Small Surfaces » design

Designing objects for unexpected uses

Gabriel White — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:36:09 +0000

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)

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Commodity touch devices as UI infrastructure

Gabriel White — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:24:55 +0000

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)

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Designing a ‘unique’ UI

Gabriel White — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:57:12 +0000

“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)

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Interview with Nokia’s head of design

Gabriel White — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:38:37 +0000

“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)

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Context, Sensing and Mobiles

Gabriel White — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:30:00 +0000

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)

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Enhancing social connections on mobile devices

Gabriel White — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:41:10 +0000

Video from the Business to Buttons conference, with Hampus Jakobsson and James Haliburton of TAT talking about social connectivity on mobile devices.

“Mobile phones are some of the most advanced personal objects we have, but still there are just technical inventions or stylish skins. What can be done to improve personal communication and social connections? TAT Tenk researches social patterns around mobile applications and will present some of its findings during first half of 2008.”

Link: Can mobile phones become useful as social tools? (businesstobuttons.tv)

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Design and Politics at Motorola

Gabriel White — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:50:38 +0000

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)

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NY Times Appreciates Small Screens

Gabriel White — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:52:57 +0000

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)

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Modal overlays

Gabriel White — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:36:01 +0000

Aza Raskin write about avoiding modalities.

“What’s wrong with modal overlays? In a word, they are modal: You are either interacting with the content or the overlay. Modal overlays don’t allow you to refer back and forth between two sources of information, or move fluidly between two actions. The second problem with modal overlays are that they are disconnected and disjoint from other overlays—knowing how to access one doesn’t yield a physical sense of how to access another one; they do not scale to give a unified, cohesive interface. ”

Link: Mobile Firefox and Designing Without Modal Overlays (azarask.in)

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Ten Good Designs

Gabriel White — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 05:51:48 +0000

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

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

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Mobile design basics

Gabriel White — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:20:41 +0000

“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)

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An idea every day

Gabriel White — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:14:20 +0000

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.”

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

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Design of the new Wells Fargo ATMs

Gabriel White — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:53:52 +0000

“With the new UI, we were able to use the entire screen for user input. This came really handy when we approached the workflow for envelope-free check deposits which allow much shorter processing times and the ability to print receipts with an actual image of the check. It also saves the bank processing costs.”

Link: That design is money! (physicalinterface.com, via)

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What we can learn from coins

Gabriel White — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:01:06 +0000

One of the wonderful things about the design of the new UK coinage is that it makes the relationships between the coins far more important than the individual items. In fact, the individual coins are only interesting insofar as it’s possible to tell a story about the relationships between them. Pushing it further: the design is all about the negative space.

This, I think, has some interesting implications for the design of mobile devices and systems. How we can create systems that are more interesting in the spaces between the devices we are designing and other objects; how can the design focus be on the space? How can we create systems that are literally piece parts of the collection of physical and virtual objects that people use in their mobile lives?

Link: The New Designs Revealed (royalmint.com)

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Staying loosely connected

Gabriel White — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:44:28 +0000

“However, the real reason in my mind that the iPhone wins is it’s ability to “stay in social touch”. The email, the SMS, the browsing experience has enabled much of the behavior that social networkers have mastered already on the laptop or desktop. It’s not about the technology, it is about how the device helps you socialize.

“So the iPhone wins because it both keeps us in the flow and keeps us loosely connected. Perhaps a little like adding a “lurking” factor…. iPhone in hand I have a better sense of what my friends and colleagues are doing.. I am more connected without actually thinking about it or working at it. As someone who’s never used a Blackberry and yet observed the “connected” behavior that creates around email (like IM) it’s been a revelation.”

Link: The Mobile Social World of Presence (henshall.com), via)

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