“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.”
Link: Windows Phone 7 User Experience Guidelines (microsoft.com)
“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.”
Link: Windows Phone 7 Interface: Microsoft Has Out-Appled Apple (gizmodo.com)
Dave Gustafson pointed to a great Gizmodo post that looks at the absurd place the clickwheel iPod has gone over the years with all the functionality that slowly got added to something that originally was designed only to play music.
“To put this eyeball cacophony into perspective, the new menu system has over 60 places to click—nearly triple that of the original iPod version (and that’s not including Nike+ integration on nanos). Plus, the new system has five screens just for settings, all of which are unrelated to the main “Settings” menu. How did things become so complicated? The iPod went from doing one thing really well to doing a bunch of things pretty well. But the UI was never redesigned to accommodate the functionality…Right now Apple’s sending city traffic down a one-lane, unpaved road.”
Link: A Sad Fact: The iPod’s Clickwheel Must Die (gizmodo.com, via)
Smashing Magazine describes some future UI concepts, including several for mobile devices.
“Below we present 10 recent developments in the field of user experience design. Most techniques may seem very futuristic, but some of them are already reality. And in fact, they are extremely impressive. Keep in mind: they can become ubiquitous in the next years.”
Link: 10 Futuristic User Interfaces (smashingmagazine.com)
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)
Morten Hjerde has taken a long hard look at text input field design.
“Edit-in-place is preferable in most cases. A person can see the context, and the visuals is consistent. Full screen editing is preferable when the user is likely to enter a large amount of text. Predictive text (T9, etc) may only be available in full screen edit.”
Link: The anatomy of a text input field (sender11.typepad.com)
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)
Just came across a blog published by Kevin Arthur called Touch Usability. The blog tracks articles related to touch UIs, and has a great collection of content.
Link: Touch Usability (touchusability.com)
Yahoo’s published a nice looking stencil library, which includes mobile components.
Link: Design Stencils (yahoo.com)
Cool stuff.
“I wanted to try to take advantage of spatial reasoning and spatial memory to make it easier to find and navigate stuff. Let the user see the scope of information available. Start by showing the big picture. When it makes sense, let it behave more like real-world objects. You can normally pick up objects where you left them off. They don’t move when you are not watching, something digital objects often do. (Insert your favorite joke about spouse here.) Over the last couple hundred thousand years our brains has developed a fantastic ability to take in and store where stuff is in our immediate surroundings. Since mobile screens are a part of our immediate surroundings, we should try to take advantage of this ability. It might sometimes make user interfaces a bit less confusing.”
Link: Flat Music Player version 2 (sender11.typepad.com)
MEX is hosting a design competition of sorts – encouraging people to showcase design ideas (or new products) for mobile. Here are some of them.
The Blind Phone concept seems to a bit of a dexterity obstacle course – I’m not sure how you could dial with a pinky finger and keep a decent grip on the device:
“The Blind Phone is aimed at filling a niche requirement for blind and partially sighted people. A phone designed from the ground up around the needs of a restricted sight person.”
Link: BSR Blind Phone
Delta deals with the particularly North American obsession with having full keyboards on devices. It has F keys, and I’ll leave it at that:
“At the heart of a Delta II equipped mobile phone is a patented, modified QWERTY button layout that is simple, elegant, and brutally effective. The buttons are large enough to easily read and far enough apart to comfortably press, even for people with large hands. The ingenious button layout takes advantage of the user’s motor memory and PC (QWERTY) keyboard typing experience. The result is new users typing a speedy 20 to 30+ WPM in less than 5 minutes; on single-hand operation mobile phones no larger than a business card – previously this was unheard of.”
Link: Finest Mobile Phone Keypad in the World
Motionized looks like fun:
“By using the movement of the handset to enable users to browse menus, pan and zoom within images, navigate web pages or play games, the Motionized handset introduces a breakthrough in user experience.”
Link: Motionized™ – using the phone’s camera to enable a new UI
Slide it (like SharkText, which became ShapeWriter) requires users to slide a stylus around to type faster:
“SlideIt, is an intuitive method to input text on touch screen enabled devices. Instead of tapping each letter, with SlideIt users simply point to first letter of a word and slide the stylus to the subsequent letters. Spacing is achieved by just lifting the stylus. Speeds of more than 50 words per minute are easily achievable. Consumers love the feel of writing quickly and accurately.”
Microsoft Research is offering up a vision for computing in 2020. The very detailed document is thought provoking stuff, and even better it offers up some very specific questions about design challenges that fall out of that vision.
“Many new forms of mobile interaction are on the horizon. Mobile devices will allow us to connect with others in new ways, as well as to access information in the environment. For example, we will increasingly be able to use mobile devices to interact with objects in the real world, acting more as if they are extensions of our own hands, by pointing and gesturing with them. While travelling, we can gesture with our mobile device at a historic building and be offered up an audio or visual history of its architecture. Taking a picture of a product in the supermarket can send us back information about where the product came from, its associated air miles, and ecological credentials. Likewise, buying a piece of music by pointing at a band’s poster and then sending it as a gift to a friend’s music player can be as natural as a ‘cut and paste’ operation on a desktop computer. As we move toward 2020, mobile devices will increasingly offer flexibility in interaction and new kinds of connections to both our local and remote world.”
Link: Being Human: human computer interaction in 2020 (research.microsoft.com, thanks Stefan)
Published by Gabriel White.