Small Surfaces » trends

All Thumbs

Gabriel White — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:09:26 +0000

“Ask anyone over 25 what digit they use to ring a doorbell and most people will pop up their index finger. But ask a youngster and they are much more likely to extend a thumb. “Where texting is happening they use the thumb,” Anand Chandrasekher, head of Intel’s ultra mobility group, told BBC News at CES.”

Link: Texting a signal of wider trends (bbc.co.uk)

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Context, Sensing and Mobiles

Gabriel White — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 22:30:00 +0000

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)

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Google on the future of mobile

Gabriel White — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:20:28 +0000

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)

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Urban Computing and Locative Media

Gabriel White — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 17:15:04 +0000

Anne Galloway, of Purse Lip Square Jaw, has published her PhD.

“The dissertation builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape our experiences of spatiality, temporality and embodiment. It contributes to methodological innovation through the use of data bricolage and research blogging, which are presented through experimental and recombinant textual strategies; and it contributes to the field of science and technology studies by bringing together actor-network theory with the sociology of expectations in order to empirically evaluate an area of cutting-edge design.”

Link: A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media (purselipsquarejaw.org)

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NTT DOCOMO Future Concept Videos

Gabriel White — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:07:03 +0000

One of the interesting things about this concept video (which isn’t particularly earth-shattering in itself), is comparing it with IDEO’s concept piece they produced for Intel. It’s interesting how the DOCOMO piece feels, just, well, more human.

“Mobile phones have evolved to become indispensable tools that have changed the way we lead our lives, and they are certain to continue to evolve and play an even greater role in both business and everyday life.”

Link: A mobile life in the near future envisioned by DOCOMO (nttdocomo.co.jp)

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Aurora Concept and the Mobile Web

Gabriel White — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 20:41:44 +0000

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)

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Context Aware vs Location Based

Gabriel White — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:56:20 +0000

“I must say that it’s been surprisingly difficult, in various conversations with folks not immersed in the IxD space, to get across the essential distinction between context-aware applications and location-based services (LBS)...Mac Funamizu has actually nailed two separate things here. The first demonstrates precisely what I, at least, mean when I use the words “context aware”: but for some residual core of basic functionality, the device’s capabilities and available interface modalities at any given moment are largely if not entirely determined by the other networked objects around it. If you pair the device with a text, it’s a reader; at the checkstand, it provides a friendly POS interface; aimed at the skyline, it augments reality.”

Link: Worth a thousand words, etc. (speedbird.wordpress.com)

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Mobile components

Gabriel White — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 23:30:37 +0000

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)

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NY Times Appreciates Small Screens

Gabriel White — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 02:52:57 +0000

Interesting in that it’s in the Times.

“As it turns out, Mr. Jobs may well have understated the quality of the iPhone Web experience. Visiting Web sites that have been redesigned for the iPhone is often a quicker and more pleasing experience than it is on those increasingly cinema-style desktop displays, which routinely have 20-inch or larger screens. It seems counterintuitive, but small really is beautiful.”

Link: On a Small Screen, Just the Salient Stuff (nytimes.com, via)

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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)

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Touch Usability blog

Gabriel White — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:24:28 +0000

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)

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Mobile innovation in Africa

Gabriel White — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 22:32:46 +0000

Ken Banks writes about his experience with mobile technology in Africa.

“When it comes to mobile innovation, the gap between developed and developing countries is not much of a gap at all. Mobile innovation in the West, largely technology-lead, sits in contrast to that in the developing world where combating the geographic, economic and cultural constraints of users is considered a more sensible way to go. This explains the emergence of the torch phone, for users who live in areas with little or no regular light, or multiple phone books for users who share their phones with family members. On the heavyweight side, a plethora of financial applications have hit the streets, with Safaricom’s m-Pesa service getting by far the biggest press to date. Regularly used by hundreds of thousands of Kenyans, you often hear it described as the “Kenyan Debit Card”, allowing users to transfer money through their mobile phones to help out family and friends, or to buy and sell goods and services across the airwaves. For the tens of millions of Kenyans without bank accounts, m-Pesa represents both a revolution and a revelation. It is now being rolled out in other countries, with Afghanistan next on the list.”

Link: Africa’s grassroots mobile revolution – a traveller’s perspective (vodafone.com)

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Mobile Technology and Society Book

Gabriel White — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 01:59:02 +0000

The recently published Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies looks like it has a lot of interesting pieces in it.

