Generative AI is rapidly diffusing worldwide, yet access remains uneven. In informal settlements, barriers of cost, literacy and connectivity can exclude residents from AI-enabled self-expression. This paper presents Street Scenes: a public appliance for walk-up interaction with generative AI video in Dharavi, Mumbai. Inspired by the “Hole in the Wall” computers and previous Dharavi speech deployments, the system lets passers-by capture phone images, add voice-, button- and dial-based prompts, and generate short videos to view and leave locally. We report on ideation workshops, two Wizard-of-Oz prototypes and a 13-day in-situ deployment across Dharavi street locations. Findings show residents appropriating AI for play, self-presentation, small business promotion and community messaging, while also raising concerns about privacy, trust and misuse. We contribute: (1) a model for public AI appliances; (2) empirical insights into community engagement with generative AI; and, (3) design lessons for accessible, equitable and community-governed AI systems.

Computer vision systems are increasingly used by blind individuals to navigate their lives, helping, for example, locate objects such as doors or chairs. Yet these recognition systems do not work for many personal objects a blind user might want to find, such as keys or a special notebook. In response, efforts created personalized recognition systems, where individuals train their phones to identify and locate things, like a coffee mug or white cane, using example images/videos. However, these tools are trained on data from high-resource contexts, not necessarily reflecting India’s material culture. This paper discusses the contribution of the ORBIT-India dataset, which extends these tools to the Indian context, home of the world’s largest blind population. The ORBIT-India dataset comprises 105,243 images from 587 videos, representing 76 unique objects. We use this experience to examine dataset collection practices translated from high- to low-resource settings, providing recommendations to support cross-geography dataset collection.

Sketch-to-image systems let users transform simple line drawings into realistic images, but current workflows force users into tedious redraw-regenerate cycles that slow creative exploration. We introduce two complementary interaction techniques that reduce iteration friction: AutoSketch, which extends partial sketches through AI-driven completions (pre-generation support), and BackSketch, which transforms generated images back into editable sketches at multiple abstraction levels (post-generation support). In a study with 30 participants, the results indicate that both techniques can improve exploration and expressiveness compared to a baseline sketch-to-image system, while AutoSketch also can increase users’ sense of agency and co-creation with the AI. We contribute new evidence that shifting support before or after generation opens distinct pathways for balancing user control and system initiative. Together, our results establish pre- and post-generation assistance as a design space for co-creative sketch-to-image systems.

Assistive technologies, such as smartphone-based object-recognition (OR) apps, provide visual assistance to people who are blind or lowvision to enable increased independent participation in society.While previous research has explored the functional accessibility of object-recognition technologies, little attention has been given to their social accessibility, particularly in interdependent sociocultural contexts of the Global South.Through a mixed-methods approach, employing a seven-day diary study followed by one-onone interviews with seven OR app users in India, we explore their experiences in depth.Our findings highlight the nuances of what interdependence looks like in a multicultural, Indian society, as people navigate public and private spheres with a camera-based assistive technology designed for independent, western contexts.We argue for the necessity to design assistive technologies following the interdependence framework that accommodates the social and cultural context of the Global South.Additionally, we propose design guidelines for assistive technologies in community-oriented societies, emphasizing community-centered approaches, cultural alignment, and locally adaptable designs.

This paper presents an exploration of how UK radiologists interact with VUI systems and peripherals when authoring diagnostic reports. We conducted a laboratory study with 10 practicing clinical radiologists to investigate the ways in which radiologists utilise speech-based technology to construct, edit and proof their work by having them report on real-world anonymised medical studies on camera. A sample of the participants also participated in interviews in which their data was collaboratively analysed and examined to offer deeper insight into the realism and generalisability of our findings and conclusions. We conclude that better training should be given to radiologists on how VUI systems work, and further investigation should be carried out on the best ways to interact with Speech To Text systems in safety critical environments.

Welcome to the 2025 Mobile Human-Computer Interaction (MHCI) issue of the Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (PACMHCI), which highlights current advances from the MHCI community. This issue features research on mobile, wearable, and personal technologies that shape how people work, communicate, move through cities, and experience the world. As mobile systems reach deeper into daily life, the community continues to balance technical innovation with social responsibility, addressing privacy, equity, safety, and long-term impact. This year, we received 147 valid submissions and accepted 40 papers, for an acceptance rate of 27.2%. Authors are invited to present their work at MobileHCI 2025, held September 22 to 25, 2025, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The papers span privacy and security in mobile contexts, health and wellbeing applications, accessibility and assistive technologies, novel input and interaction techniques, sensing and on-device intelligence, and emerging experiences in mixed and extended reality. Our editorial process followed a rigorous two-round, double-blind review. We are grateful to our 36 Associate Editors (AEs), who coordinated expert reviews and constructive discussions, and to the 230 external reviewers who contributed their time and insight delivered in 269 reviews. Their efforts ensured a fair and thorough evaluation and helped authors improve their work. Additionally, this year, six submissions were desk-rejected because they were clearly out of scope or incomplete. Eight additional submissions were assisted desk rejected, where the primary AE discussed the paper with the track chairs and determined that external reviews were unnecessary. This practice ensured that reviewer capacity was focused on submissions with a reasonable chance of acceptance, while still upholding fairness and transparency in decision-making. The conference theme, “Diving into Mobile AI,” invites the community to explore how AI-driven mobile technologies can empower diverse communities, from dense urban centers to rural regions, to foster collective progress. While the theme did not influence paper selection, many accepted works speak directly to it, advancing methods, tools, and experiences that make mobile AI more usable, trustworthy, and impactful. We hope you enjoy reading the articles in this issue and that they inspire new ideas for research, design, and practice in Mobile HCI.

We report on community-centered, collaborative research that weaves together HCI, natural language processing, linguistic, and design insights to develop spoken language technologies for unwritten languages. Across three visits to a Banjara farming community in India, we use participatory, technical, and creative methods to engage community members, collect spoken language photo annotations, and develop an information retrieval (IR) system. Drawing on orality theory, we interrogate assumptions and biases of current speech interfaces and create a simple application that leverages our IR system to match fluidly spoken queries with recorded annotations and surface corresponding photos. In-situ evaluations show how our novel approach returns reliable results and inspired the co-creation of media retrieval use-cases that are more appropriate in oral contexts. The very low (< 4h) spoken data requirements makes our approach adaptable to other contexts where languages are unwritten or have no digital language resources available.

