If I paid a dollar every time Horace Luke of HTC says ‘simple’ in this product launch I’d be down about $132. Hyperbole aside, it’s an interesting piece of design.
Demo of the overall experience:
Demo of the the web experience:
Link: YouTube – HTC TouchFLO 3D Video on HTC Diamond (youtube.com, via)
Cool stuff.
“I wanted to try to take advantage of spatial reasoning and spatial memory to make it easier to find and navigate stuff. Let the user see the scope of information available. Start by showing the big picture. When it makes sense, let it behave more like real-world objects. You can normally pick up objects where you left them off. They don’t move when you are not watching, something digital objects often do. (Insert your favorite joke about spouse here.) Over the last couple hundred thousand years our brains has developed a fantastic ability to take in and store where stuff is in our immediate surroundings. Since mobile screens are a part of our immediate surroundings, we should try to take advantage of this ability. It might sometimes make user interfaces a bit less confusing.”
Link: Flat Music Player version 2 (sender11.typepad.com)
A slightly interesting article about innovation at Nokia is accompanied by some fun user-generated concept phones from their research.
Link: Nokia’s Dream Phones (businessweek.com)
In the last three years everything and nothing has changed.
User experience design for the mobile life was a murmur in 2005. It was barely audible in the world of business magazines and almost untalked about in all but the most obscure design circles. Today it’s hard not to overhear the growing cacophony, in conferences, magazines, the news and elsewhere.
But beyond conversation, not that much has actually changed. The devices we carry in our hands are still using increasingly overburdened interaction paradigms, and only slowly are truly new services and capabilities being used in the wild.
This blog turned three today. It’s amazing to me how much louder the conversation has become; over the next three years I’m looking forward to turning more of those conversations into reality.
Marek Pawlowski write about one of the topics at this year’s MEX conference: fashion.
“It may be limited to the high-end of the mobile market, but Vertu is a great example of two very important techniques which are applicable at all levels: total experience planning and customer involvement. The Vertu experience extends across the hardware, software, services and retail environment. At the same time, it involves its customers directly in the product development process, producing customised handsets and allowing customers to actually see how their device is built.
“These principles may manifest themselves in different ways at different levels of the pricing scale, but the fundamentals remain the same. A successful manufacturer must be able to see its products in the wider context of a user’s lifestyle and must structure its development process to respond quickly to the needs of individual customers.
“Perhaps this is indicative of manufacturers following ‘fashion’ or becoming ’style-orientated’, or perhaps it is just good user experience practice?”
Link: Is fashion a stronger motivator than functionality? (mobileuserexperience.com)
Some interesting discussion about mobile UX at Over the Air, via Brian Fling’s resurrected Mobile Design blog.
Book about how mobile communication devices are changing social relationships.
“The message of this book is simple: the mobile phone strengthens social bonds among family and friends. With a traditional land-line telephone, we place calls to a location and ask hopefully if someone is “there”; with a mobile phone, we have instant and perpetual access to friends and family regardless of where they are. But when we are engaged in these intimate conversations with absent friends, what happens to our relationship with the people who are actually in the same room with us?
“In New Tech, New Ties, Rich Ling examines how the mobile telephone affects both kinds of interactions—those mediated by mobile communication and those that are face to face. Ling finds that through the use of various social rituals the mobile telephone strengthens social ties within the circle of friends and family—sometimes at the expense of interaction with those who are physically present—and creates what he calls “bounded solidarity.”
“Ling argues that mobile communication helps to engender and develop social cohesion within the family and the peer group. Drawing on the work of Emile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins, Ling shows that ritual interaction is a catalyst for the development of social bonding. From this perspective, he examines how mobile communication affects face-to-face ritual situations and how ritual is used in interaction mediated by mobile communication. He looks at the evidence, including interviews and observations from around the world, that documents the effect of mobile communication on social bonding and also examines some of the other possibly problematic issues raised by tighter social cohesion in small groups.”
