Lessons From Early Stages Design Of Mobile Applications

Lessons from Early Stage Design of Mobile Applications [1]

Synopsis

This paper is an HCI meta-paper, describing a design process for mobile applications (rather than the details of a specific design).

Strengths

1. The authors argue that porting applications from a standard desktop environment to a mobile environment often results in applications that are "generally cumbersome and unusable".
2. The authors further argue that with a lack of methodologies for evaluating mobile applications, the evaluation phase of application development is "frequently discarded".
3. Among other approaches, they use the "Wizard of Oz" technique to evaluate their low-fidelity, early-stage, mobile prototypes.
4. The paper outlines a number of scenario-generation guidelines so that application designers can consider all possible scenarios in which their application will be used.
5. They advocate "ethnography and user observations" to develop and refine the application.
6. To gather user-study information, they used two different user-mounted webcam kits (one shoulder-mounted, one head-mounted) to watch and record interactions with their prototypes.

Weaknesses

1. How much weight can one put on application design decisions that are based on cardboard mockups used in user studies? They claim that "low-fidelity prototypes can be used for mobile devices".

What are "user-centered design (UCD) methodologies"?

Bibliography

1. Marco de Sa and Luis Carrico, Lessons from Early Stage Design of Mobile Applications.