We explore the training dynamics of neural networks in a structured non-IID setting where documents are presented cyclically in a fixed, repeated sequence. Typically, networks suffer from catastrophic interference when training on a sequence of documents; however, we discover a curious and remarkable property of LLMs finetuned sequentially in this setting: they exhibit *anticipatory* behavior, recovering from the forgetting on documents *before* seeing them again. The behavior emerges and becomes more robust as the architecture scales up its number of parameters. Through comprehensive experiments and visualizations, we uncover new insights into training over-parameterized networks in structured environments.

Cycling continues to grow in popularity, both as a means to commute and for exercise. While there is a plethora of research studying technology use in vehicular travel, cycling remains a relatively understudied area—especially within HCI. We conducted an ethnography, adopting an ethnomethodological lens, to study cyclists as they use their bicycles for routine purposes. Through the use of a handlebar-mounted 360-degree action video camera, we conducted our study longitudinally with participants over a number of weeks. Our analysis explicates our participants accountable use of different electronic technologies while on the go and in this paper we present four fragments of their use of different technologies as exemplars from our corpus. Our paper offers insights into the use of technology on bicycles, including how cyclists select moments of opportunity to use technology for different purposes. We conclude by offering design implications for the design of interactive technologies for cyclists.

In this paper we develop approaches to automatic speech recognition (ASR) development that suit the needs and functions of under-heard language speakers. Our novel contribution to HCI is to show how community-engagement can surface key technical and social issues and opportunities for more effective speech-based systems. We introduce a bespoke toolkit of technologies and showcase how we utilised the toolkit to engage communities of under-heard language speakers; and, through that engagement process, situate key aspects of ASR development in community contexts. The toolkit consists of (1) an information appliance to facilitate spoken-data collection on topics of community interest, (2) a mobile app to create crowdsourced transcripts of collected data, and (3) demonstrator systems to showcase ASR capabilities and to feed back research results to community members. Drawing on the sensibilities we cultivated through this research, we present a series of challenges to the orthodoxy of state-of-the-art approaches to ASR development.

What do pedestrian crossings, ATMs, elevators and ticket machines have in common? These are just a few of the ubiquitous yet essential elements of public-space infrastructure that rely on physical buttons or touchscreens; common interactions that, until recently, were considered perfectly safe to perform. This work investigates how we might integrate touchless technologies into public-space infrastructure in order to minimise physical interaction with shared devices in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on an ethnographic exploration into how public utilities are being used, adapted or avoided, we developed and evaluated a suite of technology probes that can be either retrofitted into, or replace, these services. In-situ community deployments of our probes demonstrate strong uptake and provide insight into how hands-free technologies can be adapted and utilised for the public domain; and, in turn, used to inform the future of walk-up-and use public technologies.

Voice assistants (VAs) are present in homes, smartphones, and cars. They allow users to perform tasks without graphical or tactile user interfaces, as they are designed for natural language interaction. However, we found that currently, VAs are emulating human behavior by responding in complete sentences, limiting the design options, and preventing VAs from meeting their full potential as a utilitarian tool. We implemented a VA that handles requests in three response styles: two differing short keyword-based response styles and a full-sentence baseline. In a user study, 72 participants interacted with our VA by issuing eight requests. Results show that the short responses were perceived similarly useful and likable while being perceived as more efficient, especially for commands, and sometimes better to comprehend than the baseline. To achieve widespread adoption, we argue that VAs should be customizable and adapt to users instead of always responding in full sentences.

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) researchers are turning their attention towards supporting low-resource languages, such as isiXhosa or Marathi, with only limited training resources. We report and reflect on collaborative research across ASR & HCI to situate ASR-enabled technologies to suit the needs and functions of two communities of low-resource language speakers, on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa and in Mumbai, India. We build on longstanding community partnerships and draw on linguistics, media studies and HCI scholarship to guide our research. We demonstrate diverse design methods to: remotely engage participants; collect speech data to test ASR models; and ultimately field-test models with users. Reflecting on the research, we identify opportunities, challenges, and use-cases of ASR, in particular to support pervasive use of WhatsApp voice messaging. Finally, we uncover implications for collaborations across ASR & HCI that advance important discussions at CHI surrounding data, ethics, and AI.

Many of us daily encounter shadow and reflected light patterns alongside macro-level changes in ambient light levels. These are caused by elements—opaque objects, glass, mirrors, even clouds—in our environment interfacing with sunlight or artificial indoor lighting. Inspired by these phenomena, we explored ways of creating digitally-supported displays that use light, shade and reflection for output and harness the energy they need to operate from the sun or indoor ambient light. Through a set of design workshops we developed exemplar devices: SolarPix, ShadMo and GlowBoard. We detail their function and implementation, as well as evidencing their technical viability. The designs were informed by material understandings from the Global North and Global South and demonstrated in a cross-cultural workshop run in parallel in India and South Africa where community co-designers reflected on their uses and value given lived experience of their communication practices and unreliable energy networks.

Working with emergent users in two of Mumbai’s slums, we explored the value and uses of photovoltaic (PV) self-powering digital materials. Through a series of co-design workshops, a diary study and responses by artists and craftspeople, we developed the PV-Pix concept for inter-home connections. Each PV-Pix element consists of a deformable energy harvesting material that, when actuated by a person in one home, changes its physical state both there and in a connected home. To explore the concept we considered two forms of PV-Pix: one uses rigid materials and the other flexible ones. We deployed two low-fidelity prototypes, each constructed of a grid of one PV-Pix type, in four slum homes over a four week period to further understand the usability and uses of the materials, eliciting interesting inter-family communication practices. Encouraged by these results we report on a first-step towards working prototypes and demonstrate the technical viability of the approach.

We present Flowcuits, a DIY fabrication method to prototype tangible, interactive and functional electrical components by manipulating liquid metals. The prototypes afford both physical and visual interactions to demonstrate the inner working mechanics of fundamental electronic elements, which enables tangible and playful learning. The fabrication process follows simple imprinting and sealing of fluidic circuits with a 3D-printed stamp on an accessible moldable-substrates such as ‘Blu Tack’. Utilizing conductive gallium indium liquid metal, we demonstrated interactive and re-configurable electronic components such as switches, variable resistors, variable capacitors, logic gates and pressure sensors. In this paper, we present the design analogy of Flowcuits, DIY fabrication approach including a parametric 3D stamp design toolkit and results from a technical evaluation. The stamps are printed with a low-cost 3D printer and all the materials are inexpensive and reusable, enabling Flowcuits to be easily used without any advanced lab facilities.

