Blog

“  …why can’t work keep up? Why are you forced to use an unfamiliar, and sometimes outdated, operating system? Why do you need a second laptop, maybe an older and clunkier one? Why do you need a second cell phone with a new interface, or a BlackBerry, when your phone already does e-mail? Or a second BlackBerry tied to corporate e-mail? Why can’t you use the cool stuff you already have?…

…security is on the losing end of this argument, and the sooner it realizes that, the better.  ”

Security guru Bruce Schneier on Consumerization and Corporate IT Security.

“  Afghanistan now boasts a cellular network of 12 million cell phones in country of 28 million. Mobile technology is the largest legal, taxpaying industry in Afghanistan and the single greatest economic success story in the country since the fall of the Taliban. The existing network also offers a proven way to help defeat corruption.

In 2009, the Afghan National Police began a test to pay salaries through mobile telephones, rather than in cash. It immediately found that at least 10% of its payments had been going to ghost policemen who didn’t exist; middlemen in the police hierarchy were pocketing the difference…

“  The problem is that every company out there that’s addressing this opportunity, from Sony to Samsung to even Apple, is actually trying to solve the wrong problem. None of them are really asking how they can fix the living room problem. Rather, they’re focusing on establishing their brand in the living room, positing completely unrealistic scenarios in which a consumer buys only, say, Samsung-branded components (e.g., its absurdly useless WiseLink protocol) without acknowledging the reality that the components of most home theaters make for a decidedly heterogeneous world.  ”

Khoi Vinh on Subtraction discussing how Apple Blinks in the Living Room by pursuing a strategy of pushing it’s brand into an existing space, instead of cooperating, or making things truly simpler. The problems of the interactive second screen are similar to those of the fourth.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted at AntoineRJWright’s blog. We’re proud to be included again.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

This week, my article is a followup to last week’s, on Influencing the Requirements Process – Designing Documentation, Part 2.

“  Theme? Well, there’s a bit of a theme to the posts this week around strategy and UX (user experience). For example, Little Springs Design continues on their talk around the design process…

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Peggy Anne Salz at M Search Groove. We’re proud to be included again.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

This week, my article is a case study of Designing Requirements Documentation.

“  Mobile design for the masses: Steven Hoober over at Little Springs Design shares a detailed and valuable post documenting mobile design elements…

Specifications are hard. There are a lot of conflicting needs, and the complexity of the documents might be more severe than the product you are specifying. Aside from designing products or interactions or interfaces, I spend a lot of time designing the documents themselves. A happy ending to this sort of process is detailed in last week’s post on Designing Requirements Documentation.

Which might bring up the question: What type of specification? Design documentation, which is most of what we do (well, by hours – most actual documents by count are proposals and emails and so forth) took a long time to settle on, but it has evolved into something pretty specific and which works very well to communicate to everyone on the entire project team. There have been several evolutions, many mandated by technology alone; I used to do everything as a single sheet which functioned as sitemap and …

About 14 months ago, [a large mobile operator] came to us with an interesting project for mobile handset UI. There was practically no mandate to design the interaction itself, in any way. Instead, we were asked to take a muddled mess of poorly-updated Word documents, a compliance spreadsheet branched from it a couple years before, and a pile of notes, and make… something, that would be a better specification for OEMs to implement the operator UI on their handsets.

All their handsets (first, featurephones, but various smartphones followed as secondary projects). It’s not just paperwork, but a pretty big deal, and influences a lot of hardware, so many millions of users. And in that, it’s actually a quite honorable design job. If there’s a design, and it’s good (or good enough) but is not being implemented correctly or consistently, then a key job for a UX …

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Tam Hanna at his brand spankin’ new site TamsBada - the Samsung Bada blog. We’re proud to be included again.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

And if nothing else, if you missed it, be sure to read my article about My Mobile Mantra: People First, which Tam likes just because I mentioned Bada in the opening, I’ll bet.

Come to the Design for Mobile 2010 conference and workshops next month in Chicago and watch me try to argue my point in the panel on “Why and when to design for mobile first.”

The latest news about net neutrality wheeling and dealing came up in the friday meetings here at Little Springs. While I have no idea what the ultimate goals of most of the big players are, I can certainly guess. And I think it’s all going the wrong direction, and even those marching outside Google HQ are arguing the wrong point.

And what’s bugging me is that even the fairly interesting articles and commentary about this issue pretty frequently miss key points. There are terms of art being used which are not being understood. So, we spent a little bit of time explaining what is basically going on, and how the telecom industry works. In the U.S. this is more about telecom law and regulation than business and way more than about end user needs, so it’ll vary by country.

So, some of the key definitions to understand this. If you don’t get the point, or want more information, search for these terms and read up on your own.

