The WORKPAD user interface and methodology: developing smart and effective mobile applications for emergency operators

In complex emergency/disaster scenarios, teams from various emergency-response organizations collaborate in order to achieve a common goal. The use of smart mobile devices and applications in these scenarios can improve this collaboration dynamically; and poses interesting challenges, such as user' mental attention, small screen size, unavailability of reliable network, reduced power, and battery consumption. So, to design and develop interactive applications to be used in mobile and pervasive scenarios requires novel methodologies which combine user-centred design approaches and software engineering approaches tailed for distributed architectures. In this paper, we outline the methodology, adopted successfully in the European WORKPAD project, and describe the work done from getting the requirements to developing the interface of the desired system.