Recently, people prefer to read books via a combination of formats - E-Books along with printed books. We conducted a scoping survey and a lab-study which informed various inhibiting factors associated with switching between formats to conveniently use multiple formats. To improve the switching experience, we present Digital Bookmark that synchronises the current page location digitally between both printed and e-books. The page number of the printed book is electronically read using a conductive tag and transmitted to the e-book via the internet. The current location on the e-book is converted to the corresponding page number of the printed book and presented on the display of the Digital Bookmark. We present the results of a controlled lab-study to assess the parameters of switching between printed and electronic books. The initial feedback from a local reading group suggests that our Digital Bookmark would encourage multi-format reading and improve their user experience.

The interactive, digital future with its seductive vision of Internet-of-Things connected sensors, actuators and displays comes at a high cost in terms of both energy demands and the clutter it brings to the physical world. But what if such devices were made of materials that enabled them to self-power their interactive features? And, what if those materials were directly used to build aesthetically pleasing environments and objects that met practical physical needs as well as digital ones? In this paper we introduce PV-Tiles ? a novel material that closely couples photovoltaic energy harvesting and light sensing materials with digital interface components. We consider potential contexts, use-cases and light gestures surfaced through co-creation workshops; and, present initial technological designs and prototypes. The work opens a new set of opportunities and collaborations between HCI and material science, stimulating technical and design pointers to accommodate and exploit the material's properties.

There is widespread concern over the ways speech assistant providers currently use humans to listen to users' queries without their knowledge. We report two iterations of the TalkBack smart speaker, which transparently combines machine and human assistance. In the first, we created a prototype to investigate whether people would choose to forward their questions to a human answerer if the machine was unable to help. Longitudinal deployment revealed that most users would do so when given the explicit choice. In the second iteration we extended the prototype to draw upon spoken answers from previous deployments, combining machine efficiency with human richness. Deployment of this second iteration shows that this corpus can help provide relevant, human-created instant responses. We distil lessons learned for those developing conversational agents or other AI-infused systems about how to appropriately enlist human-in-the-loop information services to benefit users, task workers and system performance.

Multiple fingers are often used for efficient interaction with handheld computing devices. Currently, any tactile feedback provided is felt on the finger pad or the palm with coarse granularity. In contrast, we present a new tactile feedback technique, Active PinScreen, that applies localised stimuli on multiple fingers with fine spatial and temporal resolution. The tactile screen uses an array of solenoid-actuated magnetic pins with millimetre scale form-factor which could be deployed for back-of-device handheld use without instrumenting the user. As well as presenting a detailed description of the prototype, we provide the potential design configurations and the applications of the Active PinScreen and evaluate the human factors of tactile interaction with multiple fingers in a controlled user evaluation. The results of our study show a high recognition rate for directional and patterned stimulation across different grip orientations as well as within- and between- fingers. We end the paper with a discussion of our main findings, limitations in the current design and directions for future work.

This paper explores the use of conversational speech question and answer systems in the challenging context of public spaces in slums. A major part of this work is a comparison of the source and speed of the given responses; that is, either machine-powered and instant or human-powered and delayed. We examine these dimensions via a two-stage, multi-sited deployment. We report on a pilot deployment that helped refine the system, and a second deployment involving the installation of nine of each type of system within a large Mumbai slum for a 40-day period, resulting in over 12,000 queries. We present the findings from a detailed analysis and comparison of the two question-answer corpora; discuss how these insights might help improve machine-powered smart speakers; and, highlight the potential benefits of multi-sited public speech installations within slum environments.

Touchscreens are the predominant medium for interactions with digital services; however, their current fixed form factor narrows the scope for rich physical interactions by limiting interaction possibilities to a single, planar surface. In this paper we introduce the concept of PickCells, a fully re-configurable device concept composed of cells, that breaks the mould of rigid screens and explores a modular system that affords rich sets of tangible interactions and novel across-device relationships. Through a series of co-design activities -- involving HCI experts and potential end-users of such systems -- we synthesised a design space aimed at inspiring future research, giving researchers and designers a framework in which to explore modular screen interactions. The design space we propose unifies existing works on modular touch surfaces under a general framework and broadens horizons by opening up unexplored spaces providing new interaction possibilities. In this paper, we present the PickCells concept, a design space of modular touch surfaces, and propose a toolkit for quick scenario prototyping.

Current haptic feedback techniques on handheld devices are applied to the finger pad or the palm of the user. These state-of-the-art approaches are coarse-grained and tend to be intrusive, rather than subtle. In contrast, we present a new feedback technique that applies stimuli around the periphery of the finger pulp, demonstrating how this can provide rich, nuanced haptic information. We use a reconfigurable haptic device employing a ferromagnetic marble for back-of-the device handheld use, which, for the first time, probes, without instrumenting the user, the periphery of the distal phalanx with localised stimulation. We present the design-space afforded by this new technique and evaluate the human-factors of finger-peripheral touch interaction in a controlled user-study. We report results with marbles of different diameters, speeds and a combination of poking, lateral vibration and patterns; present the resulting design guidelines for finger-periphery haptic feedback; and, illustrate its potential with use case scenarios.

Mainstream digital interactions are spread over a plethora of devices and form-factors, from mobiles to laptops; printouts to large screens. For emergent users, however, such abundance of choice is rarely accessible or affordable. In particular, viewing mobile content on a larger screen, or printing out copies, is often not available. In this paper we present Sustainabot - a small robot printer that uses everyday materials to print shapes and patterns from mobile phones. Sustainabot was proposed and developed by and with emergent users through a series of co-creation workshops. We begin by discussing this process, then detail the open-source mobile printer prototype. We carried out two evaluations of Sustainabot, the first focused on printing with materials in situ, and the second on understandability of its output. We present these results, and discuss opportunities and challenges for similar developments. We conclude by highlighting where and how similar devices could be used in future.

“Designed in California” is a brand statement used by high-tech manufacturers to denote provenance and cachet of digital innovation and modernity. In this paper, we explore philosophically alternate design perspectives to those this statement embodies, reporting and reflecting on a long-term multi-sited project that seeks to diversify future-making by engaging communities of “emergent” users in “developing” regions. We argue that digital technologies are typically created with a design lens firmly focused on “first world” populations, assuming a base set of cultural norms, resource availabilities, and technological experience levels that do not strongly align with those of emergent users. We discuss and argue for inclusive technology design methods, present our approach, and detail indicative results and case studies as an example of the potential of these perspectives in uncovering radical innovations. Distilling findings and lessons learned, we present a methodology—itinerative design—that pivots between emergent user communities across multiple regions, driving digital innovation through the periphery of mainstream design’s current remit.

