Foreword This book is an innovative study of user experience design and analy - sis for the age of mobile computing and communication. Phones, PDAs, media players, and other devices are ubiquitous platforms for relationship-building, learning, entertainment, commerce, and social- izing. The fi rst generation of mobile studies focused on traditional aspects of user-interface design, human factors, and usability. The coming generation focuses on usefulness and appeal. Content and controls are combined in complex and novel ways. New metaphors, mental models, and navigation combine with changing techniques of interaction and appearance to produce new multi-modal, multi-media, and multi-user forms and formats that concentrate as much on the content as on the controls. Today, the amount of mobile personal content is exploding and is tightly coupled with increasing mobility, personal memories, and daily communications with others. Consum- ers, as well as professionals in academia and industry, are just becom- ing aware of the consequences. This book sets the stage for understanding personal content experi- ence and uncovers the consequent challenges. The authors take a multidisciplinary approach ranging from user-centered design to mobile software development, from information management to thorough analysis of media, context, and metadata from the consumer point of view. The book is among the fi rst of its kind to consider the full range of issues, from software architecture to end-user needs for mobile personal content. The authors introduce and explore issues such as context capture, user interfaces for continuous mobile use, user-interface design for mobile media applications, complex metadata, virtual communities, and ontologies. The also discuss user interactions and behavioral pat- terns with personal content, resulting in a lifecycle model for analyzing media devices, services, applications, and user interfaces. Finally, they examine personal content from a number of viewpoints and present a mobile prototype software framework for personal content manage- ment, complete with extensible ontologies, that realizes the require- ments of an enjoyable personal-content experience. Consequently, the book contains both theory, in the form of frameworks and models, and practice, such as hands-on examples, application concepts, and soft- ware architecture descriptions.