Intra-European family migration has extended the realm in which families live and work in Europe. This paper joins a limited number of recent attempts to analyse family migration using a children-in-families approach (Bushin 2009). In contrast to existing studies on this theme, our focus is on children's migration decision-making, experiences of step-migration and experiences of separation from parents during processes of intra-European family migration. Little is known about children's views and experiences of step-migration and separation from their parent(s) during family migration. Such experiences have implications for the spatial and temporal construction of family and childhood in Europe, where transnational mobility is increasing. This paper discusses children's experiences of separation in two research contexts, Scotland and the Republic of Ireland, to illustrate common features of the phenomena. The paper analyses family relationships relevant to migration decisions and explains their effects on children's agency, as well as on family integrity itself.

One difficulty for interface design on mobile computers is lack of screen space caused by their small size. This paper describes a small pilot study and two formal experiments that investigate the usability of sonicallyenhanced buttons of different sizes. The underlying hypothesis being that presenting information about the buttons in sound would increase their usability and allow their size to be reduced. An experimental interface was created that ran on a 3Com Palm III mobile computer and used a simple calculator-style interface to enter data. The buttons of the calculator were changed in size between 4x4, 8x8 and 16x16 pixels and used a range of different types of sound from basic to complex. Results showed that sounds significantly improved usability for both standard and small button sizes -more data could be entered with sonically-enhanced buttons and subjective workload reduced. More sophisticated sounds that presented more information about the buttons were shown to be more effective than the standard Palm III sounds. The results showed that if sound was added to buttons then they could be reduced in size from 16x16 to 8x8 pixels without much loss in quantitative performance. This reduction in size, however, caused a significant increase in subjective workload. Results also showed that when a mobile device was used in a realistic situation (whilst walking outside) usability was significantly reduced (with increased workload and less data entered) than when used in a usability laboratory. These studies show that sound can be beneficial for usability and that care must be taken to do testing in realistic environments to get a good measure of mobile device usability.

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This paper reports two experiments relating to the design of Tactons (or tactile icons

We present a study investigating the use of vibrotactile feedback for touch-screen keyboards on PDAs. Such keyboards are hard to use when mobile as keys are very small. We conducted a laboratory study comparing standard buttons to ones with tactile feedback added. Results showed that with tactile feedback users entered significantly more text, made fewer errors and corrected more of the errors they did make. We ran the study again with users seated on an underground train to see if the positive effects transferred to realistic use. There were fewer beneficial effects, with only the number of errors corrected significantly improved by the tactile feedback. However, we found strong subjective feedback in favour of the tactile display. The results suggest that tactile feedback has a key role to play in improving interactions with touch screens.