“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 [...]
“Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master. “There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo. “Experimenting with different key combinations [...]
InUseful published a usability report on the iPhone.
“What is it then that makes the iPhone different? Most importantly, it has removed one level of abstraction by allowing the user to act on objects using the finger directly on the phone’s surface. The difference between this and having to press keys on a keyboard and watch [...]
Barbara Ballard has announced her plans to host a conference dedicated to mobile design in September this year.
“Design For Mobile will be the first North American mobile user experience conference. This will be a two-day conference focused on strategy and tactics for user research, product definition, interaction and other design, and usability testing. A day [...]
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Posted 07 March 2008
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Also tagged: barbaraballard, conference, design, interactiondesign, ixd, littlespringsdesign, mobile, strategy, usa, userexperience, ux
This slightly unfortunately designed study compares the on-screen keyboard of the iPhone with QWERTY and Bell keypads. People with no iPhone experience were asked to use both their own hardkey-based phone and the iPhone, and the results were then compared.
“Participants made an average of 11 errors per message on the iPhone compared to an average [...]
Kelly Goto describes how to build a cheap and cheerful mobile phone testing camera rig.
Link: DIY gotomobile’s mobile cam (gotomobile.com)
I linked to this article only because it has a fantastic title. Enjoy.
“The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off [...]
Convergence has arrived. Samsung’s SCH-V960 now has a mouse. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.
“Users can point the cursor and click directly on icons on MyScreen, similar interface to that on a PC environment, and gain direct access to frequently used menus such as photo album, messaging, and music menu. Users can also use [...]
“Shrinking” design paradigms to mobile devices often isn’t the best strategy.
“Designing user interfaces for small screens is a difficult problem, much more difficult than it may seem at first glance. We can not simply take established interface conventions and “shrink” them to baby face size, because just like children have a unique way of life, [...]
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Posted 11 November 2006
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Also tagged: complexity, design, handheld, interactiondesign, ixd, mobile, scaling, ui, userexperience, userinterface, ux
Richard F Cecil writes about challenges facing the next step of mobile sevices.
“Achieving simplicity and speed of access is the key to expanding people’s perceptions of the mobile Web to include information, entertainment, and commerce services. If people are to use these services while they are on the go, we must avoid cramming as many [...]
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Posted 10 October 2006
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Also tagged: context, design, ethnography, mobile, mobileweb, social, ubicomp, ui, userexperience, userinterface, ux
Little Springs Design have published a couple of short pieces on applying Fitt’s Law to mobile devices.
“Fitt’s Law (circa 1954) states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. The further the target is away from the user’s current position, the [...]
“Many of these issues are about solving the complexity problem: enabling lots of different features for lots of different users in lots of different cultures. Will tomorrows intuitive interfaces use RFID to allow us to interact with our environment in a more tangible manner, in a way similar to how people in cities like London [...]
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Posted 06 June 2006
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Also tagged: customization, design, future, hci, input, interactiondesign, ixd, mobile, mobility, multimodal, personalization, pervasive, phones, trends, ubicomp, ui, userexperience, ux
“As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don’t already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years…
”...But they’ve also shown a growing frustration with how confusing those added features can be. A J.D. Power & Associates survey last [...]
Published by Gabriel White.