Archive for User Interface
by Imran Ali
June 23, 2008 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Crowdsensing, Devices, Research, User Interface
Earlier this year we covered the emerging field of crowdsensing - the ability to aggregate sensor readings from networks of mobile devices.
Last week, CNET highlighted research underway at Georgetown University that’s exploring the use of mobile devices to track the glocose levels of diabetes patients…a more personal form of mobile sensors that may have some ‘crowd’ applications but are very much about individual users…
- RFID-enabled skin patches sense glucose levels.
- The patch sends glucose data to a nearby mobile handset.
- The handset can do any number of things - submit data to a healthcare tracking service, emergency services and first responders or use the data to direct a dispensation device to administer insulin.
The process and the technology are still in teh early stages of development, but have exciting implications for healthcare, further underlying the emerging role of cellphones as mobile sensing platforms.
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In a bizarre inverse of the Georgetown project, a recently published design concept for a digital tattoo display also uses blood - this time to power a fuel cell that runs a display surface implanted under the skin of the user! The display, could potentially be used in concert with mobile technologies and as the author points out, it would be ‘waterproof and powered by pizza’!
A food shortage coupled with a profilerating mobile market, potentially powered by said food? Oops!
by Imran Ali
May 26, 2008 at 6:58 am · Filed under Design, Mobile messaging 2.0, Usage + Usability, User Interface, iPhone
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of arranging and attending an evening talk by one of the mobile industry’s unsung heroes, Clive Grinyer.
Until the beginning of May, and for the last several years Clive was alternately the Director of Customer Experience and Design & Usability at France Telecom’s mobile operator, Orange.
Prior to this, Clive’s led the UK’s Design Council, Samsung’s design group, roles at TAG McLaren, IDEO and also co-founded a design practice with Apple’s Jonathan Ive.
With such a stellar pedigree, Clive was tasked with imagining France Telecom’s new era of converged mobile, broadband, TV and fixed telephony services.
The focus of Clive’s talk was the poor application of design processes as an afterthought in technology. Design is often appled too late as a ’skinning’ activity rather than early on where design can impact the decisions that deeply affect the user experience; and for Clive user experience encompasses everything from retail stores to packaging, product design, devices & service interfaces as well as customer support.
Though the talk took place a day before Clive left Orange for the consultancy wing of Cisco, joining as their Director of Customer Experience, he touched upon some of the legacy of his time at one of the world’s largest cellcos and alluded to somequite exciting products and services, due to be launched in the next few weeks.
I thoroughly recommend Clive’s three talks, downloadable as PDFs from his website…
- Lipstick On A Pig - the focus of the talks earlier this month.
- The Silence Of Design - exploring the gulf of understanding between designer’s work and user’s experiences.
- The Design Toolbox - covering the basic elements of design for products, user interfaces and service design; notably elements that are applicable for designers and non-designers.
As design-centric companies like Apple pull ahead of their competitors in sectors such as mobility, computing and service design, it’s becoming increasingly important for companies to understand how to understand, replicate employ such practices in their own philosophies. Clive’s work is a great starting point in this journey.
by Imran Ali
March 26, 2008 at 1:43 pm · Filed under Books, Development, Gestural, Usage + Usability, User Interface, iPhone, touch screens
With an interminable three months before the June 2008 release of the iPhone SDK, jailbroken, hacked iPhones are still the preferred means of innovating for the iconic device. With this in mind, my O’Reilly-ian friends have just published iPhone: Open Application Development, a guide to writing ‘native Objective-C applications for the iPhone’.
The appears to be tailor made for the iPhone hacking community - from jailbreaking the AT&T/O2 lockdown to understanding the operating system, application structure, interface APIs (notably multitouch and accelerometer!) and multimedia operations.
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Incidentally, the subject of gestural interfaces is gaining some documented best practices thanks to the proliferation of iPhone and Nintendo’s Wii. I recently saw Dan Saffer speak about the design of gestural interfaces at O’Reilly’s ETech 2008 conference…the first chapter of his upcoming book on the subject is freely downloadable from the book’s official site. The sample offers some useful insights into the ergonomics and conventions of gestural UIs and an historical view of touchscreen technology.
by Ewan Spence
February 11, 2008 at 10:49 am · Filed under 2008, Hardware, Microsoft, Mobile World Congress, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, Symbian, UIQ, User Interface
The Mobile World Congress is all about raising eyebrows – with s many new phones, services, products and ideas being announced, pre-announced or reaching the public’s hands in Barcelona this week, you need to make some big moves if you want to get noticed. Nokia, as expected, have rolled out a veritable smorgasbord of phones, social networks and product options that they can capture the news cycle for a few hours.
