Punchcut has published a set of guidelines for the design of distributed / multi-device experiences:
1. Understand the digital ecosystem, its organisms and relationships
2. Focus on distribution, not duplication
3. Adapt experience touch-points to each context
4. Embrace the concept of services, not applications
5. Establish frameworks to provide flexibility
6. Take the time to get the details right
7. Seek to evolve and enhance relationships
In a paper that also synthesises a lot of his previous work, Chipchase writes about some of the social and cultural issues related to mobile money services.
“Simply being able to prove who you are can present a problem particularly for migrant workers. In many factory and manual labouring jobs the employer takes the worker’s identity card as a form of collateral to be returned at the end of the contract and/or when a replacement is found. Without an identity card it can be difficult to sign up for a pre-paid mobile phone account – just how difficult varies from market to market, and the extent to which know your customer (KYC) requirements are enforced or enforceable. Accessing regular banking branches to withdraw or deposit money can also be problematic without an identity card since the task requires prior interaction with the employer. In cultures with a high level of graft the police are more likely to use physical ownership of an identity card as a leverage point to exhort fines/bribes – as a risk-aversion strategy culture laminated facsimiles are likely to be carried. In contexts where identity information is frequently asked for some people carry multiple photocopies. In these environments migrants make easier pickings and can fall under suspicion with the police for the simple reason that they are not local. For many migrants obtaining a locally recognised identity card, either through formal or illegal means is a job in itself.”
A great article about the elements of the design of Safaricom’s tremendously successful M-PESA service in Kenya.
“In Kenya, sending and receiving money with a mobile phone is not an intuitive idea for many people. It is important, therefore, that communications around how the service works and how it benefits users be simple and clear. From its inception, M-PESA has been presented to the public as offering a simple service—“send money home.” This basic remittance product has become the must-have “killer” applica- tion that continues to drive service take-up. M-PESA’s marketing campaigns have worked well; most Kenyans queried know that M-PESA can be used for money transfers.”
“The launch of the iPad and the general success of mobile device app stores has created a buzzword frenzy for “curated” computing – computing experiences where software and wallpaper and attendant foofaraw for your device are hand-picked for your pleasure. In theory, this creates an aesthetically uniform, and above all safe and easy, computing environment, as the curators see to it that only the very prettiest, easiest-to-use and most virus-free apps show up in the store…The beauty of noncoercive curation is that there are so many reasons we value things, it’s really impossible to imagine that any one place will serve as a one-stop shop for our needs.”
I was hanging out at the Nikon store in Kuala Lumpur today, embracing my inner camera geek while a DSLR sensor was cleaned. Up on the big televisions I saw a video advertising the very cool looking S70 touchscreen camera.
I know well how underpowered the CPUs on these devices are, so I was impressed that Nikon had been able to pull this UI off. I walked over to the display and picked up the demo model.
Problem was, it was not much like the video. Response time was slower and motion effects were minimal. It felt like a very different camera to what I’d seen.
Designers are often accused of creating demo-ware that doesn’t correlate with reality. This was at the other end of the cycle: marketing folks creating a simulation of a product that doesn’t match what exists in the world.
A video about a project out of IBM’s research labs aimed to better support mobile email triage. Help is sorely needed in this area, and while this project definitely shows some research-labs rough edges, it’s got some interesting ideas for rethinking mobile email.
This is a review of some fascinating books, on a subject dear to my heart: designing objects for flexible / changing uses (or even misuse).
“How many ways can you use a plastic bag? What about a paper clip, a Post-it note, or a park bench? This isn’t a quiz; it’s about messing with design, about reinventing objects and endowing them with new uses. We all do it—you, your kids, your parents, your sister in the burbs. We’ve all slid a matchbook under a table to stabilize it and turned a sheet of paper into a dustpan, and in that sense everyone is a designer. Design doesn’t simply happen at the moment of creation, when an object is given certain attributes to solve a specific set of problems. It happens in the myriad ways a plastic grocery bag is reused, reconceptualized, reborn.”
Fabio Sergio writes about using standard consumer devices as infrastructure for all kinds of touch-enabled devices.
“Apple’s smaller-scale touchware has become so ubiquitous that it’s easier to consider it as a foundation, rather than as a building. I am guessing that the same will happen at a larger scale, and the iPad will soon appear as touchfrastructure wherever and whenever a portable, comfortably-sized touchscreen will be needed. I can see lots of reasons why such scenarios won’t be rare. Quite the opposite, actually.”
“The goal is to clearly direct end users to the content they want. Metro interfaces are supposed to embody harmonious, functional, and attractive visual elements. Ideally, good UI design should encourage playful exploration when interacting with the application and people should feel a sense of wonder and excitement. A clear, straightforward design not only makes an application legible, it encourages usage.”
“With the iPhone, Apple put together an extremely simple modal interface that works, one that people of all ages and backgrounds understand right away…Microsoft’s approach is completely different. Instead of becoming another me-too cellphone, like Android and the rest, the Windows Phone 7 team came up their own vision of what the cellphone should be. In the process, they have created a beautiful user interface in which the data is at the center of user interaction. Not the apps—specific functions—but the information itself. At some points, in fact, it feels like the information is the interface itself.”
“Interface fragmentation seems to be a somewhat desirable thing. Okay, let’s call it “interface uniqueness.” You set the look of the product to reflect (or create) a brand feel that is related to the device it lives on, but is clearly differentiated from other apps or sites available to the same device. This is valid, and we work on projects like that all the time. Right this minute I have a team working on new interfaces for a mobile web browser. But interaction has to be grounded in the common device interaction language. We’re not changing the interaction for that browser in any notable way.”
“Nokia has the opportunity to play on a much wider field than that of Apple: it can serve the end of the market that wants a good phone that is not too smart; can offer smartphones with all crucial functions at the lowest price on the market; but also has to play at the high-end of expensive and attractive smartphones like the iPhone. It is the high-end market where cultural leadership is defined.”
“Here’s a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm. User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they’re increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).”
Small Surfaces is a site about design for mobile technology. This site tracks articles about interaction design, user interface design, user experience, usability and social trends related to mobile devices.
