Designing for Usability on Handheld Devices

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The chance to develop Open software for handheld devices is currently expanding. The Trolltech Greenphone is well established and recently the OpenMoko project has announced that it will be shipping the first general release phones in October. This is in addition to the many existing platforms that are based on Open software.

However developing usable software for a handheld device gives rise to some unique challenges that are not as keenly felt when developing desktop software. Issues such as limited screen sizes and differences in user input mean that approaches often seen in desktop software simply will not work on a handheld device.

This presentation draws on a combined nine years of experience in developing user interfaces for hand held devices. The focus will be on the type of challenges that are faced, some approaches that will help overcome them and how this can also benefit desktop programing. While the experiences presented will be based on the Qtopia platform developed by Trolltech, it is hoped that all the information will be equally useful to someone developing on other handheld platforms.

Stream: Embedded

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Michael Brasser is a member of the User Interface team for the Qtopia project. He has a background in computational linguistics, looking at how humans and machines can better communicate through (non-machine) language.

Ian Walters has been involved in the development of user interfaces and software for handheld Linux platforms since 2000, initially with Compaq on the iPAQ h3600 and with Trolltech starting in 2001 with the Qtopia project. His involvement in the Qtopia project has mostly focused on the PIM functionality such as access to contacts and appointments, however has also covered general toolkit features, text input methods, database functionality, virtual target environments and a range of work on other handheld applications.