This week, we're finalizing the Design For Mobile conference agenda, and celebrating by chatting with the notorious Luca Passani of AdMob. Among other things, Luca is the chief personality behind WURFL and WALL. Not only will Luca talk about designing with WALL Next Generation at the conference, but Brian Fling will provide a pre-conference workshop on mobile web design.
Barbara Ballard: What excites you about mobile?
Luca Passani: The challenge. Mobile phones are extremely poor internet clients. People don't buy phones to go on the Internet. They buy them to make phone calls. Almost every mobile device comes with a mini-browser these days, but the user experience is so poor that people continue to buy newspapers to look up the day's events, ask passers-by for directions, and or to call a phone number to reserve movie tickets. When people perform the functions above and others like them using a mobile application I have designed and built, I get a little satisfaction.
BB: Tell me about your history in systems to enhance mobile usability, including Openwave.
LP: When I started working with WAP in 1999, it was clear to me that development for mobile devices needed to include usability thinking from the ground up. This did not go unnoticed to Openwave (or Phone.com as it was called at the time). That was the beginning of a journey in which Openwave was asking me to evangelize about WAP usability to developers all over the world.
My views about usability have always been sort of extreme. I always believed that the success of a mobile web application depends on letting the UI design go very deep and influence the business logic. This is quite a strong statement, particularly if you consider that pretty much all of the web development frameworks built over the past 10 years were built on the assumption that you have data, you have business logic, and then you have the view part which can be adjusted to present any business logic. My approach has always been different, in that, the system should be defined by user experience. If business logic must be modified to accommodate user experience, then so be it.
BB: What are the origins of WALL? How will it progress?
LP: There was a point when Openwave was asking my department, Developer Marketing, to promote the creation of XHTML-MP sites. WML devices were dominant at the time and developers could not see a clear advantage in migrating to XHTML. One problem was that XHTML had dropped a lot of the good ideas of WML (soft keys, keyboard accelerators,... but I digress).
The solution was to create WALL, a tag library that allowed developers to create mobile sites for all devices with one markup. I did not have programming resources at the time, so I ended up writing it all by myself. I would do a lot of things differently today, but this did not prevent WALL from being a huge success. WALL was launched in 2004. It was a great resource at the time. Today's devices and mini-browsers are more advanced than what was available in 2004. For this reason, sites built with WALL look a bit 2004-ish today. This problem will be solved by WNG (WALL Next Generation). WNG is a complete rewrite and redesign of WALL, allowing developers to fully utilize CSS, yet still gracefully degrading on older XHTML devices and WML. [ed: learn more at the conference!]
BB: What can you tell non-coding designers about device diversity?
LP: Every device is different. Full stop. Seems easy enough, yet people continue to complain about standards and lack of standards and bad support for standards. Well, this is the way it is. If you don't like it, keep doing web development.
BB: What is the biggest obstacle to getting good design into the marketplace and your designs implemented?
LP: Device diversity. Network operators. Content transcoders.
BB: Considering anyone planning on coming to see you speak at D4M, what book / article / movie / blog would you suggest they read to understand the way you think?
LP: GAP is a good introduction. It puts web developers on the right track of thinking mobile, raising awareness and challenging everything they think they know. Once they have absorbed GAP, then they will understand why WURFL and WALL exist, and why they may want to adopt it for their projects.
Check back periodically for the rest of our interview series with the speakers of Design for Mobile 2008.