Day 3 of the MobileHCI 2008

Yesterday was Day 3 of the conference, I kicked it off my taking a look at Always-on Information – Services and Applications on the Mobile Desktop, presented by Arjan Geven. One thing that stuck to me regarding this paper was the fact that during the testing phase for various interfaces people were assuming that these should all be touch screen based, like the iPhone. Are we heading towards a new standard?

Another interesting talk was that by Antii Oulasvirta who talked about Mobile Awareness cues. Once again the discussion of text vs icon surfaced although it is starting to become clear that iconic representation is more efficient in the long run, especially on small screens.

Shaun Kane delivered a fantastic presentation about Walking User Interfaces. What Shaun and his team was examining was how we can adapt our interface to the activity we are performing automatically. In this case it was walking and the study yielded some very interesting results, namely that bigger buttons are universally more accurate however they come with an efficiency drawback. Stephen Brewster had some interesting questions about the effects an ever changing interface would have on a user who might be pausing for a second whilst walking.

Spatial Information for Selection of Co-located Devices brought some interesting concepts, although I did have some questions regarding the method of testing.

BJ Fogg talked about Persuasive Computing again and this is a topic that I have started to find very interesting during the past few days, purely because of it’s apparent simplicity on the front end.

Finally I saw Sharing places: Testing psychological effects of location cueing frequency and explicit vs. inferred closeness. This topic, like BJ Fogg’s talk about Persuasive Computing has been fascinating me quite a lot, this one perhaps even more simply because it makes the translation of online to real world presence.