Other Symbian partners joined in as well, with handsets from LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson all announcing on Sunday night, probably to get some time in the blogosphere before the Finnish juggernaut arrives. But what pricked up my ‘Industry Radar’ was Sony Ericsson’s non-Symbian phone, the Xperia 1. Not because it’s a metal encased handset, nor the qwerty keyboard or the ‘arc slider.’ It’s the operating system.
This is Sony Ericsson’s first Windows Mobile powered device.
For a company that is so closely associated with Symbian OS, to the point of buying the UIQ interface from Symbian and setting it up as a subsidiary company (and then bringing Motorola into the UIQ fold by splitting the company 50/50 with then), this is a very interesting piece of news.
The strategy behind it bears thinking about, because I don’t think this is the action of a company that’s upset with Symbian. The answer may lie in one of Symbian’s fundamental problems – the US market just doesn’t get Symbian OS. The idea of getting a beach-head in the US mobile market with some high end UIQ devices (either by Sony Ericsson or Motorola), in small numbers, has already cropped up here on Mobile Messaging 2.0.
This could very well be an extension of the idea. If the consumer isn’t particularly focused on a specific operating system on their phone, then let’s establish the beach-head with the Sony Ericsson name, rather than with our Operating System prowess.
I’d expect to see the handset debut in the second half of the year, and the marketing should cast some light on Sony Ericsson’s expectations and positing of the Xperia 1 handset. Of course I could be missing something obvious – have you any thoughts on the Microsoft / Sony Ericsson handset?
by Imran Ali
February 6, 2008 at 10:57 pm · Filed under Design, Hardware, User Interface
Wow. Last Friday, I caught some images from a BBC article, covering the Royal College of Arts mobile design contest, sponsored no less by 3.
I particularly liked the minimalist Vase concept, where the phone begins as a blank slate, gradually populated with features the user desires.
Mobile handset concepts are ten-a-penny and often dismissed as fantastical and unworkable. Yet, like concepts cars, they enable an industry that’s stagnant and unimaginative to path a course to the future and open new trains of thought.
See the full set of winning designs here…Â
by Imran Ali
January 26, 2008 at 5:43 pm · Filed under Content, News, SMS, User Interface
The New York Times has just launched an SMS news service, driven by increasing traffic to their mobile site. However the user experience strikes me as kinda weird…
- Text a keyword to a shortcode (698698 - ‘Pogue‘)…keywords include the NYT’s columnists and sections.
- Receive a text message containing URLs for the latest three stories in the selected category.
- Click on the URL to view the site in your mobile browser.
I guess its a roundabout way of further increasing usage of the mobile site…but, um why not just bookmark the URLs in question and save yourself the cost of sending or receiving a text message?
by Imran Ali
January 18, 2008 at 9:34 am · Filed under Design, User Interface
A couple weeks ago Adaptive Path’s Peter Merholz posted a thought provoking piece on mobile design entitled Don’t design for “mobile†- design for mobility.
Merholz articulates and frames current mobile design fixated on form-factor and ‘miniaturising’ the web for smaller screens and keypad interaction. Notably, he argues that the essence of great mobile application design is understanding that a phone is always with you - not that its simply a smaller device.
So what does that mean? At a fixed device, such as a desktop PC, our context is less fluid and hence our interaction can be richer and more verbose. When in motion - whether travelling, driving, shoppin, or at an event - our context is much more fluid and hence devices or applications that can sense or predict our context or motive will be more successful by providing focussed content and data.
As Merholz puts it…
‘there’s an inverse relationship between the dynamism of your environment, and the complexity of use you’re willing to put up with’.
I’ve found myself quoting ‘mobility, not mobile’ many times in the last few days - I’d love to see Merholz expand this thinking into a number of reference examples, best practices and design patterns that can be used by others. For example, Twitter’s hugely usable SMS interface would be a great pattern.
