Day 1 of the MobileHCI 2008

The 10th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2008) started today in Amsterdam. This year we (Rogier, Joel and myself) are lucky enough to be able to volunteer at this event where some of the most brilliant HCI experts from all over the world are present.

Today was off to a slow start with a few workshops and tutorials of which I attended three.

Mirjana Spasojevic from Nokia had a tutorial for studying the different means for mobile user needs and evaluating the user experience. One of the most important things that came forward in this presentation was usage context, something that I think is vital in every user experience design. It was also nice to see the Wizard of Oz technique being used at Nokia to test certain fictional functions: in this case the ability to take a picture of a building and getting information shown about it on the spot. Another thing worth noting was the philosophy of leveraging the inherent properties of the mobile phone as a opposed to turning your mobile into a mini computer, which reenforces the idea that the medium is the message, or indeed should be the message.

Then there was Albrecht Schmidt from the Universität Duisburg-Essen who talked about context awareness in mobile phones and what it can do for HCI with regards to mobile interaction. Whilst location awareness is becoming more mainstream and available in mobile handsets (think of things like GPRS positioning) context awareness still has a long way to go. This is definitely an exciting field of research and it was very interesting to see some early prototypes that utilized context awareness based interaction such as motion detection that has now become mainstream.

Finally I saw Stephen Brewster from the University of Glasgow talking about haptics, audio output, sensor and gesture input in mobile HCI. He talked about how we can use alternatives to visual screen based feedback to provide rich feedback to the users of mobile devices. Haptics are especially fascinating to me simply because this is method of interaction that I am fairly unfamiliar with.

So, that was it for the first day of MobileHCI2008. Hopefully tomorrow will be just as exciting/inspring.