Little Springs Design. 2001 – 2010.

Alan Cooper introduced the world to application "posture", at least for desktop design. This is a characteristic of how the user interacts with the application. In About Face 2.0, he and Robert Robert Reimann document four postures:

• Sovereign — an application that takes the user's full attention, such as Outlook or Word.
• Transient — applications in the periphery of the user's attention, calling the user for short moments, such as (for most folks) a calculator.
• Daemonic — alerting systems
• Parasitic — support interaction mode for both sovereign and transient applications, such as chat.

In mobile, what might a sovereign application look like? Well, the user interacts with it for long periods of time, to the exclusion of most environmental inputs. Examples might include news readers, certain games, and Blackberry email.

I argue that personal communications device (mobile phone) applications, in contrast to, say, a GameBoy or PlayStation Portable games, are never sovereign. The nature of the personal communications device is to interrupt, and the interruptions are complete. Even Crackberry email users stop to watch their kid score a goal, receive a call, and so forth.

Game-focused devices tend to be used by more serious gamers. The teenager sits in the back of the car, headphones on and game out. These devices have plenty of sovereign applications. Of course a phone could be used this way, but it's designed for more intermittent use. And if you keep using it you won't be able to send that critical SMS later because the battery is dead.

I think that personal communications devices' applications have only three potential postures:

• Transient — any application users use and then put the phone back down. SMS, weather, voice calls, banking, etc.
• Daemonic — SMS alerts plus device activities.
• Parasitic — a "big" application, such as email or games or a browser.

Design for the first two postures needs to be efficient. A frequently used web site with transient posture is ideal for making into a widget, as the information will be there when the user needs it. A parasitic application should have access to the "full" desktop experience as well as optimizations for transient use.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 10:25 am and is filed under Design, Mobile applications, Mobile web. 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.