I liked this nugget in Jakob Neilsen’s review of the ten best application UIs for the year.
“Although dedicated mobile apps are not yet good enough to win in their own right, it was striking how many of this year’s winners have a mobile component. Mobile is definitively the trend to watch for next year, and any application owner should think hard about whether and how to add mobile features in 2009.”
Link: Year’s 10 Best Application UIs (useit.com)
I agree with Michael Mace on this – the future of mobile innovation is web delivered applications. That in my mind is one of the really interesting things about the iPhone (aside from ruthless simplification and swishy motion fun); it’s a viable platform for delivering niche applications through a truly nice web browser.
“I think Web applications are going to destroy most native app development for mobiles. Not because the Web is a better technology for mobile, but because it has a better business model. Think about it: If you’re creating a website, you don’t have to get permission from a carrier. You don’t have to get anything certified by anyone. You don’t have to beg for placement on the deck, and you don’t have to pay half your revenue to a reseller. In fact, the operator, handset vendor, and OS vendor probably won’t even be aware that you exist. It’ll just be you and the user, communicating directly.”
Update: see some interesting responses by Carlo Longino, Mike Rowehl, and Dean Bubley.
Link: Mobile applications, RIP (mobileopportunity.blogspot.com)
Riffing on the recent zooming UI launches, Carlo Longino thinks that the one of the basic questions related to the design of mobile applications is not giving people access to more, but giving them access to the right stuff.
“A common complaint about the mobile web is that it’s unattractive, or even useless, because of the small screen size, but I’ve never much bought into that. Is this focus on zooming a reflection of the idea that making the mobile web and mobile content better is just a question of fitting more on the screen? When we talk about “more” in this context, the focus should be on richness, not sheer quantity, and I remain convinced that this is a information architecture issue as much as a technical issue. The right idea isn’t to simply throw more information at mobile users, but to deliver better information to them.”
Link: Mobile UI Trends: Is More Better? (mobhappy.com)
Tom Hume writes that’s he’d like to see more task-specific mobile applications. I think he’s spot on. All the talk about the mobile web is using the wrong metaphor; the mass mobile computing experience is not going to involve surfing a web – it’s about doing atomic, simple, networked activities.
“Now this is a good example of what I’d like to see for mobile: mini-apps, like TadaList or MeetWithApproval, that do a single thing nice and cleanly.
“The big gap I see now is an app to help you synchronise with >2 people; getting consensus from 3 or more folks using SMS “by hand” is a nightmare, wouldn’t it be nicer if you could just get everyone sent a single message which lets them comment, argue, and decide…”
Link: Mini-mobile apps (tomhume.org)
Gong & Tarasewich take design guidelines typically used for desktop applications and transform them for mobile applications. Short and clear.
“Design for multiple and dynamic contexts
Allow for single- or no-handed operation
Design for small devices
Design for limited and split attention
Design for speed and recovery
Design for ‘top-down’ interaction
Allow for personalization
Design for enjoyment”
Link: Guidelines for handheld mobile interface design (pdf)
“As ubiquitous computing technology migrates into the home environment, there has been a concurrent effort to allow users to build and customize such technologies to suit their own specific needs. Many tools have been built to enable users with little or no programming knowledge to build such applications. Despite the de-emphasis on programming, however, these tools are often device-centric, rather than user-centric. In this paper, we investigate how people describe and conceptualize ubiquitous computing applications and technology. We examine how people naturally express ideas for novel applications to build conceptual models upon which to base future interfaces for creating ubiquitous computing applications.”
(I don’t have access to the ACM library at the moment, but this definitely looks interesting).
Published by Gabriel White.