Mobile - Small Surfaces

Posts Tagged: mobile

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)

concept, email, ibm, iphone, labs, mobile, prototype, research, sorting, tasks, triage, ui, userinterface — 2 Comments
28
Jul 10

Mobile email triage

A video about a project out of IBM’s research labs aimed to better support mobile email triage. Help is sorely needed in this area, and while this project definitely shows some research-labs rough edges, it’s got some interesting ideas for rethinking mobile email.

Link: Triage and Capture: Rethinking Mobile Email (youtube.com)

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)

guide, guidelines, interactiondesign, ixd, microsoft, mobile, phone, standards, ui, userinterface, windows, windowsphone — 1 Comment
5
Jul 10

Windows Phone 7 User Experience Guidelines

“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)

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)

engadget, microsoft, mobile, operating system, ui, ux, windows mobile — No Comments
24
Feb 09

Engadget is underwhelmed by Windows Mobile 6.5

“Instead of demonstrating its technical prowess and vast resources, Microsoft limped out a half-hearted rehash of an OS we’ve seen all too much of, and managed to blind most onlookers with a storm of big time partnerships and bloated PR. While their major competitors (and even some allies) in the mobile space seem bent on changing ideas about how we interact with our portable devices, the company proved once again that it’s content to rest on its laurels and learn little from its mistakes.”

Link: Editorial: Ten reasons why Windows Mobile 6.5 misses the mark (engadget.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)

alerts, future, google, mobile, privacy, sensors, trends, trust — No Comments
20
Sep 08

Google on the future of mobile

Google’s Andy Rubin thinks this of the future of mobile:

Smart alerts: Your phone will be smart about your situation and alert you when something needs your attention.
Augmented reality: Your phone uses its arsenal of sensors to understand your situation and provide you information that might be useful.
Crowd sourcing goes mainstream: Your phone is your omnipresent microphone to the world, a way to publish pictures, emails, texts, Twitters, and blog entries.
Sensors everywhere: Your phone knows a lot about the world around you.
Tool for development: Your phone may be more than just a convenience, it may be your livelihood.
The future-proof device: Your phone will open up, as the Internet already has, so it will be easy for developers to create or improve applications and content.

Safer software through trust and verification: Your phone will provide tools and information to empower you to decide what to download, what to see, and what to share.
Link: The future of mobile (googleblog.blogspot.com)

clickwheel, complexity, control, controls, interactiondesign, ipod, ixd, mobile, music, scaling, ui, userinterface — 1 Comment
11
Sep 08

The iPod can’t scale

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.

ipodmenunew

“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)

browser, concept, future, mobile, mozilla, trends, video — No Comments
25
Aug 08

Aurora Concept and the Mobile Web

The Aurora browser concept piece from the folks at Adaptive Path has lots to like about it. But overall I struggle with the idea of the web browser as a universal tool for doing things on devices, especially mobile devices. The web browser is great in that it’s a networked standard way of easily accessing information and services (in the same way Gopher) was so popular before it). It’s easy to get scale, because everybody has the same client and rendering engine on their PC.

But if there’s one thing that’s demanded by mobile devices, it’s that the things you create are highly optimised for the context of use. And this is exactly what a web browser is not. So it’s no surprise to me that people are racing to use the native iPhone applications for Facebook or Twitter rather than going to the iPhone-specific web versions.

Link: Aurora Concept Video (adaptivepath.com)

applications, best, desktop, integration, jakobneilsen, mobile, trends — No Comments
12
Aug 08

Mobile components

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)

Posts Tagged: mobile

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