“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)
“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)
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)
A hypothetical redesign of the USAA mobile user experience.
“Utilizing these well-designed, iconic images already on the web site sends a message of professionalism that says “Our company is second to none. We offer style and class. We take no shortcuts, etc.” It also gives the application a little bit of an interactive feel, much more so than the plain, dry text links offered currently.”
Link: Design for Users: Branding Yourself in Small Spaces (design-for-users.com)
If I paid a dollar every time Horace Luke of HTC says ‘simple’ in this product launch I’d be down about $132. Hyperbole aside, it’s an interesting piece of design.
Demo of the overall experience:
Demo of the the web experience:
Link: YouTube – HTC TouchFLO 3D Video on HTC Diamond (youtube.com, via)
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)
Marek Pawlowski write about one of the topics at this year’s MEX conference: fashion.
“It may be limited to the high-end of the mobile market, but Vertu is a great example of two very important techniques which are applicable at all levels: total experience planning and customer involvement. The Vertu experience extends across the hardware, software, services and retail environment. At the same time, it involves its customers directly in the product development process, producing customised handsets and allowing customers to actually see how their device is built.
“These principles may manifest themselves in different ways at different levels of the pricing scale, but the fundamentals remain the same. A successful manufacturer must be able to see its products in the wider context of a user’s lifestyle and must structure its development process to respond quickly to the needs of individual customers.
“Perhaps this is indicative of manufacturers following ‘fashion’ or becoming ’style-orientated’, or perhaps it is just good user experience practice?”
Link: Is fashion a stronger motivator than functionality? (mobileuserexperience.com)
Some interesting discussion about mobile UX at Over the Air, via Brian Fling’s resurrected Mobile Design blog.
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.”
Sender 11 has published some stats on device screen sizes. Interesting stuff, though it’s important to note that the study doesn’t cover the user prevalence of particular screen sizes.
“Over the years the relative screen size difference has increased. The difference between the smallest (128×128) and the largest (800×480) is now a factor of 23. That means the largest screen is 23 times bigger than the smallest one.
“You can see that the smaller screens have a portrait orientation and the large screens have a landscape orientation. Between them are the phones that can change orientation, they can work in both landscape and portrait. 240×320 is the dominant screen size overall.”
Link: Sender 11: Mobile screen size trends (sender11.typepad.com)
InUseful published a usability report on the iPhone.
“What is it then that makes the iPhone different? Most importantly, it has removed one level of abstraction by allowing the user to act on objects using the finger directly on the phone’s surface. The difference between this and having to press keys on a keyboard and watch the screen to see what happens is striking. Instead of having to press one key to focus on the list item representing your contact and then clicking another key to make the call, the iPhone allows you to actually click the contact right on the screen. To scroll, you pull the list itself instead of clicking a down-key, and to flip between pictures in the album, you drag them from one side to another.”
Link: Free iPhone usability report (inuseful.se)
Published by Gabriel White.