Posts Tagged: mobilephone

, , , , , , , , , , — No Comments
24
Mar 08

Evolving to baroque complexity

Jan Borchers wrote this article for the latest edition of Interactions magazine.

”...Sweet-spot products make your life simpler, baroque ones more complex. Sweet-spot products support you in a new way, making a previously difficult or awkward task change fundamentally. Learn just a few new things, and you get an almost magical boost in productivity, simplifying your everyday life. Baroque products just tweak existing processes, trying to make them more efficient in some situations, but often complicating other tasks (and sometimes the most frequent ones — think microwave ovens). And to use them, you often need to learn a fair amount of new interaction concepts, operations, and other lingo.

”...Cell phones hit their sweet spot in the mid-90’s: pocketable handsets, with several days of standby and calling charges that didn’t ruin the average consumer anymore. What a change! Within years, people moved from carefully planning their evening out to “call us when you’re ready, we’ll tell you what bar we ended up in”...Today, cell phones have moved squarely into their baroque stage. In a 2007 study we did for German’s largest mobile technology consumer magazine, connect, virtually all models we tested gave users problems with even the most basic and essential tasks: turn on, mute ringer, call number. Being able to browse the web, take pictures, watch or record movies wherever you are is great, mind you, but it has overloaded the sweet-spot product and interaction design of the traditional mobile phone beyond recovery.”

Link: Sweet Spots and Baroque Phases of Interactive Technology Lifecycles (rwth-aachen.de, also at interactions.acm.org, via)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , — 3 Comments
10
Jan 07

Apple Finally Gets a Phone

Apple finally got their phone. I had two immediate reactions. It’s fantastic that a company has released a touch-screen phone that’s hitting the mass market. I hope this is a wake up call to other manufacturers: touch-screen devices are not just for the high end PDA market. Second, I’m very interested to experience text entry on the device. One of the most difficult things to do on a touch-screen is text entry (text entry while in motion can be exceptionally difficult, and is almost impossible one-handed). While the iPhone solution looks interesting, it’s not clear that the solution is completely baked.

Link: Apple – iPhone (apple.com)
Link: The Apple iPhone runs OS X – Engadget (engadget.com)

, , , , — 2 Comments
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)

, , , , , , , , , , , , — 1 Comment
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)

, , , , , , , , , , — 1 Comment
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)