Design - Small Surfaces

Posts Tagged: design

africa, casestudy, design, kenya, mobile, mobilemoney, money, mpesa, report, safaricom, servicedesign, userexperience, ux — No Comments
30
Aug 10

How to design a mobile money service

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.”

Link: Designing Mobile Transfer Services: Lessons from M-PESA (gsmworld.com, 6.8MB PDF, see p52 of the report)

adaptation, book, design, flexibility, misuse, objects, repurposing, review, thinking — No Comments
22
Jul 10

Designing objects for unexpected uses

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.”

Link: Redefining Design (metropolismag.com, via)

apple, components, design, devices, foundation, infrastructure, ipad, iphone, mobile, touch — No Comments
18
Jul 10

Commodity touch devices as UI infrastructure

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.”

Link: Touchfrastructure meets the hypepad (frogdesign.com)

competition, design, differentiation, fragmentation, ui, unique, userinterface — No Comments
27
Jun 10

Designing a ‘unique’ UI

“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.”

Link: Interaction fragmentation, and avoiding it (littlespringsdesign.com)

apple, competition, design, mobile, nokia, phone — No Comments
27
Jun 10

Interview with Nokia’s head of design

“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.”

Link: The huge challenge of Nokia’s head of design and UX (experientia.com)

australia, conference, context, design, future, gabrielwhite, mobile, presentation, sensing, trends — 4 Comments
10
Oct 08

Context, Sensing and Mobiles

Here’s the presentation I gave in Sydney at Web Directions a week or so ago (great conference!).

Link: Context, Sensing and Mobiles (slideshare.net)

design, engineering, management, motorola, organisation, products, razr — No Comments
21
Aug 08

Design and Politics at Motorola

Motorola’s got some really talented designers and research folks.

“The RAZR, a design victory as much as an engineering one, only came about due to the gumption of chief marketing office Geoffrey Frost. Following the RAZR’s overnight success, Moto commissioned an in-house team to research the company’s next step. Countless hours were spent pulling together focus-group studies and carrier feedback, but it was all for naught—the research was simply ignored by Motorola’s top brass. “They have this attitude of, ‘Well, I’ve built phones for 20 years, I know what I’m doing,” says a frustrated member of that team, who noted that once Frost died in 2005, there was no one left with the chops and political capital to route around Moto’s stick-in-the-mud managers.”

Link: Motorola Insider Blame Game: Engineers Shoved Designers Aside (gizmodo.com)

design, iphone, small screen, trends, userexperience, ux — 1 Comment
20
Jul 08

NY Times Appreciates Small Screens

Interesting in that it’s in the Times.

“As it turns out, Mr. Jobs may well have understated the quality of the iPhone Web experience. Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays, which routinely have 20-inch or larger screens. It seems counterintuitive, but small really is beautiful.”

Link: On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff (nytimes.com, via)

design, examples, interactiondesign, ixd, mobile, nokia, presentation, visualdesign — 1 Comment
26
Jun 08

Ten Good Designs

Nokia’s written up a short article that highlights some examples of what they believe is good design for mobile.

examples

Link: Mobile Design Showcases (nokia.com, via)

basics, context, design, mobile, principles — 2 Comments
24
Jun 08

Mobile design basics

“Similar things happen all too often on mobiles. While typing a text message, a full-screen alert interrupts you to say a new message has arrived, maybe destroying the current composition. It’s almost impossible to type web addresses on most phones, because the useful symbols are hidden away. It takes six keypresses to find out what call you just missed because you couldn’t get to the phone on time. It’s easier to accidentally completely delete a new MMS than to send it.”

Link: The right information, at the right time (littlespringsdesign.com)

adaptivepath, blog, carrier, concepts, design, handset, interactiondesign, ixd, manufacturer, mobile, phone, ui, userinterface — No Comments
23
Jun 08

An idea every day

Rachel Hinman’s going on a generative sprint for the next three months.

“For the next 90 days, I’m going to think about, sketch, draw, and prototype ideas about mobile design and post them here. Like folks recovering from any addiction, I don’t know what is at the end of these 90 days. I’m just gonna commit to thinking about it every day for 90 days and have faith that something good will be on the other side.”

fan_2

Link: 90 Mobiles in 90 Days (90mobilesin90days.com)

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