Digital Divides and Social Mobility

The Mobile Makes Its Mark – Lara Srivastava
Shrinking Fourth World? Mobiles, Development, and Inclusion – Jonathan Donner
Mobile Traders and Mobile Phones in Ghana – Ragnhild Overå
Mobile Networks: Migrant Workers in Southern China – Pui-lam Law and Yinni Peng
Mobile Communication in Mexico: Policy and Popular Dimensions – Judith Mariscal and Carla Marisa Bonina
Reducing Illiteracy as a Barrier to Mobile Communication – Jan Chipchase
Health Services and Mobiles: A Case from Egypt – Patricia Mechael

How the Urban Poor Acquire and Give Meaning to the Mobile Phone – Lourdes M. Portus

Sociality and Co-presence
Always-On/Always-On-You: The Tethered Self – Sherry Turkle
The Mobile Phone’s Ring – Christian Licoppe
Mobile Technology and the Body: Apparatgeist, Fashion, and Function – Scott Campbell
The Mediation of Ritual Interaction via the Mobile Telephone – Rich Ling
Adjusting the Volume: Technology and Multitasking in Discourse Control – Naomi S. Baron
Maintaining Co-presence: Tourists and Mobile Communication in New Zealand – Peter B. White and Naomi Rosh White

The Social Effects of Keitai and Personal Computer E-mail in Japan – Kakuko Miyata, Jeffrey Boase and Barry Wellman

Politics and Social Change
Mobile Media and Political Collective Action – Howard Rheingold
Mobile Multimedia: Uses and Social Consequences – Ilpo Koskinen
Mobile Communication and Sociopolitical Change in the Arab World – Mohammad Ibahrine
Locating the Missing Links of Mobile Communication in Japan: Sociocultural Influences on Usage by Children and the Elderly – On-Kwok Lai
The Effects of Mobile Telephony on Singaporean Society – Shahiraa Sahul Hameed

Mobile Communication and the Transformation of the Democratic Process – Kenneth Gergen

Culture and Imagination
Cultural Differences in Communication Technology Use: Adolescent Jews and Arabs in Israel – Gustavo Mesch and Ilan Talmud
“Express Yourself” and “Stay Together”: The Middle-Class Indian Family – Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy, Molly Wright Steenson and Carolyn Y. Wei
Nondevelopmental Uses of Mobile Communication in Tanzania – Thomas Molony
Cultural Studies of Mobile Communication – Gerard Goggin
Mobile Music as Environmental Control and Prosocial Entertainment – James E. Katz, Katie M. Lever and Yi-Fan Chen
Supernatural Mobile Communication in the Philippines and Indonesia – Bart Barendregt and Raul Pertierra
Boom in India: Mobile Media and Social Consequences – Madanmohan Rao and Mira Desai
Mobile Games and Entertainment – James E. Katz and Sophia Krzys Acord

Online Communities on the Move: Mobile Play in Korea – Youn-ah Kang

Conclusions and Future Prospects
Mainstreamed Mobiles in Daily Life: Perspectives and Prospects – James E. Katz

Link: Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (mit.edu)

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Continuous Partial Attention

Gabriel White — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:22:03 +0000

Continuous partial attention is one of the side effects of mobile networked computing; it’s parasitic on our desires to feel connected to other people.

“Continuous partial attention and multi-tasking are two different attention strategies, motivated by different impulses. When we multi-task, we are motivated by a desire to be more productive and more efficient. Each activity has the same priority – we eat lunch AND file papers. We stir the soup AND talk on the phone…We multi-task to CREATE more opportunity for ourselves -time to DO more and time to RELAX more.

“In the case of continuous partial attention, we’re motivated by a desire not to miss anything. There’s a kind of vigilance that is not characteristic of multi-tasking. With cpa, we feel most alive when we’re connected, plugged in and in the know. We constantly SCAN for opportunities – activities or people – in any given moment. With every opportunity we ask, “What can I gain here?””

Link: Fine Dining with Mobile Devices (huffingtonpost.com), and also worth reading is Meet the life hackers (nytimes.com) and Attention and Sex (scottberkun.com)

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Three

Gabriel White — Sun, 04 May 2008 01:35:03 +0000

In the last three years everything and nothing has changed.

User experience design for the mobile life was a murmur in 2005. It was barely audible in the world of business magazines and almost untalked about in all but the most obscure design circles. Today it’s hard not to overhear the growing cacophony, in conferences, magazines, the news and elsewhere.

But beyond conversation, not that much has actually changed. The devices we carry in our hands are still using increasingly overburdened interaction paradigms, and only slowly are truly new services and capabilities being used in the wild.

This blog turned three today. It’s amazing to me how much louder the conversation has become; over the next three years I’m looking forward to turning more of those conversations into reality.

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