Category Archives: Design

SXSW 2007: Mobile Application Design Challenges and Tips

Panel: Kevin Cheng (Yahoo!), Matt Jones (Nokia), Simon King (Yahoo! Research Berkeley), John Poisson (Tiny Pictures Inc/RADAR.NET), Anita Wilhelm (Caterpillar Mobile).

MJ: User research and prototyping for mobile is incredibly important and difficult. The mobile experience is difference when it is in your hand. The sooner you can get a sketch on a block of wood or something in people’s hands is the most important. Post-it notes on blocks of wood. Some Flash Lite code: XML representation of screen flow. People react very differently when it is in their hand.

AW: The most successful method I’ve had is paper. In some cases with foamcore so people could push buttons. Diary study with a brick to see what they would want to do with that brick.

KC: How is mobile design different than web design?

SK: Much more fragmented and divided attention situations. 20 seconds at time.

KC: What sort of metrics do you use?

JP: Clicks are gold in mobile space. Saving clicks makes sense. We even used .net because it was easier than .com

SK: We do a lot with click tracking too. Number of clicks are used to fine tune. It is harder to maintain state: no deeply nested menus or breadcrumbs.

AW: Session time is important: 3-5 seconds is successful. Designing for mobile is about breaking up an application into small steps. Keep minds available for whatever else they are doing.

KC: How do you deal with interruptions?

AW: Graceful failure. Design for interruptions so they can be resumed.

JP: Very different than designing for desktop. Very discreet tasks. Never going to go through a long string of actions.

MJ: Always know where your default cursor position is. Don’t put anything complicated in a dialog! Always give people a positive path through the application using the defaults.

Q: Who is actually using mobile applications? I don’t believe many people know you can send a text message via email.

JP: That’s true. But time and again, even people who have a minimal exposure to phone functionality can learn it easily. Needs to be explained to users in the right orders and the right sequence. And once they learn the pattern they can do it.

Q: You have all these given inputs and outputs on mobile. If you are thinking about solving a user goal, what makes you choose one or the other?

SK: Depends on what you need to do. SMS can be limiting. It depends on the problem you have to solve. One issue is integrating with the other applications on the phone. Need to consider target platform.

JP: Need to solve a particular problem.

AW: Need to consider the experience. You can customize outputs for that application. If you can put it all into one centralized location, it makes it more of one experience.

SK: This also makes it faster.

MJ: Look at a service design approach to it. Magic tablets and magic clouds that follow them around. Need to look in a human-centered way about the service.

KC: At Nokia, how much of your time is spent designing the entire experience around the phone?

MJ: More and more. Particularly in the area I work in. The interaction between the cloud and the little mobile thing. Not just about going through this tiny post-it note. How we decide what to expose when. Two most exciting things is mobile version of Apache server–makes the relationship different. Python for S60 is also very interesting for rapidly making new web services. A wonderful pattern is emerging as mobile as stubmaker. “This is very interesting to me” then going back later and filling in that stub. You can do that with SMS or whatever.

Q: Flash Lite isn’t supported on most phones. Emulators aren’t great. How do you test an app on a million different phones?

SK: Excellent prototyping tool, but not good for actual applications.

JK: It simply isn’t the case you can write one and use anywhere. Alternative is put it out there.

SK: Pay someone to test it for you.

AW: Number of companies that will test online.

MJ: If you test the edge cases, you are 70% good.

AW: Certain groups of devices you can test one or two from a group.

JP: Make it work on one or two categories very well.

Q: What is your strategy for getting your applications used and on people’s handsets? Do you go on the carrier on-deck or off-deck?

AW: Have both off-deck and on-deck distribution for scannr. Decision is in the business deals and monitesation. On-deck has more distribution channels and easier billing for services. But it is a pain. Off-deck is much easier and lets you control the experience better.

JP: Some different strategies for distribution. We used the WAP experience, especially for outside the US. Distributing the app via WAP site.

KC: Off-deck means you also don’t have to negotiate with all these carriers, right?

JP: Yes. Put it out there and build demand.

AW: Ecosystem of mobile is much harder than web. You need a tiered system: give users what they can use. Multiple versions: free version, deck version, etc.

Q: What do think about browser development in the phones?

SK: Opera browser rules. Makes WAP much less cool.

JP: Drinking the ocean with a spoon.

MJ: Need to think about the partial attention.

KC: Need two different designs?

MJ: Need a sweet spot between the two. Most websites are pairing themselves down anyway.

Q: Do you have any favorite resources for design patterns? Books, etc.

MJ: Sound and haptic feedback are also important, by the way.

SK: There aren’t any.

Q: Strategies for open access to things on the phone?

MJ: We’re actually trying to open up more. It’s becoming baked in to things like the S60.

SK: Another company is to keep an eye on is Open Moko an open hardware and software platform.

JP: Fair amount of pushback from carriers against openness.

MJ: Carriers in Europe and Asia are understanding more open = more money. Becoming “The Proud Pipe” with only a little added value.

Q: Is there a standard email SMS back-end?

AW: Can’t send an SMS to an email in the states.

JP: Can’t programatically send out SMSs to the phone. And the answer to the question is no. It’s a never-ending battle.

AW: Startups are trying to go around the carriers, but carriers are pushing back.

KC: We’re out of time…

Judge’s Pick: Zimmertwins.com

Last fall, I was one of the judges for How Magazine’s Design Competition. The issue with the winners is now on stands. I tried to inject a little more interaction design perspective into the competition, so that it wasn’t only focused on the shiny-shiny. (Decide for yourself how successful that was…)

My judge’s pick was a really fun site for a Canadian animated TV Show that I’ve never seen: zimmertwins.com. I really enjoyed the Make a Movie application, which was one of the best uses of Flash I’ve seen in a long time. Fiona really enjoyed it too, and since she is more of the target audience than I am, I thought it was a real success.

UX Intensive!

Adaptive Path has put together a new conference that should be of interest to intermediate and advanced practitioners of interaction design (and any sort of UX design, really): UX Intensive, which will debut in Chicago in April.

Along with my colleague Kim Lenox, I’m teaching the Interaction Design Day, which has some awesome topics that have been really interesting (and challenging) to put together, namely:

  • Turning research findings into interaction design concepts
  • Making better interaction design decisions
  • Improving your ability to design suites of applications and extend interaction design languages across platforms
  • Fixing inherited (and broken) products
  • Communicating your designs throughout an organization
  • Better tools for productive team-building and collaboration

The first workshop is in Chi-town on April 25th. Hope to see some of you there! Oh, and don’t forget to use my discount code FODS for 15% off!

Happy 6th Anniversary, Adaptive Path

Seven people started Adaptive Path on the auspicious date of 3-2-01. Now, six years and 20-some-odd employees later, we’re celebrating our 6th anniversary. Join us tonight for the infamous taco truck and a selection of our greatest prom pictures (you can get one taken too!). RSVP on Upcoming. I’m flying from Helsinki to be there (fresh off the plane no less!), so you have no excuse!

My 2007 SXSW Schedule

Once again, I am headed to SXSW Interactive (I’m not cool enough too busy to stick around for Music). I hope to hang out with old friends and new, so please come find me (and go to my session):

Saturday
I’ll arrive just in time for Opening Night Happy Hour. I will probably have to attend the frog design opening party from 8-10. Hopefully it will be better than last year, but I doubt it. The real event of the night will be 8-Bit starting at 10 hosted by our upstairs pals Satisfaction.

Sunday
I’m probably going to start the day (hungover) with Designing for Convergent Devices although I might be tempted by the pissing match that will be Why We Should Ignore Users. I’ll probably take a break after that to get some BBQ and prep for my session Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas. After which I’ll be signing some books at the SXSW Bookstore. That night, I will definitely be catching DJ Mel again at the Web Awards After Party at one of my favorite Austin bars, Club DeVille. But not at the expense of missing What Made Milwaukee Famous at Ben Brown’s shindig from 10-2. If I’m cool enough I might once again make it back to Ben’s house for the after party.

Monday
Let’s be honest: after Sunday, there is no way I am getting up early or will be functioning Monday morning. I’ll probably get there in time for what I hope is a great mobile panel: Mobile Application Design Tips and Tricks. I’ll probably head out for Tex Mex lunch and some Mexican Vanilla ice cream, then return in the late afternoon for The Death of the Desktop. I’ll go drink some of Yahoo’s purple booze at Yahoo’s Bar Tab before crashing the The Great British Booze Up to hang with my Limey friends. My last scheduled event before my liver finally gives out is South by Northwest.

Tuesday
Return home. Recover.

My guess is this will be my last SXSW for a while, as my career and interests slowly drift away from (at least pure) web properties. But you never know…

Review: Designing the Mobile User Experience

I was fortunate to get an advance copy of Barbara Ballard’s Designing the Mobile User Experience. In general, it is well-written, authoritative, and a boon to interaction designers working (or better, starting to work) in mobile. While I’m not sure this book alone will really enable you to design mobile user experience, it is a good introduction and overview of the mobile space.

It’s great that, rather than dive immediately into application design, Ballard spends the second chapter on the needs and contexts of users. I like that her definition of “mobile” has nothing to do with the device, but is instead a characteristic of the user. It’s the user that is mobile and is carrying the device. I was particularly drawn to the idea of user “microcontexts:” the social context, the physical environment, the application, and the interpersonal context of whom the user is interacting with all come into play.

Although the section on international usage patterns is good (albeit incomplete: no Korea or India?), Ballard makes some judgement calls that may only be true in the West. She says, for instance, that mobile devices being used by more than one person are rare. In some parts of Africa and, I believe, Indonesia, it is actually common. Families own sets of mobile phones and individuals simply take whichever one is charged and ready.

Ballard presents a number of different frameworks, models, and dissections that are useful for understanding the fractured nature of the mobile space. She presents a taxonomy of devices, a device hierarchy chart, the anatomy of Personal Computing Devices (PCD), and a method for selecting the device’s technology/platform (something interaction designers rarely get to do).

Designers, especially those new to mobile, will likely find the chapter on Mobile Design Principles particularly insightful, although here (like in other parts of the book) the technical jargon gets thick and becomes geared towards more developer types.

For designers of a certain ilk, the meatiest part of the book will be Chapter 6 on Mobile UI Design Patterns. (I personally find patterns hard to put into practice, but that’s another story.) Missing from some patterns is an accompanying image of the pattern, however, which makes some patterns hard to understand. Images of the patterns in actual use in addition to wireframe-like figures would have been nice. Designers who are into patterns might also checking out Ballard’s Mobile UI Design Patterns Wiki.

I was personally more interested in Chapter 7, strangely titled Graphic and Media Design. I’d call it, well, Interface Design. Using the brilliant metaphor of portrait miniatures, Ballard offers some really interesting advice for designing UIs for the small screen, such as that designers might want to replicate some of the characteristics of amateur art in their designs: no attention paid to the background, close cropping, and to play with perspective. Some color plates and examples of these practices on mobile devices would have helped this chapter.

Chapter 8, an overview of industry players, is probably crucial to any understanding of mobile even though for anyone with experience, this chapter contains very little insight. It’s also an industry that changes rapidly (although not rapidly enough in some cases). Likewise, chapter 9, on Research and Design, interaction designers will probably find puzzling and dated, springing from a very HCI/usability approach. A complementary book–and indeed, almost the inverse of this book–is Mobile Interaction Design, which I would recommend to really dig into interaction design for mobile. What’s missing from Ballard’s book is well covered there, and visa versa. I’d recommend the two books be read together (if you can afford the hefty price tags on both: $75 for this book, $60 for the other. Why are these books so expensive??)

As a final note, it will be interesting to see how the industry shifts (if at all) when the iPhone debuts in June. And how those shifts will affect this book. Very little is mentioned here of gestures, for example, and the iPhone makes some use of those, not to mention new haptic paradigms like multi-touch. Mobile design is changing rapidly and it is tough for any book to keep up.

The Cult of Innovation

I am as pleased as Punch to announce that I am in the March 5, 2007 print edition of BusinessWeek (the one with “Customer Service Champs” on the cover) with an editorial called The Cult of Innovation. An excerpt:

Innovation is traditionally understood as a combination of insight and invention, with insight being the “Aha!” moment and invention being the company’s muscle to make it happen. This is all well and good, but one crucial aspect of the definition is missing: the ability to judge the inspiration and determine whether it is worthwhile to spend the company’s resources on the invention. Without this judgment, innovation is just The New, and new isn’t always better. It’s a louder sizzle, not a juicier steak. For innovation to be truly important, it needs to resonate with consumers. Insights need to be derived from the unmet needs and desires of people, not simply the company’s feeling that it needs to innovate.

Update: This is no longer premium content, so the link now points to the free version!

From Parsimony to Bounty (and Back Again)

I have this week off, and one of the chores I’m doing is that I’m ripping all my old Elvis Costello CDs to MP3s. When I first got iTunes, I did this for selected tracks off each album–I knew I had only (only!) 20 gigs or so to hold my music. But now, with a new 160g MacBook Pro and an 80g iPod…well, I no longer only have to have just some of my collection. I can pretty much have every album I’ve ever owned and then some. And then double that again.

It’s odd how behavior changes when one constraint (in this case, memory storage) vanishes. What was once a precious commodity becomes cheap and available, and all of a sudden, people act differently. We’ve seen this time and time again with computers of course, as processor speed and memory become faster and larger, but it also happens all the time away from the digital as well. Economists have known this for some time, of course, with behavioral finance. You can observe it in both small and big gestures. Despite the warnings, I used to top off my car’s gas tank at the pump. Once gas hit $2.50 a gallon in the US, I stopped doing that little gesture. It also, on a large scale, stopped many from taking car and plane trips.

At MX last week, Adam Richardson talked about constraints using the metaphor of walls: some are load-bearing and cannot be moved; others are for decoration. I’d like to add that, over time, some walls can change from load-bearing to decoration (like my hard drive’s memory) and visa versa (gasoline, once cheap, is now an impediment).

Learning (Interaction Design) from Las Vegas

When it was announced last year that the 2007 IA Summit was going to be in Las Vegas, Bill DeRouchey had the great idea that, since we seldom get a couple hundred user experience designers in Sin City, we should do something based on the city itself. This is when I came on board. Sitting on my wish list was a book I’d been meaning to read for a while: Learning from Las Vegas. When I was in Portland last summer, I found it at Powells and devoured it in a few hours.

As I read, one thing became clear to me: how architects thought of Las Vegas in the 1960s is how interaction designers think of MySpace now. The “ugly” architecture of Vegas is like the “ugly” functionality of MySpace. And yet, there is a lot of stuff to be learned from Las Vegas (and thus from MySpace): designing for the shape of action, making use of the ordinary, what role taste has in design, and the role of class in design.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve put together a short presentation on this topic that I’m going to give first at SXSW Interactive on Sunday, March 11 at 3:30. Then, with Bill and Steve Portigal, we’ll be leading a full-day workshop Learning from Las Vegas: Insights from the Ordinary and the Extraordinary at the IA Summit on Thursday, March 22. I’ll be presenting again (Why to Observe), then Bill and Steve talk about What to Observe and How to Observe It (respectively). We’ll spend a good part of the day doing observations at three different (and stylistically varied) casinos, then come back together at the end of the day to create our insights from the ordinary and the extraordinary.

I hope you’ll come out for one or both!

Update: Despite there being a lot of enthusiasm about the one-day workshop, there weren’t enough actual attendees for it, so the Summit Committee has decided to cancel it. Which is a shame, because it means I’m not headed to Vega$ now and I had been looking forward to this day for nearly a year. Oh well.