From ethnography to design of mobiles

This paper takes a step towards connecting the results of ethnographic research with mobile device design and groupware development. They do an excellent job of using low-fidelity prototypes such as paper and medium-fidelity prototypes such as Flash to evaluate designs with users. However, it is still unclear how the recommendations of the ethnographic studies translate into concrete UI designs and why UI designs were chosen. For instance, a 3D graphical layout is chosen to represent contacts, which may be unusable to depict large groups. This paper is a great read for ideas about what tasks future mobile devices should support for users, but it still leaves some gaps to be explored in the design process.

Mobile Phones for the Next Generation: Device Designs for Teenagers, 2003
Sara Berg, Alex S. Taylor, Richard Harper
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