09 August 2010 by Steven Hoober
Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It’s not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.
Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it’s fashionable. It’s not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.
Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people. As obvious as it seems, we’re no longer tethered to wireline phones, or movie theaters and TVs, or pinball arcades, or typewriters, photocopiers and desktop computers.
Mobile works because it lets people work the way they want to, and the way they always have. Mobile lets people be mobile, and read what they want, and watch what they want, and take photos of their vacation, and share their thoughts with their friends, their family or no one in particular.
Designing for mobile – and I say now designing for anything – is an exercise in designing for people. Sure, it’s always been a great idea to consider users; but not just how they interact with a machine, or a website. If you step back and look at the way people really work, and want to work (or play, or share, or create…) then you are on the right track.
Whether the product that comes out of this is (or works on) a large chunk of iron, a wheeled vehicle, a desktop computer, a website or a mobile handset – or many of the above all at once, is of no particular significance. When you consider people, and their context, and address it right, that is what I consider designing with a mobile mindset.
Certainly do not get locked in and decide before anything else to design a desktop website, but also don’t design for mobile first. Design for people first.
I think this will be my position at 5pm on 21 September when I talk about “Why and when to design for mobile first” with Scott Jenson, Barbara Ballard, Luke Wroblewski, and Alan Tifford at Design for Mobile 2010. Come see us and join in.
Justin Powell on 10 August 2010 – 11:33a.m.
Excellent approach, so many designers (and projects) begin with a digital tactic or medium. When really we need to ask, What’s the person’s need? What are we trying to help them do?
You all should share more about your methodologies for understanding people’s needs. Looking back I see you all have used Ethnography (or observational research of people) – an excellent approach our anthropologists use quite often as well!
http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/2010/May/get-out-of-the-office-and-into-the-field-ethnography-and-design-today/
Steven Hoober on 10 August 2010 – 3:29p.m.
Time or budget or just project lifecycle (we come too late) means I don’t do a tenth as much research as I’d like. And, I never have anywhere. So, I’ve quite come to grips with it, and instead of just trying to be clever, have a whole set of methods to get to the right information.
Some is discussed in other blog posts, like the collaboration one. But the whole process from my point of view is in my book:
http://dbd.littlespringsdesign.com
It’s about asking the right questions, of the right people, examining existing information, using heuristics and analyzing results to get to actionable design-centric information.
Sometime when we get more time, I’m gonna get with Eric (of the ethnography post) and we’ll merge our info and make a new version of the data collection and analysis process.
Justin Powell on 12 August 2010 – 2:02p.m.
That’s great Steven – you ‘wrote the book on it’! You’re right about the scope of a project, so many times research is viewed as a ‘nice-to-have’ VS helping to understand the person’s needs.
A way we’ve been trying to get rapid research (cost-effective) has been through our ‘Ethnographic Sampling Project’:
http://twowest.com/esp/
Frog design just launched a very similar concept a week ago or so:
http://frogmob.frogdesign.com/
This rapid-virtual approach can be a helpful way to see peoples needs across boundaries and time. But, might not provide the complete actionable design-centric information you need.
Steven Hoober on 12 August 2010 – 2:40p.m.
I am tentatively, theoretically, excited about this crowdsourcing sort of stuff.
Practically, I worry about self-selection errors. Maybe less for the ESP thing, but looking at what’s been submitted, they seem to be much less observational, and more about what the submitters do with /their/ lives. Like a badly moderated focus group (i.e. way too many of them) this poor ability to introspect and the loudest-voice-in-the-room phenomenon can skew perceptions and results.
I have used some non-traditional methods, like browsing forums or (one of my favorites) reading online resumes. But I use it to gather info as /a/ point in the data process. Good for confirming, getting a handle on why, and getting specific and personal info to make your point or create (cheap) personas.
I worry about these (and they’ve been around before) being used to identify issues and initiate programs. Thereby being weighted too heavily.
But, as I said, I am tentatively excited. I have to believe concepts like citizen journalism will even out, and the checks and balances of those will be able to be applied to concepts like this, and we’ll get good results in another few years.
Jesse on 25 August 2010 – 3:07p.m.
Great Mantra, I try to practice this in all my designs. Just have a hard time convincing everyone else.