Mobile Interaction

Mobile Interaction is the study of interaction between mobile users and computers. Mobile Interaction is an aspect of Human-Computer Interaction that emerged when computers became small enough to enable mobile usage around 1990's.

Goals

Mobile devices, in particular, mobile phones, PDAs and mobile music player are an essential part of life for billion users. The goal of mobile interaction researchers is to understand the requirements and needs of mobile users. Compared to stationary devices mobile devices have specific, often restricted, input and output requirements. A goal that is often named is to overcome the limitations of mobile devices. However, exploiting the special opportunities of mobile usage can also be seen as a central goal.

History

One of the first work in the mobile interaction discipline was the concept of the Dynabook by Alan Kay in 1968. However, at that time the necessary hardware to build such system was not available. When the first Laptops were built in the early 1980th they were seen as transportable desktop computers. Mobile interaction became more important when mobile phones and PDAs became more common. In 1998 Chris Johnson organized the first workshop on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices which focussed on mobile interaction.

References

• Enrico Bertini, Andrea Calì, Tiziana Catarci, Silvia Gabrielli and Stephen Kimani (2005). Interaction-Based Adaptation for Small Screen Devices. In: User Modeling, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg. 978-3-540-27885-6
• Matthew Jones and Gary Marsden (2006). Mobile Interaction Design. Wiley & Sons. ISBN 978-0470090893
• Peter Tarasewich (2003). Designing mobile commerce applications. In: Communications of the ACM. ISSN 0001-0782
• Christof Roduner (2006). The Mobile Phone as a Universal Interaction Device – Are There Limits? In: Mobile Interaction with the Real World [1]