The picture also confused me. Really? The $700 E90 is the picture you want to show? And the E90 is more popular than the N95? And the RAZR derivatives or Series 40 devices aren’t more popular?
If you are starting to go mobile, the first tip is to use the term “mobile”, not “cell”. In many circles the latter term will immediately get you branded an outsider.
New York Times Mobile - Blackberry and feature phone
The good folks over at The New York Times have put a lot of research-intensive work into their mobile version, at least for the Blackberry. My chief complaint with the Blackberry version is that it regularly forgets where I am and instead gives me New York weather. Useful for the not quite once a year I visit the city, less useful most of the time. But one of the challenges in mobile is managing cookies, so I'm somewhat forgiving.
The Blackberry version has lots of good features: pretty good use of screen real estate, good use of pictures, good use of white space, pretty good internal navigation.
Alas, the site for some other devices does not fare so well. On my Sanyo MM-7500 (NetFront 3.0 browser, Openwave transcoder pass-through, Sprint network), the design is just... wrong.
The biggest problem is the use of white space. Every page has a 30 pixel gutter down each side. This doesn't sound so bad, until you realize that 34% of the available space on the screen is devoted to these gutters. The logo and advertising banner are even shrunken. Below the banner is yet more white space.
This white space does not achieve what it would visually achieve on the desktop. On the desktop, or the printed page, it provides a restful place to separate the page from the remainder of the screen, and provides content framing. On the mobile, the physical hardware provides that function quite nicely. Only enough gutter is needed to avoid bezel parallax from covering content (say, 5 pixels).
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| White space overwhelms the content | Page 2 of 17! I don't have that much patience. | I'm not even sure I'm on page 2. Was there a new page, or did I just move to the top of this one? |
My next problem is how the article is distributed across pages. Yes, it is important to ensure that the phone can load the entire web page. But dividing a story into one-paragraph chunks is awkward at best. And the experience is not "as best": all of the header information, from category to banners to titles, are on the later pages. Combined with the white space problem, the later pages have no new content on the first screen (so-called "above the fold") at all.
As I got ready to post this entry, I found this 2007 image a NYT page on the RAZR. Things have definitely improved.
Content-wise, the smaller site skips the blurb and the photo, but preserves the category (e.g., "U.S.") and pseudo-category (e.g., "SUPREME COURT MEMO"). I call this a pseudo-category because it looks like one, but you can not navigate with it (except via search engines).
My recommendations:
One final note: As a mobile designer, I try to keep at least one older feature phone hanging around so I can understand feature phone experience, not just expensive device experience. While the smart phone market is growing (and probably will skyrocket over the next few years), many people still have smaller devices. As interest in mobile access to the web increases, these folks will try to go online. Indeed, this is the sales pitch of the transcoding companies. Give these folks a bad experience at the industry's peril.
I like blog comments, not because they validate my existence, but because I have always come up with the best ideas when having conversations with others. This one made me think about what really dissatisfies me about mobile browsers today.
The browse experience was always inefficient. Surfing is probably a good word for it: a lot of hard work and falling into the cold, cold ocean in exchange for a few seconds of thrilling ride every once in a while. The desktop browser has actually evolved with RSS and Ajax-like technologies. My current experience is to have two browsers open all the time. Safari is for work stuff (this Wordpress site, some intranet items) and general browsing (searches, mostly). Firefox runs gmail, g-calendar, and bloglines (at home, add eBay). Most of these update automatically and a glance tells me when there are new items; the rest require a manual update, but I use them in the same manner, scanning through to make sure nothing has changed.
The mobile browse experience has been focused lately on “one web” views. Making the browser display any old web page as well as it can. This leads to folks thinking the iPhone has the best mobile browser out there. And a growing niche of folks who want a third device in the UMPC category to do things like browse the internet, because phones clearly cannot.
But I have just started to realize that not only are mobiles different (so it’s wrong to judge mobile browsing off desktop metrics) but everyone seems to be chasing an out of date baseline. Can those new desktop experiences of RSS feeds and Ajax-like updating inform mobile browsing? With increasing connectivity, I think yes.
