Location information contains a huge promise in the area of awareness technologies. In PePe project, automatic location detection was investigated as part of a mobile presence system. A field study with twelve young adults was conducted to explore the usage habits of sharing location information. The participants defined, named, and shared on average twenty meaningful locations with their friends. They found the location information as the most relevant mobile presence attribute, due to a fact that it gave good overview on the status of the other users. We focus on analyzing how the participants named locations and how they used location information in the context of mobile presence. The participants utilized shared meanings of locations in naming and storing them to the PePe system. We classified the created locations as generic locations, points of interest, and geographical areas. The presented results will facilitate in designing location enhanced mobile awareness systems.

This study compares two alternative ways to organize links as navigation elements in mobile banking applications. For the comparison, two alternative banking applications were tested. The applications that were tested had the same content but different ways to navigate with links. One of them provided a system where the user was required to use specific menu pages for navigation and where there were no cross-navigation enabling links on content pages. The other application had cross-navigation enabling links on content pages. The comparison was done by conducting a usability test with 30 test users. The users' performance and subjective feedback were measured in the test. The application with links hierarchically beneath each other on menu pages and having no cross-navigating links on content pages was considered better by the test users than the application with cross-navigation enabling links on content pages. In addition to their academic contribution, the study results can guide the development of current mobile banking services for the participating bank and the development of mobile application guidelines for the participating handset manufacturer. We also believe that the study results can be generalized over other mobile internet applications.

The Internet has been a great success in the fixed world, whereas WAP (Wireless Application Protocol), the mobile Internet, has not fulfilled its promise. However, now the analysts have started to believe in a rise of the mobile Internet again. WAP 2.0, with XHTML Mobile Profile as its standard language, will enable sites to function both in the fixed and wireless worlds. In this paper, we analyze different ways to navigate XHTML sites with mobile phones and base our analysis on two usability evaluations with a total of 30 subjects from various countries. The results show that due to limitations of mobile devices (the limited display size, pointing methods, and bandwidth), not all navigation guidelines of the fixed Internet are applicable to the mobile Internet. It is important for developers to realize the effect of these limitations in order to build usable XHTML sites also for mobile use.