Notes on Patrick Baudisch's lecture on small screens

Friday I attended Patrick Baudisch's talk entitled Making sense of small screens. I'll provide references for a number of interesting points but there is one point where I disagree with him. Baudisch does an excellent job of systematically explore HCI technics for small handset screens. However, he feels this will be the only device the masses will have access too. His scenarios focused on trying to do PC activities (e.g., reading news, spreadsheets, etc) on the handset.

Alex de Carvalho recently posted an article outlining tasks people want to perform on the handset. It was called Personifying the mobile device. This jives with successful scenarios I am experiencing and learning from others.

Here is a list for some technics he discussed. There are the associated publications and project

• Summary Thumbnails. This is a technic for displaying webpages on handsets. Present thumbnails on handsets which are structurally the same as they appear on the desktop.
• Collapse-to-Zoom: Viewing Web Pages on Small Screen Devices by Interactively Removing Irrelevant Content.
  
• Fisheye technics which shrink the document to fit on the screen. Then magnify the point of interest.
• The Halo project used off-screen technics help users navigate on a map.
• Multiblending: displaying overlapping windows simultaneously without the drawbacks of alpha blending.

-jk