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Int. J. Human-Computer Studies 66 (2008) 833837

www.elsevier.com/locate/ijhcs

Editorial

Mobile humancomputer interaction

ACM denes HCI (humancomputer interaction) as
a discipline concerned with the design, evaluation and
implementation of interactive computing systems for
human use and with the study of major phenomena
surrounding them (Hewett et al., 1992). This denition
positions mobile HCI as a subarea focusing on one species
of interactive computing systemsthe portable and
handheld computer. The major phenomenon surrounding mobile HCI is naturally the users mobility. The users
agency for physical movement changes the conditions of
interaction so profoundly that mobility is one of the key
challenges for post-millennium research.
How successful have we been in addressing this
challenge? Have we learned something that others must
know in order to succeed with their mobile services?
Looking back over 10 years of research, it seems that
we have been unable to produce a body of ndings that
are widely applied in design and engineering in this
area. Mobile prototypes are being developed in special
application domains that tend not to refer to work done in
the core of mobile HCI. The lack of valid and actionable
results, methods, and theories may be part of the reason
why substantial investments in mobile technologies can
fail. The case of WAP (wireless application protocol) in
Europe is a good example from the recent past. Academic
research should not be a slave to the development of
technology but it should steer efforts across application
domains.
Nonetheless, the rst 10 years of mobile HCI research
cannot be judged as being a failure. Mobile HCI has been,
by and large, a technology-focused enterprise (Kjeldskov
and Graham, 2003; York and Pendharkar, 2004)
and a model of fruitful industryacademia relationships.
Numerous commercial products and services have been
anticipated by academic publications and almost all major
manufacturers and network operators have active research
divisions that take part in the conferences. Location-based
services, awareness, remove monitoring, media-capturing
and sharing, browsers, online banking, business processes,
games, ofce documents, voice communications, short
messaging, email, and input interfaces are prime examples
of research areas that have contributed to industry efforts.

1071-5819/$ - see front matter r 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2008.10.001

However, the bulk of this work has been local in a sense,

specic to the application or setting, without generalizable
understanding that carries over to new applications and
settings. We need stronger basic science without letting
industry needs off the hook.
The papers of this special issue break new ground by
bringing into focus the expanding spheres of mobile HCI:
from the user interfaces designed for the moving user to the
immediate situations at hand and all the way to the wider
and more latently operating social, organizational and
cultural contexts. In the end, the core of mobile HCI that
intertwines these spheres is how the users actions change
their relation to their contexts, and how this in turn affects
the use of computers. In other words, the unique aspect of
mobile HCI is the strong inuence of the environment
almost to the extent we could talk about human
environmentcomputer interaction. Mobility is essentially
about change, something transforming to something else
as a consequence of a users agencya cycle of actions
that provide new resources and place constraints for the
ensuing actions. Mobility is therefore both a limiting as an
enabling factor and a couple of the papers in this special
issue reveal.
We believe that herein lies the greatest advantage of
mobile technologies over as a platform for HCI. They
should not simply be conceived as small or inferior versions
of desktop applications, but they enable a host of new
services that leverage their contexts for the benet of the
user. The environment is not only a condition for achieving
something but it can be actively exploited. The full
spectrum of the conditions that are relevant spans the
physiology of joint movement as well as to the sociology of
human mobility. Papers in this special issue go all the way
to argue that there are aspects in mobility that simply
cannot be isolated and disentangled from the richness of
human life.

Overview of the papers

Mobile HCI has been an active area for more than
a decade, yet this special issue is the rst targeting not

