Towards More Usable Mobile Application Development

We define more usable mobile applications as those that are human-centred, pro-active, and shield users from the technical and technological implementations. This paper presents the results of our attempt in designing and developing more usable mobile applications through the integration of various mobile and wireless technologies and the adoption of context-aware computing. We present our context-grid framework for the effective management of context information and implementation of context-awareness in mobile applications. Two context-aware mobile system prototypes, context-aware retail system (CARS) and Sentosa X³, are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and framework