Sliders are widely used on mobile devices. Envisioning mobile devices that can dynamically deform to raise tangible controls from the screen surface, tangible sliders offer the benefit of eyes-free interaction. However, reaching for distant values with one hand is problematic: users namely need to change their handgrip, which is not comfortable. To overcome this problem, this paper sets out to experimentally study an extendable tangible slider to support one-handed clutching. The tangible slider's knob extends to maintain the thumb's movement within its comfortable area. We first built a low-fidelity prototype made of a knob long enough to allow clutching. This low-fidelity prototype significantly improves performance when reaching distant targets, as compared to a standard tangible slider. We then built a higher-fidelity prototype, introducing actuation and allowing for a shorter knob. When used for clutching, the knob moves back towards the users' thumb. Experimental results show that the motion of the actuated knob does not interrupt eyes-free interaction during manipulation. In comparison, a graphical extendable slider performed 0.9s slower due to the required visual attention. However, the results suggest that the motion of the actuated knob affects performance, as the higher-fidelity prototype performed 0.6s slower than the low-fidelity prototype.

Millions of homes worldwide enjoy access to digital content and services through smart speakers such as Amazon's Echo and Google's Home. Promotional materials and users' own videos typically show homes that have many well-resourced rooms, with good power and data infrastructures. Over the last several years, we have been working with slum communities in India, whose dwellings are usually very compact (one or two rooms), personal home WiFi is almost unheard of, power infrastructures are far less robust, and financial resources put such smart speakers out of individual household reach. Inspired by the "hole in the wall" internet-kiosk programme, we carried out workshops with slum inhabitants to uncover issues and opportunities for providing a smart-speaker-type device in public areas and passageways. We designed and deployed a simple probe that allowed passers-by to ask and receive answers to questions. In this paper, we present the findings of this work, and a design space for such devices in these settings.

We present APPropriate -- a novel mobile design to allow users to temporarily annex any Android device for their own use. APPropriate is a small, cheap storage pod, designed to be easily carried in a pocket or hidden within clothing. Its purpose is simple: to hold a copy of the local content an owner has on their mobile, liberating them from carrying a phone, or allowing them to use another device that provides advantages over their own. Picking up another device when carrying APPropriate transfers all pertinent content to the borrowed device (using local no-cost WiFi from the APPropriate device), transforming it to give the impression that they are using their own phone. While APPropriate is useful for a wide range of contexts, the design was envisaged through a co-design process with resource-constrained emergent users in three countries. Lab studies and a subsequent deployment on participants' own devices identified key benefits of the approach in these contexts, including for security, resource sharing, and privacy.

We present Tangible Drops, a visio-tactile display that for the first time provides physical visualization and tactile feedback using a planar liquid interface. It presents digital information interactively by tracing dynamic patterns on horizontal flat surfaces using liquid metal drops on a programmable electrode array. It provides tactile feedback with directional information in the 2D vector plane using linear locomotion and/or vibration of the liquid metal drops. We demonstrate move, oscillate, merge, split and dispense-from-reservoir functions of the liquid metal drops by consuming low power (450 mW per electrode) and low voltage (8--15 V). We report on results of our empirical study with 12 participants on tactile feedback using 8 mm diameter drops, which indicate that Tangible Drops can convey tactile sensations such as changing speed, varying direction and controlled oscillation with no visual feedback. We present the design space and demonstrate the applications of Tangible Drops, and conclude by suggesting potential future applications for the technique.

Digital painting is an increasingly popular medium of expression for many artists, yet when compared to its traditional equivalents of physical brushes and viscous paint it lacks a dimension of tangibility. We conducted observations and interviews with physical and digital artists, which gave us a strong understanding of the types of interactions used to create both physical and digital art, and the important role tangibility plays within these experiences. From this, we developed a unique liquid-like tangible display for mobile, digital colour mixing. Using a chemical hydrogel that changes its viscosity depending on temperature, we are able to create some resemblances to the feeling of mixing paint with a finger. This paper documents the information gathered from working with artists, how this process informed the development of a mobile painting attachment, and an exploration of its capabilities. After returning with our prototype, we found that it provided artists with sensations of oil and acrylic paint mixing and also successfully mimicked how paints are laid out on a paint palette.

Many users value the ability to have quick and frequent sight of their mobiles when in public settings. However, in doing so, they expose themselves to potential risks, ranging from being targets of robbery to the more subtle social losses through being seen to be rude or inattentive to those around them. In nature, some animals can blend into their environments to avoid being eaten or to reduce their impact on the ecosystem around them. Taking inspiration from these evolved systems we investigate the notion of chameleon approaches for mobile interaction design. Our probes were motivated, inspired and refined through extended interactions with people drawn from contexts with differing ranges of security and privacy concerns. Through deployments on users' own devices, our prototypes show the value of the concept. The encouraging results motivate further research in materials and form factors that can provide more effective automatic plain-sight hiding.

The financial crisis and austerity politics in Europe has had a devastating impact on public services, social security and vulnerable populations. Greek civil society responded quickly by establishing solidarity structures aimed at helping vulnerable citizens to meet their basic needs and empower them to co-create an anti-austerity movement. While digital technology and social media played an important role in the initiation of the movement, it has a negligible role in the movement's on-going practices. Through embedded work with several solidarity structures in Greece, we have begun to understand the "solidarity economy" (SE) as an experiment in direct democracy and self-organization. Working with a range of solidarity structures we are developing a vision for a "Solidarity HCI" committed to designing to support personal, social and institutional transformation through processes of agonistic pluralism and contestation, where the aims and objectives of the SE are continuously re-formulated and put into practice.

This research forms part of a wider body of work focused around involving emergent users---those just beginning to get access to mobile devices---in the development and refinement of far-future technologies. In this paper we present an evaluation of a new type of deformable slider with emergent users, designed to investigate whether shape-changing interfaces provide any benefit over touchscreens for this type of user. Our trials, which took place in two contexts and three disparate regions, revealed that while there was a clear correlation between performance and technology exposure, emergent users had similar ability with both touchscreen and deformable controls.

Mainstream mobile interactions are focused around individual devices, with any collaboration happening via `the cloud'. We carried out design workshops with emergent users, revealing opportunities for novel collocated collaborative interactions. In this paper we present Better Together - a framework for disaggregating services, splitting interaction elements over separate mobiles. This distribution supports both sharing of resources (such as screen real-estate, or mobile data); and, scaffolding of inclusive interaction in mixed groups (e.g., in terms of literacy or prior technology exposure). We developed two prototypes to explore the concept, trialling the first---collocated group-based shopping list making---with emergent users in South Africa and India. We deployed the second probe, which splits YouTube into its constituent parts across separate mobiles, in a longitudinal study with users in Kenya, South Africa and India. We describe the concept and design process, and report on the design's suitability for emergent users based on our results.

