Comments on: Mobile Apps under Duress: User Interface Guidelines

By: Nathan and his Open Ideals » ITP2800: Designing Mobile Apps for Crisis Situations

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 22:22:34 +0000

[...] Mobile Smartphone Applications Used Under Duress”, with the ideas and content coming from an earlier blog post / crowd-sourced effort on this [...]

By: epiraces

epiraces — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 06:13:53 +0000

Great. This list and notes are getting quite good.

One that may be missing and can be of relevance is having a night mode. Screens may be to bright for its night use, and sometimes this may compromise security/safety. Normally it will switch the background color to black and use red/blue/green for text.

In terms of UI, and this may be exclusively out of personal experience, persistent tabbed browsing can provide some benefits. Another path could be sliding panels to send loading apps to the background.

Anyway, will post other ideas if they come.

By: epiraces

epiraces — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 01:13:53 +0000

By: lisatree

lisatree — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:12:37 +0000

this kind of interface would be excellent for schools, use of mobile tools by students. under duress is probably an apt description

By: tariqkhokhar

tariqkhokhar — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:11:17 +0000

1. Privacy and anonymity: Unless specifically otherwise, have you taken adequate steps to safeguard the privacy of the individuals you are collecting data about? Are you sending data over the operator's mobile network in an encrypted format? Where will the data ultimately go to and be held?

2. Steganography: You might not want to be seen to be doing any kind of data collection. Can the application and data be hidden? Can the mobile device you're using just look like your personal phone?

3. Separate data from app: I agree that keeping data stored/backed up on something like and SD card is very important but makes the encryption element potentially more important. Consider keeping the configured application & state stored on the SD card too - i.e. you can rapidly swap to a "warm spare" device is the first fails or is compromised.

4. Simulation / Training / Documentation: recognise that if the application is going to be used by agencies in a relief situation, they are going to want to field trial the heck out of it, conduct training on it and provide documentation. Put effort into supporting this.