So what would my mobile browser look like? Well, who knows, and to a certain degree who cares? The question is, how does it work, and how do I interact with it:
Yes, this is an anti-browser — or if you prefer, and un-browser — but that is much my point. The browsing experience is not something that supports mobile use. We need to move mobile apps in the right direction and break the trend that leads to heads-down interaction, or lack of use entirely.
We'll be posting interviews with various speakers from the forthcoming Design For Mobile conference on this blog. First up is Liselott Brunnberg, whose design research into mobiles and context will soon earn her a PhD from The Interactive Institute of Sweden.
Barbara Ballard: Liselott, thanks for talking with me today. Let's start with some easy stuff. Why do you like design, what excites you about it?
Liselott Brunnberg: I am excited with doing experimental design in areas that is rather unexplored. It's really thrilling to see if your ideas work and how they are received by the users. If you explore new areas you don't really know about the result &ndash it's more like gambling.
BB: So seeing what you created in front of users is the most fun?
LB: That is just part of the fun – the nerveracking part. It's also fun to be the developer. To see what solutions work out technically.
A user sweeps the "directional microphone" about, seeking enemy agents
BB: What will you do next, now that you have the PhD?
LB: I believe we will try to develop the concept into a commercial product. I will probably work with location-based gaming or location based experiences in one way or another.
BB: Will that be as an entrepreneur, or working with an existing company?
LB: We will work with an existing company.
BB: I think that the reason why I went into industry instead of staying in academia was because I really wanted to see my work become real.
LB: Oh, cool. so you have walked that road already. It would be great to get to know more of your experiences from that. I'm not sure I will stay in academia.
BB: I was half through my dissertation before I quit – so you did better than me, congratulations. Do you consider yourself having a specific design focus, such as interaction design
LB: Interaction design is part of my focus, but a large portion is also focusing on expreience design and entertainment.
As the user moves through the physical environment, real and virtual information is presented based on proximity
BB: How do you understand each of those fields? How are they different and similar
LB: I consider interaction design to be more on usability issues. Experience design is more on creating the actual content. Such as a game – to be the more artistic side. They do both overlap.
BB: Oh, that's interesting. I think that you have some interaction design practitioners arguing about usability.
LB: Probably. It's just how I have defined my work.
BB: I understand. Since I came to this field via Human Factors engineering & psychology (then HCI, industrial design, usability, and business) I find the whole question of definitions a bit irrelevant to actually doing my job.
LB: It has two quite distinct parts. One is to develop the possibility for interaction in the game. To make it possible for players to play the game and also look out at the scenery. One is to create the content itself in regards of the context, and I see that more as experience design. But the interaction side is also about creating a good experience of course.
BB: So as far as specifics: what brought you to location-aware gaming?
LB: When I started as a PhD student I had to do something related to the road context. My colleagues were all doing mobile applications for drivers. I was more interested in doing something for passengers. Children are often spending a lot of time being quite inactive when traveling and I wanted to do something that could engage them more with the surrounding context. So I started to experiment with the idea to make the road side into an exciting game-world.
The researchers in the back seat of the test vehicle
BB: So mobile and location are inseparable as a motivation?
LB: As motivation for me? Yes, I find that interesting. How to create an experience that realties to how people move around. Traveling on road is quite different than walking around for example.
BB: Are you currently working on one application per context such as back seat, or adapting applications based on context?
LB: So far I have only developed applications for backseat. If it would be in an other context such as walking, the whole game concept would have to be adapted a bit. In a bus it could work okay.
BB: So what key discoveries did you make in designing for back seat use? Any principles our readers and conference attendees can take home and use?
LB: The players really liked the concept of creating a fiction connected with objects and locations. What we could see was that the fast movement created a special relation to the surrounding physical context. Even quite simple games became fun when they were linked to the context. The passengers' uncontrolled movement added to the challenge of the game play. Issues in much location based games is how to scale up the experience to cover vast areas, such as a whole country or continent. We saw this is possible to develop engaging experiences based on map data order with scale.