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all of mobile HCI, but specically the problems of user

mobility and mobile use. We received altogether 44
submissions and narrowed down the selection to nine
outstanding papers after two rounds of rigorous reviews.
The activities studied in these papers are emblematic of
how mobile devices are becoming one of the most pervasive
platforms for HCI. The papers cover studies of teenagers
in Japan, train travellers in the UK, older users on
the phone, a rural community in the US and foreign
exchange workers in the Middle East; they cover contexts
from work to schools and homes and trading oors; they
draw from ethnography and communication studies to
mathematical modelling, from information systems and
cognitive science to urban studies. The diversity of frameworks needed to address mobility in these papers implies
that we do not have a unifying framework for mobility,
and may not have in the future. Instead, the phenomenon
is tackled from multiple perspectives that are irreducible
to each other.
In the following paragraphs, we go through the accepted
papers, starting with papers dealing with techniques for
mobile interaction.
The uid and natural interactions enabled by modelling
physics are common in games and are moving into mobile
phones. Physics engines have been used in games for many
years to make movements and interactions more realistic,
or alternatively to be able to play with the laws to physics
to create new game play. Mobile phones now have the
processing power to do some of the same things in their
interactions. Gestures such as icking pages to turn them
or throwing a scrollbar and seeing it slow down the further
it scrolls are easy for users to understand and make for
playful and engaging interactions. Many phones now also
incorporate accelerometers so that the in the future the
whole device could be used to gesture, for example tilting
to zoom or scroll. Eslambolchilar and Murray-Smith
(this issue) suggest that techniques such as zooming and
scrolling based on dynamic models for mobile phones
are in their infancy, with many techniques hard-coded
into applications, rather than using general models that
could be applied across the whole interface. One reason for
this is that many interaction designers are not familiar with
the concepts, specication mechanisms and calibration
tools needed to make these techniques work. Eslambolchilar and Murray-Smith propose a theoretical framework
to underpin these dynamic interactions and show how it
can be used to model tilt-based speed-dependent automatic
zooming.
Until recently, most mobile devices used a small
keyboard, or a touchscreen and stylus for input. Things
are now changing with a new generation of devices based
on touchscreens operated by ngers. The removal of the
physical keyboard allows designers more exibility to alter
the size and shape of a device and to allow input on
different parts of it, for example on the back so that the
screen is not obscured during input. However, it is not clear
how effective users will be at interacting on devices such as

these. It requires them to use ngers, thumbs or two hands

together in different ways, sometimes on the front of the
device and sometimes on the back. Wobbrock, Myers and
Aung (this issue) present three detailed studies characterising input using different hand postures on the front and
back of devices to show the performance of these different
surfaces. Their results show that the index nger is good
for input on the front or back of a device, while the thumb
is better on the back than the front. However, the index
nger is more limited when complex gestures are needed,
where it performs better on the front of the device. These
studies can help device designers understand how to create
more effective interactions in future devices which may
have very different form factors to the ones we are
currently using.
There has been a very rapid growth in the use of incar navigation devices over recent years. The same is
beginning to happen in the area of pedestrian navigation,
with many new mobile phones including GPS receivers
and mapping software. This has great potential for all
pedestrians, but there may be specic benets for people
with cognitive impairments. Cognitive impairments can
affect navigation skills which are fundamental to travel,
community integration and personal independence. The
right technology could help overcome some of these
problems. Due to their disability, cognitively impaired
peoples needs and requirements are different and standard
navigation tools are not always suitable, particularly in the
way that route following assistance is presented. Fickas,
Sohlberg and Hung (this issue) studied a range of different
presentation methods to discover which was the most
effective at providing route-following assistance for this
user group. They studied the use of aerial maps, point of
view maps, and audio and textual directions with a group
of twenty cognitively impaired users. Results showed that
speech-based directions were the most effective, followed
by text prompts. Speech was also given the highest
preference rating by the participants. One reason for this
is that it placed the lowest demand on visual attention,
a resource that was required in order to navigate the
environment. The results of this work may also be
benecial to designers of general pedestrian navigation
tools as route following can be cognitively demanding for
everyone, and reducing the load on visual attention will
allow all users to focus on the environment they are moving
through.
Kurniawan (this issue) investigates the use of mobile
phones by older users. The ageing populations of Western
societies mean that this group of users is growing in
number so it is important that technology is appropriately
designed to meet their needs. In some countries, this group
has a large disposable income and so could be a big, and as
yet untapped, market for mobile phone manufacturers.
The design of most mobile phones is aimed at a younger
audience with the addition of extra features being a key
selling point. These may not be the most important aspects
for older users who need and use their phones for different

