Location-aware Event Planners

The following paper is on the design and evaluation of a mobile device used for planning and coordinating activities amongst a group of people. It is a good example of a user-centered design process, which one doesn't always find in mobile research papers.

In particular they:
- identified a target user group
- did surveys and interviews with them
- built a prototype
- tested it with the target user group, in realistic usage contexts, using scenarios
- iterated on the design and incorporated user feedback

The only thing I didn't see was use of low-fidelity prototypes (e.g. paper) which would have decreased development time and increased flexibility in early stages of design.

They identified two types of events
- formal (generally planned in advance)
- informal (social in nature and don't require firm commitments ahead of time)

This resulted in some interesting design guidelines:
- stateless interaction model
- visibility of the information needed to perform actions
- short interaction sequences
- appropriate timeout on unfinished operations
- carry data between applications to avoid re-entry
- functionality to resume where user left off a task
- integrate data where needed to avoid unnecessary switching

They make a good point about the importance of different kinds of metrics for mobile device design. "Timings are important, but other performance measures such as resiliency to interruptions and interaction suspensions may be much more useful for evaluating this class of applications."

The design and evaluation of a mobile location-aware handheld event planner, 2003
Rachel Fithian, Giovanni Iachello, Jehan Moghazy, Zachary Pousman, John Stasko

[full-text pdf | unformatted html]