Day 2 of Man Machine Interface for Mobile
By Terry
Simpson, reporting from Rome
Thank goodness that I have my Revo and Nokia working together. The
little Revo is handy for writing email and connecting during lectures.
I only wish that my laptop was properly configured so that I could
use the larger keyboard and screen from my hotel room.
Day 2 Report: The second day of the conference started with
an interesting talk about wearable computers by Michael Bronowsky
of Bremen University. Clearly, mobility and wearability are closely
aligned. Already people wear phone on belts and wear headsets to talk.
Extending the wearable capability beyond voice communication needs
care. Michael said that he has a demonstration system of a wearable
computer and people often say to him that it is nice but 'where are
the mouse and keyboard?'. His point is that wearable technology means
a rethinking of computers and interactions. For example, a maintenance
task could use smart tools that indicate when they are picked up,
and the computer could then configure a display mounted on glasses
in front of the eyes to show the appropriate diagrams.
There followed several presentations of speech and language interfaces.
A point made very strongly by most presenters was that speech is not
the holy grail of mobile applications, it is a useful and powerful
option to be used appropriately and often in parallel with other modes
such as text. There were some impressive demonstrations and there
were clear differences between speech output and speech input Ruth
Pollock of Wildfire Communications spoke about the importance of culture
and style in developing virtual personalities for speech output interfaces.
Rajiv Kumar of Widcomm described some of the usability issues that
will occur in a rich Bluetooth environment. For example security and
trust. For example a users may be given various levels of access just
as in current networks but the mobility inherent in Bluetooth means
that access control needs to be much more dynamic and rapid in response.
Users need to have simple methods to seek and select devices and also
to exclude their devices from selection.
Timo Bruns made a presentation and made a differentiation between
'communicators' which are information centric with voice capabilities,
and 'smartphones' which are voice centric with information capabilities.
Symbian has a strong emphasis on seeking user input early with storyboards
and simple prototypes. It is considered important to find out what
does not work while change is still an option. He quoted a mantra
'Fail fast to succeed sooner'.
Christian Lindholm of Nokia Mobile Phones gave the final presentation
of the second day and likened mobile technology to human transportation.
We had bare feet (I presume he meant 'no mobiles') and invented shoes
('mobile phones'?). There are lots of shoes in different styles and
for different applications, but they all do basically the same thing
and work in the same way. We have the possibility of transportation
by bike, car, bus etc ('future mobile technology'?) which will not
be recognisable as the same and will work in different ways. He also
mentioned the 'usability knee', where usability drops rapidly at a
certain feature or set of features. For example, early mobile phones
worked well for numeric dialling and receiving calls, but failed when
alphanumeric memory was required. He suggested that we should not
be too harsh on designs if they work well for some things and not
for others. Motorbikes perform badly in bad weather, but we do not
all judge them as bad technology. Similarly, mobile technology can
perform badly in a particular dimension but still work well in others
and be enthusiastically adopted by users. He is an enthusiastic advocate
of the benefits of user testing even on small groups because so much
can be learned.
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