Our work presents a method to use paper as an input device while reading on a mobile device, where the user turns a physical page in the real world in order to turn a page in the digital world. Our goal in this work is to replicate the feedback and affordances one would receive from a printed book on a mobile device, where to fully replicate the reading experience the user would need to turn pages as they would naturally with a printed book. Through a small study we discovered a number of ways that pages are often turned and these techniques became vital to the project. We describe a prototype device which uses paper as an input device with transparent electrodes and bend sensors embedded to pages, so that the turning and bending of pages can be digitally detected and addressed. The prototype is able to detect the page turns and bends made by the user and the state of each page.

In this paper, we demonstrate a method for the dynamic 2D transformation of liquid matter and present unique organic animations based on spatio-temporally controlled electric fields. In particular, we deploy a droplet of liquid metal (Gallium indium eutectic alloy) in a 7x7 electrode array prototype system, featuring an integrated image tracking system and a simple GUI. Exploiting the strong dependance of EGaIn's surface tension on external electric voltages, we control multiple electrodes dynamically to manipulate the liquid metal into a fine-grained desired shape. Taking advantage of the high conductivity of liquid metals, we introduce a shape changing, reconfigurable smart circuit as an example of unique applications. We discuss system constraints and the overarching challenge of controlling liquid metals in the presence of phenomena such as splitting, self-electrode interference and finger instabilities. Finally, we reflect on the broader vision of this project and discuss our work in the context of the wider scope of programmable materials.

We present a programmable liquid matter which can dynamically transform its 2D shape into a variety of forms and present unique organic animations based on spatio-temporally controlled electric fields. We deployed a EGaIn (Gallium indium eutectic alloy) liquid metal as our smart liquid material since it features a superior electric conductivity in spite of a liquid state and presents a high dynamic range of surface tension and 2D area controlled by applied voltage strength and polarity. Our proposed liquid metal shape and motion control algorithms with dynamically patterned electric fields realize path tracing organic animation. We demonstrate an interactive 7x7 electrode array control system with a computer vision based GUI system to enable novice users to physically draw alphabet letters and 2D shapes by unique animatronics of liquid metals.

Mobile and ubiquitous computing researchers have long envisioned future worlds for users in developed regions. Steered by such visions, they have innovated devices and services exploring the value of alternative propositions with and for individuals, groups and communities. Meanwhile, such radical and long-term explorations are uncommon for what have been termed emergent users; users, that is, for whom advanced technologies are just within grasp. Rather, a driving assumption is that today’s high-end mobile technologies will “trickle down” to these user groups in due course. In this paper, we open the debate about what mobile technologies might be like if emergent users were directly involved in creating their visions for the future 5–10 years from now. To do this, we report on a set of envisioning workshops in India, South Africa and Kenya that provide a roadmap for valued, effective devices and services for these regions in the next decade.

So many people are now using handheld second screens whilst watching TV that application developers and broadcasters are designing companion applications Second screen content that accompanies a TV programme. The nature of such dual-screen use cases inherently causes attention to be split, somewhat unpredictably. Dual-screen complexity, a clear factor in this attention split, is largely unexplored by the literature and will have an unknown (and likely negative) impact on user experience (UX). Therefore, we use empirical techniques to investigate the objective and subjective effect of dual-screen visual complexity on attention distribution in a companion content scenario. Our sequence of studies culminates in the deployment of a companion application prototype that supports adjustment of complexity (by either content curator or viewer) to allow convergence on optimum experience. Our findings assist the effective design of dual-screen content, informing content providers how to manage dual second screen complexity for enhanced UX through a more blended, complementary dual-screen experience.

In this paper we present the concept of Emergeables -- mobile surfaces that can deform or 'morph' to provide fully-actuated, tangible controls. Our goal in this work is to provide the flexibility of graphical touchscreens, coupled with the affordance and tactile benefits offered by physical widgets. In contrast to previous research in the area of deformable displays, our work focuses on continuous controls (e.g., dials or sliders), and strives for fully-dynamic positioning, providing versatile widgets that can change shape and location depending on the user's needs. We describe the design and implementation of two prototype emergeables built to demonstrate the concept, and present an in-depth evaluation that compares both with a touchscreen alternative. The results show the strong potential of emergeables for on-demand, eyes-free control of continuous parameters, particularly when comparing the accuracy and usability of a high-resolution emergeable to a standard GUI approach. We conclude with a discussion of the level of resolution that is necessary for future emergeables, and suggest how high-resolution versions might be achieved.

Rural developing regions are often defined in terms of their resource constraints, including limited technology exposure, lack of power, and low access to data connections (leading to an inability to access information from digital or physical sources), as well as being amongst the most socio-economically disadvantaged and least literate in their countries’ populations. This article is focused around information access in such regions, aiming to build upon and extend the audio-based services that are already widely used in order to provide access to further types of media. In this article, then, we present an extended exploration of AudioCanvas —an interactive telephone-based audio information system that allows cameraphone users to interact directly with their own photos of physical media to receive narration or description. Our novel approach requires no specialist hardware, literacy, or data connectivity, making it far more likely to be a suitable solution for users in such regions.

Current uses of smartwatches are focused solely around the wearer's content, viewed by the wearer alone. When worn on a wrist, however, watches are often visible to many other people, making it easy to quickly glance at their displays. We explore the possibility of extending smartwatch interactions to turn personal wearables into more public displays. We begin opening up this area by investigating fundamental aspects of this interaction form, such as the social acceptability and noticeability of looking at someone else's watch, as well as the likelihood of a watch face being visible to others. We then sketch out interaction dimensions as a design space, evaluating each aspect via a web-based study and a deployment of three potential designs. We conclude with a discussion of the findings, implications of the approach and ways in which designers in this space can approach public wrist-worn wearables.

There is increasing interest in providing content to users on secondary devices while they watch TV. This material, termed companion content, can be anything from textual information, to interactive quiz games. It can be delivered throughout a broadcast and often directly relates to specific scenes in a show. This new scenario has exposed a challenging design space for creators of both the content and the enabling technology. A key question when introducing content on a secondary device is how much it detracts from, or enhances, the show the user is currently engaged with. To examine this, we investigated methods for mediating attention from the TV and onto a secondary device. By examining a typical use case we have been able to gain new insights into how best to design additional stimuli to alert users to companion content from both a broadcasting, and an HCI perspective.

