Understanding Interaction with Mobile Devices

This editorial paper introduces an emerging and important area for human-computer interaction research, which concerns interaction with mobile devices. The design of interactive mobile applications should differ from that of traditional desktop applications. To this aim, the paper discusses some concepts and models that help to understand the new challenges as well as recently introduced techniques that can be useful for exploiting the characteristics of these devices. Lastly, tool support for the design of nomadic applications is considered, taking into account the potential contexts of use, with particular attention to the platform features.