Designing for totality of mobile and non-mobile interaction: a case study

The focus of the project is to design for mobile needs of users to support activities that closely relate to non-mobile contexts. We selected the real estate industry for a case study and conducted an in-depth research to gain a deeper understanding of the office (non-mobile) and mobile work environments of realtors and the social context of interaction with their clients. We identified some unique challenges that such a mixed work environment proposes. Recording contextual data in the mobile environment and streamlining it with huge amount of other related unorganized information in the non-mobile environment was identified as the main challenge. We designed an integrated system of a web-based application "REMAP" (for information analysis) and a mobile device "NotePod" (for information capture). The paper talks about some of the main research and findings, the design concept proposed, and finally some lessons learnt that we could extend to similar mixed contexts.