In this paper we present a novel interface for collaborative creation of evolving audio-visual documents. PaperChains allows users to sketch on paper and then augment with digital audio, allowing both the physical and digital objects to evolve simultaneously over time. The technique we have developed focuses on affordability and accessibility in its design, using standard cameraphones and telephone connections, which allow it to be used in regions where literacy, technological experience and data connections cannot necessarily be taken for granted. The main use-case that we focus on in this paper is for collaborative storytelling, an area which has been well studied and previously proven to be of value in resource constrained environments. To investigate the relevance of the approach in these contexts, we undertook two usability evaluations in India and South Africa. Results from these investigations indicate users' ability to both create and interpret stories using the software, as well as demonstrating high overall usability and enjoyment. We end with a discussion of the implications of our design and opportunities for use in other contexts.

Digital markers such as barcodes and QR codes are ubiquitous. However, these codes are normally used only for retrieving a small amount of information, such as a product identifier or a web link. Much previous work has investigated the value of associating digital content with physical objects in everyday scenarios, but has so far relied primarily on adding new markers to existing items, or studied only short-term usage. In this paper, we explore the benefits of "commandeering" existing object labels to support this interaction. We add a social layer to existing digital codes, allowing users to "tag" any marker in their environment with their own messages, which can then be viewed by any other user. The core contribution of this work is the findings and insights that were collected in user studies. We explored the use of our design via two deployments that demonstrate the potential of such a system beyond its playful starting point. We conclude the work by drawing out a number of key design elements for future appropriation designs.

Barcodes are all around us--on books, groceries and other products--but these everyday markers are typically used for a single focused purpose. In this paper we explore the concept of "piggybacking" on ubiquitous markers to facilitate indoor navigation. Our initial probe--BookMark--allows library visitors to scan any nearby book to provide a custom map to the location of a desired item. In contrast to previous indoor navigation systems, our approach repurposes existing markers on physical items that are already in the navigation space, meaning that no additional infrastructure is required. We evaluated the BookMark probe in a large university library, showing its potential with real library users. In addition, we illustrate how the general technique shows further potential in other similar barcode-rich environments.

In this paper we present a novel interaction technique that helps to make textual information more accessible to those with low or no textual literacy skills. AudioCanvas allows cameraphone users to interact directly with their own photos of printed media to receive audio feedback or narration. The use of a remote telephone-based service also allows our design to be used over a standard phone line, removing the need for data connections, which can be problematic in developing regions. We show the value of the technique via user evaluations in both a rural Indian village and a South African township.

In this paper we introduce Acoustic Quick Response codes to facilitate sharing between Interactive Voice Response (IVR) service users. IVRs are telephone-based, and similar to the world wide web in many aspects, but currently lack support for content sharing. Our approach uses 'audio codes' to let people share their call positions, and allows callers to hold their normal (low-end) handsets together to synchronise. The technique uses remote generation and recognition of audio codes to ensure that sharing is possible on any type of phone without the need for textual literacy or an internet connection. We begin by exploring existing user needs for sharing, then evaluate the technical robustness of our audio-based design. We demonstrate the value of the approach for voice service users over several separate studies--including an eight-month extended field deployment--then conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for such scenarios.

introduction Share on Introduction to the Special Issue of "The Turn to The Wild" Guest Editors: Andy Crabtree View Profile , Alan Chamberlain View Profile , Rebecca E. Grinter View Profile , Matt Jones View Profile , Tom Rodden View Profile , Yvonne Rogers View Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM Transactions on Computer-Human InteractionVolume 20Issue 3Article No.: 13pp 1–4https://doi.org/10.1145/2491500.2491501Published:01 July 2013Publication History 80citation1,259DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations80Total Downloads1,259Last 12 Months98Last 6 weeks14 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

We are starting to see a paradigm shift within the field of HCI. We are witnessing researchers leaving the safety and security of their controlled, lab-based environments and moving their research out into 'the wild'. Their studies are carrying out in-situ development and extended engagement, sampling experiences and working with communities in their homes and on the streets. This research has initially focused upon understanding the impacts that technological intervention has upon our day-to-day life and is leading us to explore the ways in which in-situ design, development and evaluation can be used to understand and explore these technological interventions. Is it the case that lab-based studies, taking people out of their natural environment and designing in the lab without long term user engagement are no longer appropriate to properly understand the impacts of technology in the real world?

As interactive systems become increasingly entwined with architecture, and spaces become able to detect the presence of individuals, we argue that the control of visibility as a temporary personal state should be considered in the design of public spaces. This workshop will provide the opportunity for participants to engage hands-on with a computer vision tracking system (OpenCV) and explore how low-cost materials and tools can be used to render people invisible in monitored public space. We invite researchers and practitioners from the fields of art, design, HCI, architecture and social science to consider strategies for managing personal visibility and how these relate to design and the use of technologies. The intention of the workshop is not to produce implementable designs. Instead we prefer to make speculative design scenarios that might act as future inspiration or critique. By focusing on practical strategies for managing personal visibility we hope to extend designers thinking of presence in public space beyond the purely physical to include digital representations of inhabitation that are processed and archived remotely.

Reading devices such as the Kindle are becoming widely used and many users are now routinely reading on tablet computers. The physical form factor of these devices promotes and accommodates comfortable, natural interactions, providing some of the look and feel of their paper predecessors. However, for operations such as searching and cutting and pasting, the magic and charm of paper is lost and the user has to revert to device-centred selections and menu operations. In this paper, we introduce and explore an alternative set of approaches. In the NoteDrop system we use hand-only gestures along with haptic and limited visual feedback. The aim is to enhance the active reading process with a focus on interactions with digital research documents. In addition to describing the concept prototype, we present the findings of an exploratory user-study that highlights the value and challenges of these new methods.

In this article we describe a novel approach to collaborative video authoring using handheld projectors. PicoTales are created by sketching story elements on a projector+phone prototype, and then animated by moving the projected image. Movements are captured using motion sensor data, rather than visual or other tracking methods, allowing interaction and story creation anywhere. We describe in detail the design and development of our prototype device, and also address issues in position estimation and element tracking. An experiment was conducted to evaluate the prototype, demonstrating its accuracy and usability for ad-hoc creation of story videos. The potential of the system for story authoring is shown via a further experiment looking at the quality of the animated story videos produced. We conclude by considering possible future developments of the concept, and highlighting the benefits of our design for collaborative story capture.

In this paper we consider the current and future use of cameraphones in the context of rural South Africa, where many people do not have access to the latest models and ICT infrastructure is poor. We report a new study of cameraphone use in this setting, and the design and testing of a novel application for creating rich multimedia narratives and materials. We argue for better creative media applications on mobile platforms in this region, and greater attention to their local use.