Link: New Tech, New Ties: How Mobile Communication Is Reshaping Social Cohesion (amazon.com, via)
Conference about the mobile web being held in London this June.
Link: Mobile Web 2.0 Summit (mobilewebsummit.com, via)
I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1. Please let me know if you have any troubles; this is a fairly significant upgrade and I’m not 100% sure everything’s working as it should. Thanks!
MEX is hosting a design competition of sorts – encouraging people to showcase design ideas (or new products) for mobile. Here are some of them.
The Blind Phone concept seems to a bit of a dexterity obstacle course – I’m not sure how you could dial with a pinky finger and keep a decent grip on the device:
“The Blind Phone is aimed at filling a niche requirement for blind and partially sighted people. A phone designed from the ground up around the needs of a restricted sight person.”
Link: BSR Blind Phone
Delta deals with the particularly North American obsession with having full keyboards on devices. It has F keys, and I’ll leave it at that:
“At the heart of a Delta II equipped mobile phone is a patented, modified QWERTY button layout that is simple, elegant, and brutally effective. The buttons are large enough to easily read and far enough apart to comfortably press, even for people with large hands. The ingenious button layout takes advantage of the user’s motor memory and PC (QWERTY) keyboard typing experience. The result is new users typing a speedy 20 to 30+ WPM in less than 5 minutes; on single-hand operation mobile phones no larger than a business card – previously this was unheard of.”
Link: Finest Mobile Phone Keypad in the World
Motionized looks like fun:
“By using the movement of the handset to enable users to browse menus, pan and zoom within images, navigate web pages or play games, the Motionized handset introduces a breakthrough in user experience.”
Link: Motionized™ – using the phone’s camera to enable a new UI
Slide it (like SharkText, which became ShapeWriter) requires users to slide a stylus around to type faster:
“SlideIt, is an intuitive method to input text on touch screen enabled devices. Instead of tapping each letter, with SlideIt users simply point to first letter of a word and slide the stylus to the subsequent letters. Spacing is achieved by just lifting the stylus. Speeds of more than 50 words per minute are easily achievable. Consumers love the feel of writing quickly and accurately.”
Russell Beattie writes about the demise of the mobile browser, Mowser.
“I think anyone currently developing sites using XHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I’m tired of wasting my time.
“The argument up to now has been simply that there are roughly 3 billion phones out there, and that when these phones get on the Internet, their vast numbers will outweigh PCs and tilt the market towards mobile as the primary web device. The problem is that these billions of users haven’t gotten on the Internet, and they won’t until the experience is better and access to the web is barrier-free – and that means better devices and “full browsers”. Let’s face it, you really aren’t going to spend any real time or effort browsing the web on your mobile phone unless you’re using Opera Mini, or have a smart phone with a decent browser – as any other option is a waste of time, effort and money. Users recognize this, and have made it very clear they won’t be using the “Mobile Web” as a substitute for better browsers, rather they’ll just stay away completely.
“Let me say that again clearly, the mobile traffic just isn’t there. It’s not there now, and it won’t be.”
Link: The end of Mowser (russellbeattie.com, via)
Peter Odum has written about design principles for converged devices. Here’s a summary of the principles he outlines:
Link: Convergent Experiences, Diverse Devices (idlemode.com)
Sender 11 has published some stats on device screen sizes. Interesting stuff, though it’s important to note that the study doesn’t cover the user prevalence of particular screen sizes.
“Over the years the relative screen size difference has increased. The difference between the smallest (128×128) and the largest (800×480) is now a factor of 23. That means the largest screen is 23 times bigger than the smallest one.
“You can see that the smaller screens have a portrait orientation and the large screens have a landscape orientation. Between them are the phones that can change orientation, they can work in both landscape and portrait. 240×320 is the dominant screen size overall.”
Link: Sender 11: Mobile screen size trends (sender11.typepad.com)
Published by Gabriel White.