A User-Centric Communication Model for Mobile Web

摘要

Nowadays, the mobile users benefit from a wide variety of communication services. Further than the traditional telecom services, the social media services provide new paradigms for people interaction. They enable users to form communities around common interests and stay in contact with each other. Combined with the possibilities of actual smartphones providing processing power running advanced operating systems, together with sophisticated and intuitive user interfaces, this should lead to a completely new-revisited communication experience. Despite all these advantages, we paradoxically notice that a rich communication process is challenging because it requires switching between the different contacts lists to find the target friend as well as between social media to discover the right communication mean to use in the current situation. The direct consequence of this awkward practice is a serious underuse of these new communication capabilities together with a prejudicial impact on the concerned economical actors.The main reason comes from the underlying communication model inherited from the traditional telco area and originally organized around one main communication mean, namely the telephone call. This outdated model still constitutes the fundamental communication paradigm structuring the terminal user interface. In this paper we propose a new communication model that simplifies the interaction between a mobile user and its friends. It consists in integrating information about the friends and the available services in a single environment easy to use. On the basis of this model, we propose new functionalities that can improve the quality of experience when using the actual social media.