Human Interaction with Advanced Mobile Services

Currently, the HCI research is facing larger and larger challenges, with advanced mobile services and intelligent environments moving from research laboratories towards everyday use. The problems with WAP acceptance are a good example of the dangers of designing without a user-centred approach: despite the success in realising the technology, the commercial success remains elusive because, for the majority of potential users, “the pain is greater than the gain”. While making telephone calls and sending text messages poses only moderate requirements on the device user interfaces, the more advanced services envisioned and even partly realised today are significantly more demanding. A smoothly operating and intuitive user interface will be a fundamental element of all successful applications and an important element of competition. Mobile services may still bear some resemblance to traditional applications, but new, intelligent, adaptive environments differ considerably more with respect to user interfaces, and the usefulness of old design knowledge will indeed be limited.