Small Surfaces » phone

Windows Phone 7 User Experience Guidelines

Gabriel White — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 12:06:56 +0000

“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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Phone as exhibition object

Gabriel White — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:27:02 +0000

Putting People First has a translated section of a French report about mobile phone use by teens.

”...for adults the mobile is a hyper-personal device, an intimate black box with data that absolutely need to be protected. For teenagers on the other hand, the mobile is often as little confidential and intimate as their blogs. They are instead identity and exhibition spaces of oneself, with “museum galleries” of photos, ringtones, videos, and music to share with a community of peers: archiving makes only sense if it can be shared.”

Link: French ethnographic study on teens and mobiles (experientia.com)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Branding on mobile devices

Gabriel White — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 01:37:20 +0000

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

HTC Touch Diamond Demo

Gabriel White — Thu, 08 May 2008 19:26:11 +0000

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Spatial music UI concept

Gabriel White — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:58:44 +0000

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Fashion over function?

Gabriel White — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 17:18:06 +0000

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

User Experience Discussion at Over the Air

Gabriel White — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:46:56 +0000

Some interesting discussion about mobile UX at Over the Air, via Brian Fling’s resurrected Mobile Design blog.

Link: Over The Air: User Exerience Discussion – Part 1

Link: Over The Air: User Exerience Discussion – Part 2

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

MEX design competition

Gabriel White — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 17:22:08 +0000

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.”

Link: SlideIT write words not letters

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Screen size survey

Gabriel White — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:09:49 +0000

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

iPhone’s breakthrough: touchscreen

Gabriel White — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 09:26:42 +0000

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)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Tufte on information resolution on the iPhone

Gabriel White — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:47:01 +0000

“The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information—too often leaving users with “Where am I?” puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

To do so requires increasing the information resolution of the screen by the hardware (higher resolution screens) and by screen design (eliminating screen-hogging computer administrative debris, and distributing information adjacent in space).

...The design ideas here include high-resolution touch-screens; minimizing computer admin debris; spatial distribution of information rather than temporal stacking; complete integration of text, images, and live video; a flat non-hierarchical interface; and replacing spacious icons with tight words. The metaphor for the interface is the information. Thus the iPhone got it mostly right.”

Link: Ask E.T.: Interface design and the iPhone (edwardtufte.com, via)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.

Sumsing 3000 phone does everything

Gabriel White — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 01:46:44 +0000

It irons, it toasts, it even inflates your bicycle tyres.

(For folks on the RSS, click the link to see the video)

Link: YouTube – Sumsing Turbo 3000 English Version (youtube.com, via)

Related:

Share on Facebook | Save to del.icio.us | Small Surfaces is published by Gabriel White.