This paper presents a set of lessons that resulted from the design process of several mobile applications. It starts by addressing the difficulties that emerged through the data gathering, prototyping and evaluation stages also stressing the absence of adequate techniques and methods to support these activities. We explain how these problems and challenges were solved and how they can be applied in other domains and future projects. As a result, we provide a set of guidelines for designers to apply on the development and design of mobile applications and user interfaces. The paper also addresses three case studies in which these guidelines and procedures were validated, stressing their contributions and results.

Mobile interaction design introduces added challenges when compared with the usual design process for fixed technologies. In particular, it benefits greatly from the ability to take the design process out of the lab, creating, designing and evaluating applications within their natural usage context. However, this process requires new and deeply refined approaches to traditional techniques which are demanding and still avoided by designers. This paper presents a tool that overcomes some of these issues by offering means to support in-situ design. The tool supports prototyping of mobile applications and user interfaces on real scenarios, also providing evaluation features that allow the logging and analysis of usage information. We describe the tool's concept, goals and design implications, focusing, in particular, its out-on-the-field, in-situ design and prototyping features.

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This paper introduces a set of concepts for usercentered design methodologies that apply to mobile and multi-device applications. It ranges from initial data gathering and specification processes to the creation of low-fidelity prototypes and their evaluation. The focus is given to usability issues of ubiquitous, context and ambient intelligent applications. The paper's main contributions are (1) the description of our findings on how to engage on the early stage prototyping process, involving mobility; (2) a set of details that need to be taken into consideration so that the design and prototyping process is successful; (3) a set of guidelines on how to evaluate mobile applications on their context of use at an early design stage and (4) a rapid prototyping framework which allows designers to quickly move from their hand-drawn sketches to semi-functional software prototypes, particularly for PDAs and Smart phones.

In this paper we present a software framework which supports the construction of mixed-fidelity (from sketch-based to software) prototypes for mobile devices. The framework is available for desktop computers and mobile devices (e.g., PDAs, Smartphones). It operates with low-fidelity sketch based prototypes or mid to high-fidelity prototypes with some range of functionality, providing several dimensions of customization (e.g., visual components, audio/video files, navigation, behavior) and targeting specific usability concerns. Furthermore, it allows designers and users to test the prototypes on actual devices, gathering usage information, both passively (e.g., logging) and actively (e.g., questionnaires/Experience Sampling). Overall, it conveys common prototyping procedures with effective data gathering methods that can be used on ubiquitous scenarios supporting in-situ prototyping and participatory design on-the-go. We address the framework's features and its contributions to the design and evaluation of applications for mobile devices and the field of mobile interaction design, presenting real-life case studies and results.

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Mobile devices have shown to be useful tools in supporting various procedures and therapy approaches for different purposes. However, when applied to children, particular care has to be taken, considering both their abilities and their acceptance towards the used approaches. In this paper we present mobile applications, designed specifically for children and young patients, aiming at supporting fear therapy procedures. The software was developed following a user centered design approach and offers users an intuitive and metaphor based interaction paradigm that overcomes the paper-based counterpart's limitations. We describe the design process, the software and the results that we have obtained during an exploratory trial study.