More broadly than the sentiment of ‘mobility, not mobile’ - designing user experience should always be driven by context, not form-factor.
by Russell Shaw
November 30, 2007 at 6:24 pm · Filed under Usage + Usability, User Interface
I spent much of last weekend’s Thanksgiving holiday at the home of my girlfriend’s 75 year-old mother and dear 82-year-old Dad.
Over the weekend, my girlfriend’s sister and brother-in-law bought their (and my girlfriend’s) Mom a cell phone.
After unboxing the phone and playing with it awhile, my girlfriend’s Mom complained loudly to all within shout of her voice that the phone keys were too small for her arthritic hands.
That comment then got me thinking: are these tiny new cellphones making it even more difficult for seniors with motion, mobility and vision problems to text?
What about arthritis, Parkinson’s, macular degeneration? Kind of ironic here that the people who need cell phones the most- for emergency purposes- would have to be subject to these kinds of usability issues?
Not only text, but make phone calls as well? I mean, well duh, that’s what you are supposed to do with a phone, right?
Maybe the answer is larger keyboard phones that would be simpler to type on. Ready-made analogy- large-type books for the visually impaired.
Hey, our seniors raised us. Don’t we owe them?
by Imran Ali
August 13, 2007 at 6:18 am · Filed under Devices, Mobile messaging 2.0, Usage + Usability, User Interface, iPhone, touch screens
Hot on the heels of some of the Haptic Messaging ideas I touched on a few weeks ago come a concept design for an All-In-One Haptic Phone at Yanko Design.
The Haptic Phone marries the tactility and physicality of a real keyboard with the infinite flexibility of a touchscreen interface. Both front and back surfaces of the handset are touchscreens where the surface area can raise itself to mimic any combination of buttons and keyboard layouts.
Implementing such a surface requires some quantum leaps in materials technology, yet perhaps an intermediary step worth exploring is to take a touchscreen surface and overlay a grid of fixed, raised, tactile ’soft keys’ that change function depending on the content of the touchscreen beneath them.
More broadly, such concepts point to a palpable lack of innovation in mobile design - with the exception of the iPhone. We’re demanding more from our handsets (GPS, imaging, web browsing…) and yet UI thinking still seems to be constrained to keypads and menus.
The computing power of today’s high-end handsets exceeds the Windows desktops of the mid-90s, yet we’re content to see Nokia expend R&D effort on a 3D version of Snakes rather than UIs that make handsets easier to use and easier to navigate.
by Imran Ali
August 6, 2007 at 6:14 am · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Studies + Research, User Interface
In recent years, I’ve been endlessly fascinated by the ingenuity and creativity of the emerging practice of data visualisation; perhaps one of the most notable authorities on visualisation are San Francisco’s Stamen Design, a company with whom I undertook a bunch of research projects in 2006, but are best known for projects like Mappr and their work on Digg Labs and MoveOn.
Last week’s Blognation review of Carolin Horn and Florian Jenett’s Anymails, got me thinking about message visualisation for mobile contexts and devices. Anymails is cute, but presents a metaphor that’s perhaps too complex to parse at a glance. However, there are some interesting projects from IDII, IBM Research and MIT’s Media Lab that to provide ‘glance-able’ summaries of messaging activity…
- Steven Blyth’s My Social Fabric concept utilises the history of communication with people in your address book to signal which of your relationships you’ve neglected, by forgetting to call or email.
- Fernanda Viegas’ Themail analyses the contents of your emai archive to highlight the nature fo your conversations with particular individuals as well as the subjects you tend to focus on.
- Viegas is also behind Media Lab’s PostHistory project - a series of visualisations that explorea when individuals fade in and out of your email history and how thr frequency of contact changes over time.
- IBM Research’s Thread Arcs presents threads of messages as a series of glyphs that can be easily understood, yet represent complexity and time in some detail. Threaded Arcs is also one of the few visualisations that immediately lends itself to implementation as a interface for manipulating messages.
- Finally, a little tangential but novel nonetheless, is Media Lab’s Conductive Chat, an instant messaging service that attempts to convey the emotional state of the user by measuring skin conductivity and using the data to alter font size and colour.
None of these projects seeks to offer answers to reduce messaging complexity, but each raises important questions about the nature of our social interactions and our interactions with devices and services. By surfacing patterns and data that are otherwise intangible to us, such research enables us to explore new design patterns for messaging services.
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