Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

I've been a long advocate of creating local applications, mostly likely in Java ME, for high-use websites. Reasons include:

• local storage of key data, allowing view of data without data charges even in a coverage hole
• local execution of interaction logic, allowing for rapid interaction without fetches to the server*
• local storage of interaction logic, which thus does not need to be repeatedly downloaded from the server

• partially addressed by AJAX

In short, I don't have to be tethered to my connection to use my own data.

Since my email is very important to me - more important than SMS by far - I was excited yesterday when Google announced a local mobile application (Java ME) at www.gmail.com/app. This morning I used it to avoid having to go all the way down the hall to read my email, which is actually consistent with some mobile television use patterns.

The experience was definitely better than using Gmail in my Openwave or Opera Mini browser. First and foremost, it remembered my user name between sessions. That by itself will increase my use of mobile Gmail by a factor of one hundred. Google did several nice things - of course the ability to read attachments is wonderful, and they used Opera-style page scrolling (left/right arrows page up/down). And the presentation is fairly attractive.

On the other hand, Google replicated several mistakes. They use the same low-feature text input mechanism for user name and password as is found on the Opera Mini, so I have to use three different modes to enter my email address. Perhaps the @ character should be an expected input? Yes, I know this would require some extra coding, but only the one time. And they use the right softkey for "Back" or "Cancel" despite the fact that I have a Back key, which is mapped to the Back function.

Perhaps the worst designed component so far is the address book. It looks great: it provides a list of all addresses in the address book, which checkboxes in front of them. You can select multiple addresses for a particular field. They went one step further: they put a wonderful search field at the top of the screen. Now I can type "joh" and get all the johns in my address book. Wonderful. I can quickly select multiple people to send.

The problem arises when I have to search for the second person in the address book. I want to clear the field and start typing again. I clear the field by pressing my Back button (standard use) ... I've just gone to the previous page and have nobody in my To field. Trying again, I select my first entry again and then select the Cancel. No luck - the right softkey replicates the Back function. Trying again, I choose the Menu button and select "add a new email address" - now I have to type it from scratch. No thanks. I ended up "solving" this problem by putting the second recipient in the CC field. This is clearly not a tenable solution.

The other big problem so far is the actual display of messages. It strongly resembles the standard Gmail inbox, which is good, but doesn't provide quite enough optimization for the mobile. Specifically, as I read messages from a mailing list, I get subject lines that all are basically the same. It is difficult to distinguish "[IxDA Discuss] se..." from "[IxDA Discuss] Inf.." There are at least two solutions: a fisheye display that grows the highlighted item in a list, or a scrolling display.

I will certainly be using the application, leaving the browser use for situations where I have to send a message to multiple people. But I would not have let the product out the door had I been in charge of it, not with one critical and several lower priority UI bugs.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 3rd, 2006 at 12:47 pm and is filed under Design, Java ME, Mobile applications, Mobile web, Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.