Attentive reading is a complex and cognitively demanding task that uses note-taking and annotation to support the reader’s interpretation of the document. When reading on paper, extensive use of highlighting and other activities are conducted to support attentive reading, but this rich behaviour is not used with digital documents. Many users therefore print digital documents and then interact with them in physical form. This paper presents the “Digital Reading Desk,” an enhanced digital reading environment that provides support for attentive reading, providing a large working space for notes that mimics the use of desk space in a conventional physical environment. The Reading Desk uses a single tool to support both annotation and bookmarking, simplifying both the user’s learning of the system and their use of tools. Evaluation of the Reading Desk indicates preference for it, as well as considerable behavioural differences between our approach and traditional digital reading tools.

Much of the mobile work by HCI researchers explores a future world populated by high-end devices and relatively affluent users. This paper turns to consider the hundreds of millions of people for whom such sophistication will not be realised for many years to come. In developing world contexts, people will continue to rely on voice-primary interactions due to both literacy and economic reasons. Here, we motivate research into how to accommodate advanced mobile interface techniques while overcoming the handset, data-connection and user limitations. As a first step we introduce TapBack: back-of-device taps to control a dialled-up, telephone-network-based voice service. We show how these audio gestures might be recognised over a standard telephone connection, via users' existing low-end devices. Further, in a longitudinal deployment, the techniques were made available on a live voice service used by rural Indian farmers. Data from the study illustrates the desire by users to adopt the approach and its potential extensions.

"In all the wonderful worlds that writing opens, the spoken word still resides and lives. Written texts all have to be related somehow, directly or indirectly, to the world of sound, the natural habitat of language, to yield their meanings."

We describe a virtual "tether" for mobile devices that allows groups to have quick, simple and privacy-preserving meetups. Our design provides cues which allow dynamic coordination of rendezvous without revealing users' positions. Using accelerometers and magnetometers, combined with GPS positioning and non-visual feedback, users can probe and sense a dynamic virtual object representing the nearest meeting point. The Social Gravity system makes social bonds tangible in a virtual world which is geographically grounded, using haptic feedback to help users rendezvous. We show dynamic navigation using this physical model-based system to be efficient and robust in significant field trials, even in the presence of low-quality positioning. The use of simulators to build models of mobile geolocated systems for pre-validation purposes is discussed, and results compared with those from our trials. Our results show interesting behaviours in the social coordination task, which lead to guidelines for geosocial interaction design. The Social Gravity system proved to be very successful in allowing groups to rendezvous efficiently and simply and can be implemented using only commercially available hardware.

In this article we describe a novel approach to pedestrian navigation using bearing-based haptic feedback. People are guided in the general direction of their destination via vibration, but additional exploratory navigation is stimulated by varying feedback based on the potential for taking alternative routes. We describe two mobile prototypes that were created to examine the possible benefits of the approach. The successful use of this exploratory navigation method is demonstrated in a realistic field trial, and we discuss the results and interesting participant behaviours that were recorded.

For over half a century, psychologists have been struck by how poor people are at expressing their internal sensations, impressions, and evaluations via rating scales. When individuals make judgments, they are incapable of using an absolute rating scale, and instead rely on reference points from recent experience. This relativity of judgment limits the usefulness of responses provided by individuals to surveys, questionnaires, and evaluation forms. Fortunately, the cognitive processes that transform internal states to responses are not simply noisy, but rather are influenced by recent experience in a lawful manner. We explore techniques to remove sequential dependencies, and thereby decontaminate a series of ratings to obtain more meaningful human judgments. In our formulation, decontamination is fundamentally a problem of inferring latent states (internal sensations) which, because of the relativity of judgment, have temporal dependencies. We propose a decontamination solution using a conditional random field with constraints motivated by psychological theories of relative judgment. Our exploration of decontamination models is supported by two experiments we conducted to obtain ground-truth rating data on a simple length estimation task. Our decontamination techniques yield an over 20% reduction in the error of human judgments.

Mobile imaging and digital storytelling currently support a growing practice of multimedia communication in the West. In this paper we describe a project which explores their benefit in the East, to support non-textual information sharing in an Indian village. Local audiovisual story creation and sharing activities were carried out in a one month trial, using 10 customized cameraphones and a digital library of stories represented on a village display. The findings show that the system was usable by a cross-section of the community and valued for its ability to express a mixture of development and community information in an accessible form. Lessons for the role of HCI in this context are also discussed.

In this article we describe the Sweep-Shake system, a novel, low interaction cost approach to supporting the spontaneous discovery of geo-located information. By sweeping a mobile device around their environment, users browse for interesting information related to points of interest. We built a mobile haptic prototype which encourages the user to explore their surroundings to search for location information, helping them discover this by providing directional vibrotactile feedback. Once potential targets are selected, the interaction is extended to offer an hierarchy of information levels with a simple method for filtering and selecting desired types of data for each geo-tagged location. We describe and motivate our approach and present a short field trial to situate our design in a real environment, followed by a more detailed user study that compares it against an equivalent visual-based system.

Across a wide range of cognitive tasks, recent experience influences behavior. For example, when individuals repeatedly perform a simple two-alternative forced-choice task (2AFC), response latencies vary dramatically based on the immediately preceding trial sequence. These sequential effects have been interpreted as adaptation to the statistical structure of an uncertain, changing environment (e.g. Jones & Sieck, 2003; Mozer, Kinoshita, & Shettel, 2007; Yu & Cohen, 2008). The Dynamic Belief Model (DBM) (Yu & Cohen, 2008) explains sequential effects in 2AFC tasks as a rational consequence of a dynamic internal representation that tracks second-order statistics of the trial sequence (repetition rates) and predicts whether the upcoming trial will be a repetition or an alternation of the previous trial. Experimental results suggest that first-order statistics (base rates) also influence sequential effects. We propose a model that learns both first- and second-order sequence properties, each according to the basic principles of the DBM but under a unified inferential framework. This model, the Dynamic Belief Mixture Model (DBM2), obtains precise, parsimonious fits to data. Furthermore, the model predicts dissociations in behavioral (Maloney, Dal Martello, Sahm, & Spillmann, 2005) and electrophysiological studies (Jentzsch & Sommer, 2002), supporting the psychological and neurobiological reality of its two components.

The StoryBank project is examining technologies and practices to allow digitally impoverished communities to take part in the user-generated content revolution. The approach involves combining mobile phones to create audio-visual stories and a touch screen display situated in a community meeting place. This paper discusses the design, evaluation and refinement of the situated display. We consider how our experiences of working with a rural Indian village community influenced design processes, principles and prototypes. The work highlights the value of community-centred design practices and prototypes in such developing-world contexts.

