Luke Wroblewski recently published a useful list of books that address the topic of design for mobile devices.
Link: Mobile Design Books (lukew.com)
“The judo rule: Turn your weaknesses into your strengths. If you cannot escape the limitations of the small screen, use them to your advantage! Think of ways to turn the screen size into an integral part of gameplay — part of the game’s challenge that the player must learn to overcome. Make the small screen [...]
“Uganda is a country coping with a severe energy crisis resulting in frequent power cuts. In addition, access to mains electricity in rural locations is limited. Given that mobile phones require power, and access to power can be unpredictable – how do people keep their mobile phones and other electrical devices charged?”
Link: Power Up: Street [...]
Robert Strohmeyer writes about the Open Cell Phone Project, a project intended to create an open software and hardware platform for the creation of GSM mobile devices. As Robert correctly comments, the way most mobile phones are made today (closed platforms, generally hard to modify) doesn’t provide very good support for the backyard hacker community.
“Hardware, [...]
An academic thesis presenting research on the design of web browsers for mobile devices.
“Technically, it has been possible to access the Internet on a mobile phone for several years already, but the mobile browsing experience has often been cumbersome for ordinary people. Understanding the user needs in different use contexts is the key to improving [...]
Yiibu has made available a wonderful little presentation about the design of mobile games.
“Design for play, quiet contemplation, exploration, discovery, suspense, laughter, friendship, joy…(remember boredom, stress, fatigue, personalization, control, play—everyone’s personal time is different)”
Link: Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail (yiibu.com, PDF, via)
Two interesting articles about mobile phones from the always-must-read Economist. The first, interestingly, predicts divergence rather than convergence and uses cars as the developmental analogue. I’m not convinced by the divergence argument here – unlike cars, mobile phones are general computing platforms than can adapt (or be adapted) to user habits in a way that [...]
Paul Golding asks whether mobile phones are designed to support people desire to fiddle with them. This is an excellent question, and in most situations phones only provide poor support for this kind of use.
“However, on close inspection (i.e peeking) at what some people do with their phones, the fiddling is a kind of mindless [...]
Some guidelines for the design of handheld games.
“There are two major things you have to keep in mind concerning the interface and user-experience, first one is that most players will be picking up your game in short breaks. They need to be able to quickly start it, and quickly put it away without losing “everything”. [...]
Design Sojourn talks about the advantages and disadvantages of non-mechanical buttons.
““Static” buttons on the other hand have issues with feedback. Nothing moves, so there is no action and thus no reaction. Therefore designers that use “static” buttons need to employ a host of other feedback elements, like beeping sounds or lights. This is a very [...]
“In fairness to cellphone makers, it is exceptionally difficult to design anything really well, especially a technically complex product that is manufactured in huge quantities. A well-designed object, like the Apple iPod, looks so effortless and can be used so intuitively, that it’s easy to underestimate the Herculean struggle required to produce it. There are [...]
Published by Gabriel White.