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?
You know you can select any search box on any page in Opera Mini and add it to your search options from the home screen, right? At least that way you only have to deal with the scrolling on imdb when you’ve got results…
No, but there are a LOT of features in there. I’m not sure how many of your current set of fairly early adopters knows about 90% of them. Despite their usefullness and coolness. I began to touch on it here but probably need to continue to rant about my design theories. How do you make all these perfectly /useful/ features usable and obvious?
And this only sorta helps. I still have to fire up the browser and enter a search there. Nothing against Opera Mini (you are not the bad-signage building, just a truck where the phone number disappears when the door is rolled up)… I used this as a comparison, with the really neat Google search on the idle screen. That is ??? and I assume this is their intent ??? allowing the experience of search to bubble up to the immediacy of conversation, or at least dialing.
Browsers, no matter how snazzy, are still arranged around the desktop-paradigm browse experience: enter browse mode, follow links, follow more links, read occasionally, eventually exit browse mode and do something else. Could mobile browsing be improved? Probably, but it would be a non-trivial design task to change the manner in which browsers function to reflect mobile use patterns. Note that RSS and Ajax-like technologies have started to change this classic paradigm on the desktop; my two browsers are open 100% of the time, with 4-8 tabs, and mostly update with information on their own, which I occasionally go look at.
Oh, and yes I could have typed “imdb capricorn one” in the google search bar. But this is what I actually did on the day in question; maybe because my mental model is not caught up, maybe because I’d often rather use the better browser. Hard to say.