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reasons. Kurniawan investigated the issues older people

face when using mobile phones and then identied
characteristics of an ageing-friendly phone. Using a range
of methods, including interviews with expert users, focus
groups and email questionnaires, usage patterns, problems
and successful phone features were found. Her results
suggest that key features for older users include: memory
aids (easy to access alarms, appointment reminders), better
visual displays (stronger backlight, larger text), haptic aids
(rubber grips, bigger buttons), features to reduce errors
(easy to operate keypad lock to avoid mistaken dialling)
and safety features (panic button and caller blacklist).
Many of these features exist in phones currently on the
market, but are not all available in any one phone and
all of the features are not necessarily as easy to nd and
use as they might be. Addressing the issues she identied
would be straightforward for manufacturers and could
allow them to increase sales to a new segment of the
market.
Trains, buses, planes and taxis ought to be prime
contexts of use for mobile devices. Using mobile devices
while travelling is not only common; it is the selling
point of business phones and PDAs. There is something
in the betweenness of traveling that is easily seen as
promising for mobile technologies. In their article entitled
Mobile technologies in mobile spaces: Findings from
the context of train travel, Axtell, Hislop, and Whittaker
(this issue) investigate train travellers in the UK. Their
paper is a strong empirical study revealing the physical,
material, technological, social, and organizational complications of interaction during travel. On the one hand,
despite owning an arsenal of mobile devices, commuters
are not able to do work wherever, whenever, and however
they want. At times they have to limit their work to
those tasks where communication is not necessary,
and they may have to revert to pens and papers to do
the job. On the other hand, workers are not powerless
in face of resource deprivations, but they exhibit quickwitted local adaptations to overcome constraints; and
they plan and at times discipline themselves to address
these limitations; in best cases they turn these limitations
to their benet. Previous work that has looked at the
practices of mobile device use has highlighted the various
kinds of work use of mobile devices give rise to
mobilization work to actively ensure resources for use (e.g.,
Perry and Brodie, 2005) and multi-device work to manage
ones set of devices (Oulasvirta and Sumari, 2007). The
broader point that Axtell, Hislop, and Whittaker make is
that users orient not only to the constraints of their
immediate surroundings; they adapt their practices to
organizational expectations and norms. They conclude
with a compelling critique of naive notions of context;
even train travel is no clear-cut, unitary context of use, but
users actively construct conditions for work by adapting
local resources to their practices and their devices, yet they
are continuously sensitive to non-present, non-visible
demands.

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In their article entitled Organisational usability of

mobile computingvolatility and control in mobile
foreign-exchange trading, Srensen and Al-Taitoon
(this issue) expand on the point that non-visible conditions
shape the use of mobile technology. They trace the
long evolution of technologies of foreign exchange
trading from face-to-face bartering in the Babylonian
civilization to the modern 24-h on-oor and off-premises
paradigm where traders orchestrate their use of phones,
pagers, and PDAs. Al-Taitoon and Srensen study traders
of a Middle East bank who use their mobile devices to
make decisions in face of uncertainty and shifting risk. On
the one hand, market volatility creates a need for offpremises trading and quick decision making under
uncertainty but, on the other, this clashes with the need
for organizational control. Mobile traders need special
technical and social skills to cope with this problem. AlTaitoon and Srensen present evidence for the claim that
what we understand as the usability of a mobile system
depends critically on balancing individual and organizational control. Here, the strong role of mobile devices
emerges in the context of dynamically switching spheres of
work and personal identities that demands looser coupling
and more discretion.
Studies since the turn of the millennium have repeatedly
pointed out the importance of mobile phones in coordination of interpersonal activities and, at a higher level, in
the management of ones social networks (Katz and
Aakhus, 2002; Kopomaa, 2000; Ling, 2004). For many
years now, Japan has been at the forefront of mobile
services. Recently, the country has witnessed a massive leap
from the use of pagers and SMS to mobile e-mail. In their
article entitled Kei-Tying teens: using mobile phone
e-mail to bond, bridge, and break with social tiesa
study of Japanese adolescents Boase and Kobayashi
(this issue) report that Japanese youth not only manage
existing relationships with phones; they use phones
to actively add new contact points to their networks.
Japanese adolescents use mobile e-mail to bond and
bridge with peers, but not to break ties. These ndings
are intriguing not only because they are telling of a recent
expansion in the interpersonal uses of mobile phones,
but also as they are telling of how mobile devices
expand to the territory of social networking sites.
Boyd and Ellison (2008) dene social networking sites as
web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct
a public or semi-public prole within a bounded system,
(2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share
a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list
of connections and those made by others within the
system. Boase and Kobayashis ndings bring about
a fascinating idea: that mobile e-mail, although not
designed for this purpose, can be and is utilized for social
networking like activities. Instead of traversing digital
connections, phones are picked out of pockets to digitalize connections that are created face-to-face. The authors
report that hallway encounters that are too brief for

