Day 1 of Man Machine Interface for Mobile
By Terry
Simpson, reporting from Rome
I have just got back after a long day at the conference, followed
by an interesting evening of networking. I faced a mobile technology
failure where my laptop wouldn't connect to my mobile and I had the
wrong connector for Italian landlines. So I am typing this on my Psion
Revo and hope to transmit it via mobile. Alistair France of Phone.com
seemed to be using a similar method.
Day 1 Report: The first presentation of the conference was
given by Frank Nuova, Chief Designer for Nokia. He reviewed user interfaces
from a historical perspective. Communication has developed from simple
stone age signals to sophisticated social interactions and then to
technology assisted remote communication. Technology was originally
place-to-place and is now person-to-person. It will soon become person-to-information.
Frank emphasised the importance of interaction and emotion in the
design of mobile products, we should stop thinking of phones as devices,
for example the chrome Nokia 8810 was more like smart jewelery. We
should consider the importance of different market segments such as
differently challenged people, and also internationalisation.
Richard Duffy, The ARC Group,UK presented a lot of market information
and asked if the problem really was a matter of moving notebook functionality
onto a handset. He said that there would be 1 billion data users by
2005. Location based services will be important for applications and
revenue. However operators are still focussed on voice, particularly
because of the poor consumer experience with WAP.
Fredrik Oijer of Ericsson spoke about personalisation of mobile
devices. He said that 1st time buyers are now outnumbered by repeat
buyers of phones, so the expectations are different. By 2004 there
will be as many mobile subscribers as fixed line subscribers. He mentioned
the different types of customisation appropriate to the elderly (e.g.
bigger fonts) and the young (e.g. colour), and also the different
amounts of customisation required (e.g. more important to young and
old than to medium age business users).
Alistair France of Phone.com gave a very interesting talk about
the problems faced by those trying to get usable WAP applications.
Because of different browser response, it is not possible to have
a single code set optimised for all phones. He emphasised the importance
of user testing and iteration of WAP designs in response to errors
revealed by actual use.
There were many other speakers and demonstrations of enhanced user
interface technologies.
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