Institute For The Future

Psychology of Mobile Interaction

When designing applications for mobile devices, it is useful to consider how mobile platform differ from traditional, static, desktop-based platforms in terms of their cognitive demands and psychological effects.

I'm attaching a paper by Antti Oulasvirta, a mobile researcher at HIIT (Finland) who is currently at Berkeley. Antti's work suggests that applications on mobile phones should aim for no more than 4-second bursts of interaction. This points to an entirely new design space for phone-based applications, one that takes into account the consequences of using mobile devices in everyday, unpredicatbly changing contexts.

Some of my own research at CHIMe Lab (Stanford) suggests that people using mobile phones can be significantly different in terms of personal disclosure, learning, and creativity depending on changing environment and their level of environmental awareness.