I recently spoke at Mobile Web USA, which was a nice intimate gathering of a variety of executives, consultants, designers, and engineers. With an emphasis on the executives, given the price of the show. They had asked me to talk about going "beyond the linear interface", which to me means making the mobile be a mobile, and not a miniature PC.
As I was putting together the presentation, I realized I could do a factual presentation with lots of bullet points, or I could make the entire presentation an example. So of course the presentation has four screenshot versions of a single mobile web task: let the transcoder do it, miniaturize it, mobilize it with good design, and widgetize it (with a non-existent widget engine). Take a look here if you can't see it below.
Most of the other presentations were "this is what mega-company X is doing" or perhaps "here is a case study". This is rather difficult for us, as we would have to convince our clients that we can talk about their case studies. So we had two fact filled days (AOL, Nokia, Google, dotMobi, Yahoo, and so forth), plus this presentation.
What I found particularly interesting about the response to the talk was that it was both my best-received talk and my worst-received talk. The executives didn't see the talk (it was late afternoon on the second day) but the consultants, engineers, and designers did. The consultants and designers were very excited about the talk; the engineers rated the talk the worst of all the presentations at the conference.
There are a fair number of engineers reading this blog. How could I have made it better?
Even though I didn’t get to see the talk (I loved the slides, now I want to hear the audio) I think I can tell you why the engineers didn’t like it.
(obDislosure: I’ve worked with hundreds of engineers, and actually married one — she’s asleep on the couch next to me right now.)
You’re asking left-brained people to accept that the rest of us don’t want to have to make lots of silly choices and multiple selections all the time. We’d rather have the interface make a good choice (I just love it when my phone camera snaps a picture of a bar code) and I just say “yes”. With GPS knowing which airport I’m at, and RFID card scanning to know what restaurant — I can just let the machines talk quietly with themselves and leave me out of the drudgery.
Engineers want lots of control and choices. I want elegance and simplicity. Unless it’s something I really care about, then I’ll take control.
As someone who does software for mobiles, I can’t find a thing in that presentation that is impossible to achieve. What kind of complaints did you get from engineers?
Anyway, what I’ve seen is that most engineers have a real hard time understanding how they can take advantage of mobile phone characteristics to make their software more simple to use so they approach mobile software with the same mindset they apply to desktop appplications. Here’s a quick real life example: on an application for mobile phones that takes photos, an engineer wanted to clutter the screen with options such as rotate picture. This is clearly a desktop software approach to things, because, if needed, the user will rotate the mobile phone without any extra effort or change of mental model (ie. people already know how to rotate something they’re holding to get a better view). As such there was actually no need to implement that “feature”. Like this on, there are lots of other small decisions that make the whole mobile application experience worse.
Nice post… I’d prefer this style of presentation ten times out of ten. Engineers will always be uncomfortable with this approach but I consider it our job to gain their confidence and respect (booze parties help) by what ever means possible (though some times it just not possible). That makes life much more easy for us people…