People record and share their experiences through text, audio and video. Increasingly they do this blogging from mobile devices. We illustrate a novel, mobile, low interaction cost approach to supporting the creation of a rich record of journeys made and places encountered. By pointing and tilting a mobile, users indicate their interests in a location. No content is provided to the user in situ but, later, web materials including images, entries from other people's blogs and web pages are automatically placed on an interactive map for viewing on a larger screen device. We built two mobile prototypes to explore the approach -- one combines gestures and visual map feedback; the other is more lightweight, allowing the user to simply point-and-tilt. We describe and motivate the approaches and present user studies that raise issues relevant to their design and to the wider class of device and service concerned with mobile spatial information access.

In most cognitive and motor tasks, speed-accuracy tradeoffs are observed: Individuals can respond slowly and accurately, or quickly yet be prone to errors. Control mechanisms governing the initiation of behavioral responses are sensitive not only to task instructions and the stimulus being processed, but also to the recent stimulus history. When stimuli can be characterized on an easy-hard dimension (e.g., word frequency in a naming task), items preceded by easy trials are responded to more quickly, and with more errors, than items preceded by hard trials. We propose a rationally motivated mathematical model of this sequential adaptation of control, based on a diffusion model of the decision process in which difficulty corresponds to the drift rate for the correct response. The model assumes that responding is based on the posterior distribution over which response is correct, conditioned on the accumulated evidence. We derive this posterior as a function of the drift rate, and show that higher estimates of the drift rate lead to (normatively) faster responding. Trial-by-trial tracking of difficulty thus leads to sequential effects in speed and accuracy. Simulations show the model explains a variety of phenomena in human speeded decision making. We argue this passive statistical mechanism provides a more elegant and parsimonious account than extant theories based on elaborate control structures.

Mobile search is becoming an increasingly important user activity. In this paper, instead of investigating the most efficient and effective ways of providing search results, the answers, we consider the value of giving access to previous queries, the questions, relating to a user's location. By exposing what other people have searched for, the aim is to provide useful insights into a location's character. To consider the value of the approach we deployed two mobile probes in a large-scale field study involving 391 participants. Our experiences suggest that presenting users with other people's in situ queries influences their information seeking interactions positively.

There is much interest in providing effective mobile search tools. Our focus is the value of in-situ sharing of users' mobile search activity. The QnotA prototype displays other people's queries about locations in an attempt to both provide users with an enriched sense of the places they visit, and to accommodate the limited input and output capabilities of many mobile platforms. We present the prototype and user experiences it affords. A study has been performed which allowed us to gather logged usage data and subjective participant information via diary and interview protocols. We report on findings that give insights as to the use and usefulness of the approach.

For digital library and information retrieval technologies to provide solutions for bridging the digital divide in developing countries, we need to understand the information access practices of remote and often poor communities in these countries. We must understand the information needs of these communities, and the best means to provide them access to relevant information. To this end, we investigated the current information access practices in an Indian village.

The recent trend towards pervasive computing and information technology becoming omnipresent and entering all aspects of modern living, means that we are moving away from the traditional interaction paradigm between human and technology being that of the desktop computer. This shift towards ubiquitous computing is perhaps most evident in the increased sophistication and extended utility of mobile devices, such as mobile phones, PDAs, mobile communicators (telephone/PDA) and Tablet PCs. Advances in these mobile device technologies coupled with their much-improved functionality means that current mobile devices can be considered as multi-purpose information access tools capable of complex tasks. This Third Workshop on Mobile and Ubiquitous Information Access (MUIA 2006) aims to be a forum for the presentation of current research and exchange of experiences into technological and usability aspects of mobile information access.

In this paper, we conduct a thorough investigation of how people search their photo collections for events (a set of photographs relating to a particular well defined event), singles (individual photographs) and properties (a set of photographs with a common theme) on PDAs. We describe a prototype system that allows us to expose many issues that must be considered when designing photo searching interfaces. We discuss each of these issues and make recommendations where applicable. Our major observation is that several different methods are used to locate photographs. In light of this, we conclude by discussing how photo searching interfaces might embody or support such an approach.

This workshop aims to review and discuss research on mobile usage of multimedia, in particular of video and TV on mobile devices. The workshop focuses on human behaviour, human needs, and interaction design concerning the creation, management, and consumption of moving images using mobile devices.

Abstract Almost all Web searches are carried out while the user is sitting at a conventional desktop computer connected to the Internet. Although online, handheld, mobile search offers new possibilities, the fast‐paced, focused style of interaction may not be appropriate for all user search needs. The authors explore an alternative, relaxed style for Web searching that asynchronously combines an offline handheld computer and an online desktop personal computer. They discuss the role and utility of such an approach, present a tool to meet these user needs, and discuss its relation to other systems.

The tutorial explores interesting and empowering mobile design philosophies, principles and methods as well as giving specific guidance on key emerging consumer application areas such as image browsing and information access.

No abstract available.

Small handheld devices—mobile phones, Pocket PCs etc.—are increasingly being used to access the web. Search engines are the most used web services and are an important factor of user support. Search engine providers have begun to offer their services on the small screen. This paper presents a detailed evaluation of the how easy to use such services are in these new contexts. An experiment was carried out to compare users' abilities to complete search tasks using a mobile phone-sized, handheld computer-sized and conventional, desktop interface to the full Google™ index. With all three interfaces, when users succeed in completing a task, they do so quickly (within 2–3 min) and using few interactions with the search engine. When they fail, though, they fail badly. The paper examines the causes of failures in small screen searching and proposes guidelines for improving these interfaces. In addition, we present and discuss novel interaction schemes that put these guidelines into practice.

Mobile internet technologies, such as WAP, are important for pervasive, anytime, anywhere computing. Although much progress has been made in terms of technological innovation, many of mobile internet systems are difficult to use, lack flexibility and robustness. They give a poor user experience. Evaluation and theoretical analysis of usability combined with innovative design can achieve significant improvements in user performance and satisfaction. Using such multidisciplinary methods explains the negative reactions to WAP, and --- more constructively --- suggest ways of developing more effective and efficient devices and services. Key words: Mobile internet, HCI, Usability, WAP. 1.

How hard to users to find interactive devices to use to achieve their goals, and how can we get this information early enough to influence design? We show that Markov modeling can obtain suitable measures, and we provide formulas that can be used for a large class of systems. We analyze and consider alternative designs for various real examples. We introduce a “knowledege/usability graph,” which shows the impact of even a smaller amount of knowledge for the user, and the extent to which designers' knowledge may bias their views of usability. Markov models can be built into design tools, and can therefore be made very convenient for designers to utilize. One would hope that in the future, design tools would include such mathematical analysis, and no new design skills would be required to evaluate devices. A particular concern of this paper is to make the approach accessible. Complete program code and all the underlying mathematics are provided in appendices to enable others to replicate and test all results shown.