Luke Wroblewski recently published a useful list of books that address the topic of design for mobile devices.
Link: Mobile Design Books (lukew.com)
Posts Tagged: cellphone
19
Jan 07
Designing games graphics for small screens
“The judo rule: Turn your weaknesses into your strengths. If you cannot escape the limitations of the small screen, use them to your advantage! Think of ways to turn the screen size into an integral part of gameplay — part of the game’s challenge that the player must learn to overcome. Make the small screen a cognitive challenge, not just a visual limitation.”
Link: Mobile Game Graphics – Overcoming the Small Screen Challenge (nokia.com)
15
Jan 07
Phone charging practices in Uganda
“Uganda is a country coping with a severe energy crisis resulting in frequent power cuts. In addition, access to mains electricity in rural locations is limited. Given that mobile phones require power, and access to power can be unpredictable – how do people keep their mobile phones and other electrical devices charged?”
Link: Power Up: Street Charging Services in Uganda (janchipchase.com)
6
Jan 07
Open source mobile phones
Robert Strohmeyer writes about the Open Cell Phone Project, a project intended to create an open software and hardware platform for the creation of GSM mobile devices. As Robert correctly comments, the way most mobile phones are made today (closed platforms, generally hard to modify) doesn’t provide very good support for the backyard hacker community.
“Hardware, however, is only half the solution. “The overarching problem,” Hamrick says, “is that it’s difficult for users to program phones or buy software to go with them.” A typical phone’s functions are limited by the service provider. Want to play a game on your mobile now? Give 5 or 10 bucks to your carrier and choose from a short list of titles. But the TuxPhone, built on the Linux operating system, lets developers write their own software and make it available to other users for free. One Homebrewer hopes to design a wireless music store that’s open to all cell users, regardless of their service provider – no more captive audiences and $2 downloads. (Of course, it’s not entirely free: You’ll still have to pay The Man for basic GSM service.)”
Link: DIY Cell Phone (wired.com)
6
Jan 07
Designing mobile web browsers
An academic thesis presenting research on the design of web browsers for mobile devices.
“Technically, it has been possible to access the Internet on a mobile phone for several years already, but the mobile browsing experience has often been cumbersome for ordinary people. Understanding the user needs in different use contexts is the key to improving the user experience and thereby popularizing device independent access to Internet.
“In her dissertation research, Virpi Roto has interviewed users of mobile browsers in several countries, and identified characteristics that help improve the mobile browsing user experience if taken into consideration. In addition to user and use context, all the system components should be taken into account: device, browser, network infrastructure, and web site. A partial outcome of the research is a visualization method called Minimap, which has gathered publicity as the first practical way to view Web pages on a mobile phone. The method has been used in Nokia S60 phones since 2006.”
Link: Web Browsing on Mobile Phones – Characteristics of User Experience (research.nokia.com)
25
Dec 06
Designing games for the long tail
Yiibu has made available a wonderful little presentation about the design of mobile games.
“Design for play, quiet contemplation, exploration, discovery, suspense, laughter, friendship, joy…(remember boredom, stress, fatigue, personalization, control, play—everyone’s personal time is different)”
Link: Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail (yiibu.com, PDF, via)
8
Dec 06
The phone of the future
Two interesting articles about mobile phones from the always-must-read Economist. The first, interestingly, predicts divergence rather than convergence and uses cars as the developmental analogue. I’m not convinced by the divergence argument here – unlike cars, mobile phones are general computing platforms than can adapt (or be adapted) to user habits in a way that cars just can’t.
“Last, and perhaps most important, the history of the car suggests that the technology industry’s current mania for “converged” devices is misguided. Nobody asks what the ideal shape for a car is, or predicts that eventually all cars will look identical. Instead there are different models for different uses: roomy people-carriers for school runs, sports cars for those suffering mid-life crises, small cars for urban dwellers.”
Link: Phones are the new cars (economist.com)
“And yet speculation about the future of phones persists, and no wonder. The telephone has changed beyond recognition since its invention in 1876, and is now both the most personal, most social and most rapidly evolving technological device. So to imagine the phone of the future is also to imagine the future of consumer technology, and its personal and social impact. What mobile phones will look like in a year or two is easy to guess: they will be slimmer and probably will let you watch television on the move. But what about ten or 15 years from now?”
Link: The phone of the future (economist.com)
27
Nov 06
Design for fiddling
Paul Golding asks whether mobile phones are designed to support people desire to fiddle with them. This is an excellent question, and in most situations phones only provide poor support for this kind of use.
“However, on close inspection (i.e peeking) at what some people do with their phones, the fiddling is a kind of mindless playing around – poking, changing, reverting back, going up and down menus, swapping settings back and forth, and so on – plain fiddling about. We like to tell kids not to fiddle with things – the remote control, the car controls, the radio, the computer. We often then go and do it ourselves…I wonder, have we fully embraced this fiddling-thingy within mobile design, or are we treating it as an exception?”
Link: Mobile fiddling… (wirelesswonders.blogspot.com)
6
Nov 06
Designing games for people’s pockets
Some guidelines for the design of handheld games.
“There are two major things you have to keep in mind concerning the interface and user-experience, first one is that most players will be picking up your game in short breaks. They need to be able to quickly start it, and quickly put it away without losing “everything”. The second thing is that you are dealing with alot of non-technical people, without any or little gaming experience. So keep things simple and intuitive.”
Link: Mobiles, design, and gameplay (orangepixel.net)
23
Oct 06
Feature creep and cell phones
“In fairness to cellphone makers, it is exceptionally difficult to design anything really well, especially a technically complex product that is manufactured in huge quantities. A well-designed object, like the Apple iPod, looks so effortless and can be used so intuitively, that it’s easy to underestimate the Herculean struggle required to produce it. There are many obstacles to great design. Inventing new materials. Predicting how the product will be used. Turf wars between designers, sales representatives and engineers. It takes a massive effort of corporate will – and the support of a visionary leader, like Apple’s Steve Jobs – to overcome them.”
Link: Style, function and the imperfect cellphone (iht.com)
