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im ux 2007

The purpose of the IMUx workshop (Improved Mobile User Experience) is to share ideas and engage in productive discussion surrounding research in user experience, user modeling, and user interaction.

The workshop was arranged by Péter Boda and Ákos Vetek from Nokia, and Petrik Floréen, Petteri Nurmi and Greger Lindén from HIIT.

Péter Boda from the Nokia lablets gave the opening presentation. He discussed the work that goes on at Nokia involving pervasive sensor networking fabrics enabled by cell phones (this is becoming a popular theme in mobile device research) as well as Nokia's part in user interaction research. A few projects of interest that he mentioned were the Wibree technology, which is a short-range mobile device technology, and SensorPlanet, the project that investigates the mobile-device-as-data-collector paradigm.

The call for participation yielded only a small number of submissions. There were 10 submissions. Four papers were accepted, but 1 withdrew from the conference at a later point. So, the conference consisted of 3 peer reviewed papers and 2 invited talks. While it may seem disappointing that there were such a small number of papers to be presented, the organizers pointed out that it was preferable to keep the workshop of higher quality, rather than sacrificing quality for quantity of work.

In the end, this small number of papers may have been ok, because it left a lot of time for lively discuss, and development of research questions, solutions, and directions.

There were 13 attendees at the workshop. Introductions were made around the table. The attendees were from all over the world:

  • Mark Adler, Nokia Research Center Cambridge
  • Eun-jong Lee, Handong University
  • Geungwoo Mareng, Handong University
  • Jason LeBrun, U. Calif. Davis
  • Jon Froelich, U Washington
  • Héctor Flores, U Chile
  • Yun-jin Cho, Handong University
  • Koji Yutani, U Toronto
  • Michael Massimi, U Toronto
  • Ville Tuulos, Nokia and HIIT
  • Péter Boda, Nokia Reserch Center Helsinki
  • Petteri Nurmi, HIIT
  • Patrik Floréen, HIIT

Background

The goal of the workshop is to present and discuss work towards creating more intelligent interfaces, which require less intentional user inputs. That is, we want mobile device interfaces and usage patterns that are proactive, adaptable, and context-aware. These goals can be achieved via research into interaction methods, statistical modeling of usage patterns, and real world testing.

Some definitions:

  • user modeling - capturing the beliefs, intentions, goals of users in analytical models.
  • interaction - studying two-way communications between entities (human-computer, computer-computer)
  • experience - performing tests to find the relations between the desired experience, expected experience, and actual interaction experience.

Discussion process for the workshop

It is the goal of the workshop to create new research questions for this discipline, as well as to suggest some new guidelines for answering existing research questions.

Key questions for the workshop:

  • Is a multidisciplinary approach necessary to truly improve user experience?
  • What are main research problems with mobile user experience?
  • What are main obstacles to progress?
  • Which applications will be the first to reach market maturity?
  • What is the role of industry?

A summary of the discussion surrounding these questions can be found on the IMUx Wiki