Involving users in the design of multimodal mobile applications

We developed the MODE framework to aid us in the design and evaluation of three multimodal mobile applications. The reason we developed our own framework was two-fold. Firstly, users have encountered problems when trying to use existing applications on their mobile phones complaining that they find them difficult to access and use. Secondly, we were building quite complex mobile applications and we were building into these applications multimodality. We realized, therefore, that it was vital that we think of ways in which we could involve users throughout the design process in order to build more user centered applications. The second phase of the MODE framework for the design and evaluation of multimodal mobile applications is presented in this paper