Patrick Baudisch

TITLE
Making sense on SMALL SCREENS

ABSTRACT
Today’s ‘smart’ cell phones are designed to allow users to perform a set of 
comparably simple tasks, such as reproducing driving directions or recalling 
bookmarked websites. More demanding variants of the same activities, such as 
route planning or the interactive exploration of the web, on the other hand, 
have received only limited or no support. And why should they--it is more
convenient for users to perform these activities on their PCs to then simply
upload the results to the device.

This, of course, assumes that users have access to a PC. In most cases, however, 
this assumption is wrong. There are 1.5 billion cell phones worldwide, but only 
400 million PCs. The majority of phone users live in fact outside the western 
world. For many of them the phone is the first and only digital device they own.

In this talk I argue that these phones could be the opportunity to get access 
to the functionality of a networked computer and to participate in the digital 
life of the first world. I am addressing this scenario from a human-computer
interaction perspective. How can we display complex documents on displays the
size of a stamp? How can users interact with such documents? I am presenting a
selection of techniques: ‘halo’ helps users perform spatial  reasoning on
large maps; ‘summary thumbnails’ and ‘collapse-to-zoom’ allow users  to make
sense of web pages by compressing them to the size of the phone screen.

Slides: http://patrickbaudisch.com/publications/2005-Baudisch-SmallScreens.ppt
More information: http://patrickbaudisch.com/projects 
Bio: http://patrickbaudisch.com/biography