BB: Do you have any intuition for how that could extend into non-game applications
LB: The closest would be to extend into interactive storytelling as experiences in general. Applications where you get to know more about places or objects such as tourists, crimes, history, geography, general knowledge etc.
Researchers observe a Backseat Playground test participant
BB: Oh, education and training is a good one.
LB: Yes, an interesting area is to explore more how children can use the time to learn things about our geography, about places and such in an interesting way.
BB: There are some classroom games around here, not mobile, that have students plan from an 1840's mindset how to move their family across our continent. This makes me wonder about "virtual" location. The games last for several weeks, with different schools participating. Over time the kids have illnesses and whatnot happen to their virtual groups.
LB: We have an old book in Sweden where a boy travels on the back of a goose to experience adventures in different cities around the country. It's for children to learn geography in school. Quite nice.
BB: How could your learnings about context make that into a better learning experience?
LB: Not that it might be a better learning experience then other alternatives; It should give another sensation as if you are actually present at a place then if you are just hearing about it. If you read about an accident in the news paper it may affect you more if you have actually visited the place.
BB: Hmmm, maybe especially for different learning styles. Okay, some technical/practice stuff. What are the challenges in prototyping and testing a context-based application?
LB: Testing can be problematic when you need to experience the product within the field for which it was developed.
BB: Okay, we can wrap this up. One final question you can answer later if you want. Have you seen 230 Miles of Love? Any comments?
LB: I have not seen that – so I will check it out and get back to you. I have pictures to send also . I would enjoy talking more next week when I have my own computer.
BB: Sounds great! Thanks for your time, I know it is getting late.
LB: okay great.
Look for our interview with Enrique Ortiz late next week to see the developer's perspective on context.
Paul’s talk engages at a business and technical level what I attempted at a design and business level in last year’s Going Mobile talk, also up at Slideshare.
When you don’t think through design, you get terrible design like the sign to the right.
When you think about the whole experience, you get great design like the truck to the left.
The building that sign is on is visible from over a mile away. It would be nice to be able to navigate by just making your way to the building. However, the building is functionally unlabeled. Huge letters, but cleverly arranged not just behind trees, but behind a corner (the main approach is right of center in this image) with zero margin.
The Shred-It truck comes to your office, the guy wheels locked bins of paper to the truck, it shreds them on site and they are driven away to be recycled or burned or something. You can even watch the paper get shredded because there is a little window in the side of the truck. Someone there realized that “most of the time the truck is in front of the client office, it will have the door open.” And they put their branding on the inside of the door, so you can read the logo whether it’s open or closed.
That is experience design.
When Barbara saw my first version of this post she commented that experience design was sort of like… well, I don’t remember what exactly. But I interpreted it as “mobile contextuality.”
The carry principle outlines some key attributes of mobiles, which lead to use patterns that vary from desktop, or even living room use. One of the more interesting ones is interruptability. Because you use the device out in the world, you get distracted before completing tasks, often many times. How does the device help, or hinder, with completion?
When talking with friends, we often wonder about obscure facts, or details we cannot recall of some movie. Its not too bad if the answer comes fifteen minutes later, but if I don’t get the search input almost immediately, I’ll forget it. I’ll use two similar examples:
Capricorn One is back out in general release, and since it’s pretty good (I was worried about my childhood memory being wrong) I am talking about it. I cannot recall who all is in it, and no one recognizes the director by name, so off we go to IMDb. Which means:
> Launch Opera Mini
> Select IMDB from the list
> Wait for IMDb to load
> Zoom and scroll to the search box
> Finally type a search!
Note I’m not even complaining about the poor way IMDb fails to work well on any mobile browser I’ve used.
Slightly later, I am communicating my exceptional pleasure with a sandwich from this place, but then we start discussing why they would call it a “po-boy.” Seemed odd, so I do a search right from the home deck of the phone. The browser takes a bit to fire up, and there is a fair bit of slogging to get to the key parts of the article (its the bread, I guess) so I do not tell anyone the results for a while, but entry is allowed after a single button press and milliseconds of delay.
How does your mobile experience help or hinder your users?