Mobile HCI Tutorials
After more than 10 years of Mobile HCI, providing an overview of the state of the art becomes more and more challenging. During the tutorial days of Mobile HCI 2008 & 2009, a number of well-known researchers in Mobile HCI gave overviews of the state of the art and cover many of the relevant topics. The tutorials also introduced the must read papers in this domain. The audience varied and included new students starting a PhD in Mobile HCI, practitioners wanting a quick survey of the state of the art and educators wishing to get an overview of Mobile HCI for their own teaching. Tutorial days have been held at Mobile HCI 2008 and Mobile HCI 2009.
Mobile HCI 2009 Tutorials
Matt Jones (Swansea University, UK): Mobile Search (Slides) Desktop search is the most popular interactive web-activity with billions of interactions daily. Mobile search is increasing in significance and this tutorial will review the state-of-the-art knowledge touching topics such as: user motivations for mobile search; query capture; and, search result visualisation and interaction. While we will of course consider query-result, screen-based mobile systems, the tutorial will also explore more adventurous visions for seeking and finding including those involving multimodal elements (such as audio and gestures) and social-network based schemes.
Luca Chittaro (University of Udine, Italy): Information Visualization and Visual Interfaces for Mobile Devices (Slides) Mobile devices have now powerful graphics capabilities that enable the creation of novel visual interfaces based on 2D (or even 3D) graphics - to help users on the move in dealing more quickly and easily with larger amounts of information. This tutorial will introduce participants to what we can learn (and what we need to adapt) from the field of visualization to build effective visual interfaces on mobile devices. It will also briefly show how information visualization techniques are useful to create new tools for studying the behaviour of mobile users. No particular background in information visualization is required.
Chris Kray (Newcastle University, UK): Mobile Guides (Slides) Mobile guides are one of the most widely used location-based services, and are now being rolled out commercially on a large scale. Often, mobile guides are thought of as just being maps with a few markers and a highlighted route but this is a very narrow perspective - they can be much more. This tutorial will provide a systematic overview over the large body of research in this area. Topics covered will include psychological foundations of way finding and producing directions, different means to convey route instructions through a mobile interface as well as ways to represent and deal with location.
Marc Langheinrich (Universita della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland): Mobile Privacy (Slides) Mobile applications that go beyond simple GPS-enabled maps often involve significant privacy issues. This tutorial will first frame the problem associated with mobile applications and personal privacy, i.e., why should we care about privacy issues when designing mobile applications? It will then summarize the current state-of-the-art in location privacy, i.e., computational countermeasures, consumer attitudes, and legal realities. Last but not least, it will also try to offer a somewhat larger view of privacy in general: what is it, and why should we want it?
Enrico Rukzio (Lancaster University, UK): Mobile Interaction with the Real World (Slides) Over the last years, there has been an increasing interested in extending the interaction between users and mobile devices to the interaction with objects from the everyday world. For example, people can use their mobile phones to take pictures of visual markers and have their codes recognized. A further example is the usage of RFID/NFC that is gaining popularity as it can reduce payment, identification or access control by simply swiping a mobile phone over a reader. This tutorial will provided a systematic overview of such interaction techniques, will discuss different technologies that are used for their implementation and will discuss applications areas and upcoming trends.
Paul Holleis (DOCOMO Euro-Labs, Germany): Modelling and Developing Mobile Applications (Slides) The development of mobile, pervasive applications is still a difficult task. Although by now there have been introduced APIs and several studies explored many aspects of mobile interfaces and services, it is often a complex and time-consuming task to create mobile applications and evaluate their usability properties. In this tutorial we will see current research and results about how to use usability models for easily and automatically evaluating certain aspects of mobile interfaces. Concentrating on the time to completion of tasks, I present approaches of how to integrate such methods into the development process and thus remove some of the burden from the developer.
Mobile HCI 2008 Tutorials
Scott MacKenzie: Text input for mobile devices (Slides) Scott gave an overview of different input means (e.g. key-based, stylus, predictive, virtual keyboard), parameters relevant for designing and assessing mobile text input (e.g., writing speed, cognitive load) and issues related to the context of use (e.g., walking/standing).
Patrick Baudisch: Mobile GUIs and Mobile Visualization (Slides) Patrick introduced input and output options for mobile devices. He will talk about the design process, prototyping and assessment of user interfaces, trade-offs related to the design of mobile GUIs and different possible interaction styles.
Mirjana Spasojevic: Understanding Mobile User Experience (Slides) Mirjana discussed different means for studying mobile user needs and evaluating the user experience. This includes explorative studies and formal evaluations (in the lab vs. in the field), including longitudinal pilot deployments. The lecture discusses traditional HCI methods of user research and how they need to be adapted for different mobile contexts and products.
Albrecht Schmidt: Context-Aware Communication and Interaction (Slides) Albrecht gave an overview of work in context-awareness and activity recognition that is related to mobile HCI. He discussed how sharing of context in communication applications can improve the user experience. The lecture explained how perception and sensing can be used to acquire context and activity information and show examples how such information can be exploited.
Stephen Brewster: Haptics, audio output and sensor input in mobile HCI (Slides) Stephen discussed the design space for haptics, audio output as well as sensor and gesture input in mobile HCI. Furthermore he assessed resulting interaction methods and implications for the interactive experience.
Michael Rohs: Camera-based interaction and interaction with public displays (Slides) Michael introduced camera based interaction with mobile devices; this included a assessment of optical markers, 2D-barcodes and optical flow as well as techniques related to augmented reality. In this context he addressed interaction with public displays, too.