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face-to-face conversations are opportunities to exchange

e-mail addresses and connection is maintained by sending
messages throughout the day. E-mail messages reach
recipients across device boundaries and help maintaining
connection no matter whether one is on or off the
desktop. The authors also report an association between
the amount of bridging a user does and the intensity
of use: more bridging leads to more use of mobile phones.
Mobile e-mail may be a forerunner of what may turn into
Web 2.0 on mobile phones.
In their article Theorizing mobility in community
networks, Carroll and Rosson (this issue) analyze the
potential of mobile technologies for supporting community
networks. Their target community is a rural town of 80,000
people located in Appalachian mountains and purpose
to facilitate information dissemination, discussion, and
collective activity. Carroll and Rossons paper is an
exercise in and extension of scenario-based analysis to the
space of mobile services. Scenario-based analysis (Carroll,
2000) has been one of the most inuential ideas in designoriented HCI during this decade. As Grudin (personal
communication) puts it, the conundrum of human
computer interaction is that an imaginative person can
entertain almost any form of interaction or interface,
yet there are hard limits on the use of technology.
A designer can presuppose a user who can type with two
hands while walking, and a marketing researcher that train
commuters are interested in killing time by watching
advertisements on their devices. Carroll and Rosson take
the reader by the hand and lead through a process to show
how their framework lends itself to difcult phenomena
like communities and mobility. The authors not only
elaborate the notion of community for this purpose, but
they draw from theoretical and empirical literature to build
a scientic basis for their design choices. They derive
principles for wireless community networks and discuss
the special nature of mobility. The resulting scenarios
show compelling ways of leveraging the physical world
and proximity of community members. The article has a
timely focus since communities and more generally social
networking is an important ingredient of the Web 2.0
movement.
As a starting point for their article, entitled Storied
spaces: Cultural accounts of mobility, technology, and
environmental knowing, Brewer and Dourish refer to
sociologist John Urry (2000), who has suggested that
mobility rather than society may be the primary animating
metaphor for the present century. Brewer and Dourish
write: If mobility is culturally shaped, then we must think
about mobile technologies not so much as devices that
help solve problems, but as sites at which social and
cultural categories are enacted. By claiming that space
is also a social product, they go beyond the argument
of Harrison and Dourish (1996) that what we call
space can be understood from the perspective of geometry
and experience. Technological representations of space
are never devoid of perspective, but are always impli-

cated in ways of movement and knowing the world.

They argue that cultural logics feature in the collective
understanding of space, and that technologies are not
agnostic about conicts between logics. Brewer and
Dourish develop this argument further through numerous
examples where they re-interpret context-aware services
from new perspectives of cultural legibility, literacy, and
legitimacy.

References
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Srensen, Carsten., Al-Taitoon, Adel. Organisational usability of
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Antti Oulasvirta
Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT,
Helsinki University of Technology TKK and University of
Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
E-mail address: antti.oulasvirta@hiit.
Stephen Brewster
Department of Computing Science,
University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK