“I must say that it’s been surprisingly difficult, in various conversations with folks not immersed in the IxD space, to get across the essential distinction between context-aware applications and location-based services (LBS)...Mac Funamizu has actually nailed two separate things here. The first demonstrates precisely what I, at least, mean when I use the words “context awareâ€: but for some residual core of basic functionality, the device’s capabilities and available interface modalities at any given moment are largely if not entirely determined by the other networked objects around it. If you pair the device with a text, it’s a reader; at the checkstand, it provides a friendly POS interface; aimed at the skyline, it augments reality.”
Link: Worth a thousand words, etc. (speedbird.wordpress.com)
“Like any remote, the designers were adamant about keeping the remote’s button layout as simple as possible. But with the DVR’s numerous features, the designers needed to create lots of extra buttons. To keep things straight, each button needed to have a distinctive feel, giving the ability to control the remote without even looking at it, which Newby described as a “key Braille-ability” surprisingly helped by the “blank finger parking spots between keys” that were equally important.”
Link: Story of a Peanut: The TiVo Remote’s Untold Past, Present and Future (gizmodo.com)
I liked this nugget in Jakob Neilsen’s review of the ten best application UIs for the year.
“Although dedicated mobile apps are not yet good enough to win in their own right, it was striking how many of this year’s winners have a mobile component. Mobile is definitively the trend to watch for next year, and any application owner should think hard about whether and how to add mobile features in 2009.”
Link: Year’s 10 Best Application UIs (useit.com)
Back from a fantastic week and a bit in Mexico I’m slowly catching up on things. I liked Marek’s piece about compulsion. I don’t like the idea of ‘compulsion’ per se, but acknowledgment of the emotional elements at play is nice.
“The iPhone is a great example of how to move from capability and compulsion. There are already tens of millions of users out there equipped with Windows Mobile smartphones and high-end products from Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG. All of them are capable of accessing a wealth of additional software and services, but we know from various independent studies that iPhone users are much more likely to utilise additional non-voice services. Where other handset manufacturers provide their users with the raw capabilities, Apple offers users a compelling reason to explore new things.”
Link: Moving from mobile capabilities to mobile compulsion (mobileuserexperience.com)
I started working at Punchcut earlier this year, and we’re continuing to hire folks into our design team to support a growing client roster. I’m having a great time with all the smart folks here, and we’ve got some fantastic clients who are turning to us to generate strategies and designs for next generation mobile experiences. We’re looking for senior interaction designer rock stars to join in the fun right in the heart of downtown San Francisco.
Check out the job description, and also the Punchcut web site.
If you think the gig sounds exciting, please drop me a line.
Interesting in that it’s in the Times.
“As it turns out, Mr. Jobs may well have understated the quality of the iPhone Web experience. Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays, which routinely have 20-inch or larger screens. It seems counterintuitive, but small really is beautiful.”
Link: On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff (nytimes.com, via)
Aza Raskin write about avoiding modalities.
“What’s wrong with modal overlays? In a word, they are modal: You are either interacting with the content or the overlay. Modal overlays don’t allow you to refer back and forth between two sources of information, or move fluidly between two actions. The second problem with modal overlays are that they are disconnected and disjoint from other overlays—knowing how to access one doesn’t yield a physical sense of how to access another one; they do not scale to give a unified, cohesive interface. ”
Link: Mobile Firefox and Designing Without Modal Overlays (azarask.in)
Putting People First has a translated section of a French report about mobile phone use by teens.
”...for adults the mobile is a hyper-personal device, an intimate black box with data that absolutely need to be protected. For teenagers on the other hand, the mobile is often as little confidential and intimate as their blogs. They are instead identity and exhibition spaces of oneself, with “museum galleries†of photos, ringtones, videos, and music to share with a community of peers: archiving makes only sense if it can be shared.”
Link: French ethnographic study on teens and mobiles (experientia.com)
Francesco Cara from Nokia talks about the mobile ecosystem.
Link: Evolution of the mobile communication ecosystem (liftconference.com)
Nokia’s written up a short article that highlights some examples of what they believe is good design for mobile.
Link: Mobile Design Showcases (nokia.com, via)
July’s Wired tells the story of Android.
“As soon as programmers started playing with the emulator, they saw how big Google’s ambitions were. The company was trying to make programming for a cell phone analogous to programming for a PC or the Web. Coders were told that their applications would have constant access to the Net, not the usual mobile hurry-up-and-wait feel. Working with the cloud — enabling programs to push or pull info to or from the Web — was a must. All Android phones would know where they were at all times, either by tapping into onboard GPS or by cross-referencing cell towers using a proprietary database owned by Google. And applications would be allowed to share information, which at the simplest level meant the kind of copy-and-paste functionality across all programs that cell phones currently lack.”
Link: Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web (wired.com)
Morten Hjerde has taken a long hard look at text input field design.
“Edit-in-place is preferable in most cases. A person can see the context, and the visuals is consistent. Full screen editing is preferable when the user is likely to enter a large amount of text. Predictive text (T9, etc) may only be available in full screen edit.”
Link: The anatomy of a text input field (sender11.typepad.com)
“Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what call you just missed because you couldn’t get to the phone on time. It’s easier to accidentally completely delete a new MMS than to send it.”
Link: The right information, at the right time (littlespringsdesign.com)
