Designing The Mobile User Experience

Designing the Mobile User Experience Jos e Alves Interaction Designer, UX&D

“ Understanding and patience of the mobile ecosystem is one of the most crucial skills of the mobile designer.” Brian Fling

Legacy

1894 - Gugliemo Marconi invents the radio. 1971 - James Fergursson discovers the “twisted-nematic” LCD. 1980 - Motorola presents the first portable radio - "DynaTAC”. 1876 - The birth of the telephone.

1980 - Nintendo Game & Watch console. 2000 - Sharp releases the first camera phone - J-SH04. 2000 - Samsung develops the world's first TV phone - SCH-M220. 2001 - The debut of the ipod.

2003 - The first mobile phone with a cursor - NEC FOMA N2051. 2007 - Apple introduce’s the iphone.

• 1996 - GSM (Global system for mobile communications) phones in 103 countries. • 2000 - 10 million i-mode users (Japan). • 2002 - 1 million mobile phone users worldwide. • 2008 - 3.0 billion mobile phone users worldwide (prediction for the end of this year). Staggering Numbers

• More mobile phones than humans. • Every second 4 babies are born on Earth and 32 mobile phones are sold.

Fragmentation

“ Designers face a proliferation of capabilities that make the early (mobile) web look like a playground.” Joe Shepter, “The Pulse of Modern Design”

• About 2500 phone models. • About 500 different operators. • More than 25 browsers. • About 14 different screen sizes.

• Different markup languages. (WML, XHTML, ...) • Different operative systems. (Symbian OS, Windows Mobile, Mac OS, ...) • Plethora of user agents. (A user agent is a client application used with a particular network protocol, e.g browsers, email clients, mobile phone, ...) • Varying code practices, urls, ...

Too much to handle by yourself! • There is no write once, run everywhere. • We need some help from handset detection. (With handset detection you can customise your website so it is optimised for a specific mobile phone)

Mobile vs Desktop

• Limited display. • Users attention may be distracted. • Increase need for clarity. (Screen is smaller, but things have to look bigger) • Power management. (e.g. Too many animations might draw battery) • Text input is a pain. (sms is the only mode widely accepted) • Navigation model is different.

Direct Manipulation vs Indirect Manipulation

• One item on the screen has focus. • You use soft keys as an intermediate device to move the focus to the item you want and click it. Indirect Manipulation

• You just tap/click anything directly. Direct Manipulation

Methodology

• Do Nothing. (SSR - Small screen rendering) • Programmatically reformat. (strip images and styling) • Handheld stylesheets. • Mobile specific site/app.

Complex Simple Slower Faster Mobile Specific Site Stylesheets No Styling SSR Value Method Comparison Implementation Browser Experience

Mobilise It, Don’t Miniaturise It

“ ... treats the mobile environment and technology as a subset of the desktop environment.” Barbara Ballard • It’s a repurpose of existing content. Miniaturisation

“ ... precisely targets mobile user needs, making (the) best possible use of technology.” Barbara Ballard • Content and context specific. Mobilisation

Context is King

• What is contextually relevant. • Mobilise content not only the layout.

“ If the mobile site design only replicates an existing high web site the result will range from suboptimal to completely unusable.” Morten Hjerde

Fundamentals

http://sender11.typepad.com/sender11/2008/04/mobile-screen-s.html http://sender11.typepad.com/sender11/2008/04/more-on-mobile.html Screen Landscape Multi-scape 128 X 128 128 X 160 176 X 208/220 240 X 320 320 X 480 640 X 200/360/480 800 X 352/400/480 96 X 65 Portrait

Font Families

• Different OS use different fonts. (e.g a 240x320 screen Series 40 phone uses font heights of 16, 20 and 24 pixels, this equals a point size of 16, 21 and 25) • In a phone web browser you can specify the font size. (bbc.co.uk uses arial point size 11, 12 and 13) http://sender11.typepad.com/sender11/2008/01/prototyping-mob.html http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/index.php/Mobile_Typography Font Sizes

• One handed interaction (most of the phones) • Two handed interaction (e.g Sony psp) Physical Interaction

• Clickable scroll wheel. • Mini joysticks. • Click Wheel. • Stylus. • Voice Input. • Soft Keys. • Key Pad. • Touch Pad. • Touch Screens. • Multi-Touch Screens. • Gestures. Interaction Techniques and Elements

• Most devices sold today are WAP 2.0. (XHTML, not WML) Browser

What does that mean? Instead of

• However, XHTML/CSS support is inconsistent.

• Test on as many devices as you can. • Don’t use emulators. Usability Testing

• Context is important. (As realistic the experience as possible) • Are standard usability techniques still valid for mobile? • Paper prototyping. (really particullarly usefull for early evaluations) • Make users test on their actual device. • Capture screen, body, face. http://www.slideshare.net/barbaraballard/mobile-usability-testing/ http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/testing/

"Most usability testing regimes assume the context of a person facing a computer, the luxury of the person ’ s full attention, and a comfortable environment with minimal distractions. Information appliances, on the other hand, need to work in low-attention situations, or where the user ’ s attention needs to be fleetingly channeled through the appliance w hile walking, talking, or any of the multitude of other day-to-day activities that would be routinely classed as d istractions.” D avid Pereira

Best Practices

• W3C proposed recommendations. (http://www.w3c.org/TR/mobile-bp/) • W3C mobile web initiative. (http://www.w3c.org/Mobile/) • Input by mobile developers, operators, manufacturers. • Mobile design resources. (http://patterns.littlespringsdesign.com/index.php/Main_Page)

Where Are We Heading

• Touch is the new click. • Gestural Interfaces. (http://www.unwiredview.com/2008/01/08/first-glimpse-inside-nokia-s60-touch-going-beyond-multi-touch/) ( http://www.designinggesturalinterfaces.com/) • Sensors everywhere. (Adam Greenfield, “Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing” ) • Browsing is out, experiences are in. • “ Icons are dead”, content is the interface.

"When it comes to design for mobile devices, it ’ tempting to take an ostrich-like approach: Hide your head in the sand and behave as though nothing is happening. Unfortunately, in the not-too-distant future, more people will be using mobile devices to access the Net; and no interactive designer will be able to ignore them." Joe Shepter, "The Pulse of Modern Design" (August 2005)

Thank You.

Resources

• http://sender11.typepad.com/ • http://www.smallsurfaces.com/ • http://www.janchipchase.com/ • http://www.m-trends.org/ • http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/ • http://www.forum.nokia.com/ Web

• Matt Jones and Gary Marsden, "Mobile Interaction Design” • Cameron Moll, "Mobile Web Design" • Barbara Ballard, "Designing the Mobile User Experience" • Christian Lindholm and Turkka Keinonen, "Mobile Usability: How Nokia Changed the Face of the Mobile Phone” • Studio 7.5, "Designing for Small Screens" Books

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/trenchcoatjedi/ 2896368951/ • http://www.flickr.com/photos/o-ren/3028013048/ • http://www.flickr.com/photos/shadda/2100736671/ • http://www.flickr.com/photos/14017121@N03/ 2405415702/ • http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevetoronto/ 2670405539/ Images

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Designing The Mobile User Experience

by Jose Alves on Dec 04, 2008

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