The Importance of HumanComputer Interaction for Mobile Development Mobile phones have really changed the way that we experience life, the way we communicate with other people, the way we get information in our daily lives, and the way that we coordinate. I'd like to start by asking you to think about 1995 and what life was like in 1995. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to go to one of these places, to a phone booth, and talk to someone.
You called a place and not a person. I had to find a phone from which I could call them. If I was lost and needed to find my way, I needed a map and find where I was on that map, find where I wanted to go, and manually find a route from where I was to where I was trying to get to. If I wanted to share media with someone and I was lucky enough to have one of the earliest digital cameras, I could, perhaps, capture a digital photo, use all of these cables and connect it to a computer, download a photo, and if I happened to have email at the time and whoever I wanted to communicate with had email at the time, maybe I could actually get that photo across and share it with someone. But it was quite an troublesome process. Now, I'd like you to think about today and think about what the mobile phone has really enabled us to do. If I want to call someone, I call them. I don't call a place. I call a person. And people are mostly available whenever I need to call and get in touch.
If I'm lost and I need to find a map, not only will my phone give me a map and throw a little dot at where I am right now, but it'll give me turn by turn navigation to anywhere I want to go in the world via car, via public transit, walking, biking— anyway I want to get there. And if I want to share media, there are literally hundreds of apps that I can use to share a photo, to share a video, to show someone what I'm seeing right now. And I could even live stream exactly what I'm seeing to people all over the world, using a variety of mobile live streaming services.
Mobile computing has really changed the way how we communicate. It's provided this always-on connectivity, data connectivity, access to information, but also a lot of rich sensing.
Mobile is changing the way we work. Whether we’re paying bills, reading the news, or purchasing goods, we’re all doing it on mobile devices. And it’s changing the way business need to deliver information. I was lucky enough to life through a time where those changes happened and I focus the on how we can use that rich sensing to create new experiences for people, to enable them to communicate in new ways with each other by using location, by using motion detection, temperature, the sensing of the camera on the phone to capture photos and videos, and have contextually relevant services that can change the way that people interact, and really taking computing out in the world and away from the desktop, away from the fixed space. To think of a few: • Nurses need to view patient care statistics and informations in real-time so they can care for each patient individually when an issue arises. • Executives, who are constantly traveling from headquarter to branch offices or customer sites, need to stay updated on the latest performance updates. • Operations managers in the oil and gas industry need to know each day’s production volume so they can forecast numbers for the next month. • Mobility means a lot for design. And design needs to change to take advantage of the fact that people are out in the world and people are using computing in their
daily lives. We're now doing much more than making applications that fit a specific task at a specific time, where the goal is efficiency.
Design is not a thing you do it a way of life. - Alan Fletcher | Famous British Graphic Designer Oftentimes, the goal is to enjoy yourself or to enable some kind of new communication. And that requires different methods. And those methods are of scientific nature. The broader field of it is called human-computer interaction, or HCI. It is a field that's been existing for several decades, and is at the intersection of: Computer science, Psychology, Design, Anthropology, Language, Sociology, Psychology, Engineering, and Ergonomics. Therefore, it vital to understand and define the ways that people will interact with digital systems. It started with desktop computer systems and is now moving on to a lot of mobile and tablet-based interactions, ubiquitous computing environments where there are screens and sensors out in the world. And HCI has really been changing over the years. It's a large research community. About 2,000 to 3,000 people attend the yearly conference every year. HCI came in several waves. Mostly when people saw the need to improve a system based on new technology findings. The first wave came in the 1980s. It focused on psychological and human factors, such as how big should a button be and where should it be placed so that someone can find it and navigate through a system? The original and persistent technical focus of HCI was and is the concept of usability. This concept was originally articulated somewhat naively in the slogan "easy to learn, easy to use". This wave came in the 1990s, with a lot of influences from cognitive science. And it mostly focused on tasks, usability and efficiency of getting done the things that you needed to get done in a system. The focus here was on lab studies about task completion time and error rates to measure performance. Last but not least, the third wave is what we are in today. It started around the 2000s, and is really focused on creating compelling and engaging systems for people to interact with, and understanding use in the real world and how these systems are adopted into people’s daily lives.
The research questions that I am really interested in is how new mobile services are adopted, how they're integrated into people's daily lives, how they change the way we communicate with each other and the world to allow new experiences. Things that people couldn't do simply because it did not exist before.
Source: http://profs.info.uaic.ro/~stefan.negru/hci2012/lab1.html
I want to encourage you to think about new ways that people can interact with each other. Exploring the domain that you're interested in, whether that be music use, photo sharing, coordination with other people, and really learning what people are doing in that domain today— using that to inspire some new concepts, building them out very, very quickly and iteratively, and evaluating them with people, understanding how those concepts get integrated into someone's daily life and experience. What you need to understand is how technology fits into peoples daily lives, what their needs are, and how the new systems that you build work in their day to day existence, and really help them experience something new in their daily lives. That involves lots of research, concepts, assessment and is called experience design.
Your goal should be to enable people to do things that weren't possible before, to experience something in their daily lives that was simply not possible before the technology that you'll be creating. That involves a lot more than just designing a screen, or an interface.
Source: http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/mako-voice-recognition-system/
What does communication mean? Yeah, where do I call my mom; in the gym, in the car, when I’m at home, on the roof, on the beach, anywhere. And what does it mean to really communicate from anywhere? Email - michel.herszak@gmail.com Twitter - @MHerszak (twitter.com/MHerszak) Want to know even more about the way in which I work? You can check me out over on my website, right here.