Its Thursday night and I just finished my second position paper for this class. I am looking at wireless networking and the impact that has on information retrieval from all sorts of devices like Cell Phones and PDAs. I found an interesting article that talked about the social barriers to using wireless information retrieval. It was pretty well written, and identified seven barriers that need to be taken into account when designing an interface. The two I particularly liked dealt with self-image and what we are willing to carry around with us. The first barrier was that since we will likely be collecting this data in a public place, we will not allow ourselves to look foolish with lots of unusual gestures needed to retrieve the data (kind of a "cool" factor). The second issue has to do with a much higher degree of intolerance for feature creep in devices I have to carry around with me. Users are much more likely to tolerate a number of unused features on their desktop machines since there is so much more power and speed on a desktop. When we are accessing the web on a cell phone (with limited screen space and low bandwidth) unnecessary features are much less likely to be tolerated. It was an interesting article.

That's about it from here - now it's on to another paper that is due next week (a GOMS analysis). Have a good weekend.

John