• PSTN– Public Switched Telephone Network. Only wireline carriers, and originally circuit-switched carriers, are like this. AT&T, the Bell…

A few Little Springs people submitted panels to the SXSW Interactive sessions, March 11-15 in Austin, Texas as usual.

Cathy Schonberger submitted Not Just Rectangles: Mobile UX Beyond Pretty Pictures,

Eric Berkman submitted Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing Experiences,

and Barbara Ballard submitted Interactive Patterns in the Mobile Space.

To vote, simply press the “thumbs up” (and definitely not the “thumbs down”) right below the title. Then, unless you already did this, or submitted a session yourself, you will see a big error-like thing at the top of the page, and have to register. There’s a CAPTCHA and email verification and everything. So brace yourself.

But to those who get through it all, thanks for helping bring more mobile to the masses. For more, sooner, come join us at Design for Mobile 2010 next month in Chicago.

Mobile is not iPhone or iPad or N8. It’s not Bada or Symbian or WebOS. Mobile is not Opera Mini, or Skyfire or Netfront. Mobile is not sliders or clamshells, QWERTY or 12-key. Mobile is not touch, or multi-touch. Mobile is not Foursquare, or Facebook, or MySpace. Mobile is not Twitter. Mobile is not MMS, or BBM, or SMS. Mobile is not resolution or GPS, or front-facing-cameras. Mobile is not CDMA or GMRS, WiMax or LTE.

Mobile is not successful due to amazing marketing, or great pricing, or because it’s fashionable. It’s not even successful because it offers new capabilities to everyone, although it also does that.

Mobile is an unspeakable success because it lets people be people. As obvious as it seems, we’re no longer tethered to wireline phones, or movie theaters and TVs, or pinball arcades, or typewriters, photocopiers and desktop computers.

Mobile works …

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Mark Bridge at TheFoneCast. We’re proud to be included again.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

This week, my article about engineering, design and battery indicators was selected as the post of the week:

“  Let’s start with my ‘Post of the Week’, written by Steven Hoober from Little Springs Design. He looks at the design of battery indicators on portable devices and explains why many are over-engineered. Such a tiny thing – yet so many ways to get it wrong! ”

I am sure there will be other opinions on the matter of design vs. marketing vs. engineering …

All mobile phones are still too engineered. By which I mean, they are too engineering-focused. Engineering is a good thing to most tech companies, because they are founded by hardware or software engineers, who like making products for themselves and their friends.

When there’s a failure (say, the antenna on a popular phone doesn’t work) more often than not it can be ascribed to a technical failure, and just gives ammunition for the technical and implementation teams to get even more power over the process.

But in a world where technical products are so pervasive that a billion people have mobiles who have never seen terrestrial TV and have no power to their house, I have to believe that engineering-driven product development design processes cannot last forever; the world will demand products designed for farmers and housewives and truck drivers as well.

We’ve all used devices which …

“ So you can see that even the top-end, high spec 2010 flagship phone (e.g. the N8, or iPhone or HTC Desire) is going to be doing very well to download, interpret and render well over a Megabyte of content in ten seconds or so on Wi-Fi and 25 seconds or so on 3.5G data. Putting this feat into perspective though is the fact that the same phone, grabbing the same page over a lowly GPRS data connection would take over four minutes. ”

Steve Litchfield of All About Symbian discussing how The ‘full web’ still unattainable for many when mobile.

Here at Little Springs Design, we’re happy to host this week’s Carnival of Mobilists on our brand spanking new site! To celebrate, we’ve received some submissions that take a wide view, then delve into the specifics of the events. Our topics this week include: why you should ask for permission before invading someone’s mobile space; what can happen if you ask nicely, and get your audience right; 10 things our phones could do if we put a bit of effort into them; an analysis of the HipLogic - Carphone Warehouse partnership; why Nokia donated Java to the Symbian Foundation; and a look into why Nokia might be looking for a new CEO.

“ Your touchscreen devices do, admittedly, look very shiny and minimalist. They look lovely. Really. Well done, you. Pictures look sooo much better on your phone than they do on my quarter-VGA postage stamp of a screen. And that app that you downloaded that makes your Twitter followers into 3D holograms while whistling the national anthem? It’s really clever. I am sure that you are also very successful and have an expensive car.

But listen, right. This is what I care about. Making phone calls. Sending and receiving messages and email. That’s it. And I can do that faster than you. I can also do it with one hand, should I be holding say, an umbrella in the other. ”

Rhiain Morgan in a Nokia Conversation The interface debate, part one: buttonholics anonymous.

“ We conclude that the sites with the most restrictive password policies do not have greater security concerns, they are simply better insulated from the consequences of poor usability. Online retailers and sites that sell advertising must compete vigorously for users and traffic. In contrast to government and university sites, poor usability is a luxury they cannot afford. This in turn suggests that much of the extra strength demanded by the more restrictive policies is superfluous: it causes considerable inconvenience for negligible security improvement. ”

Dinei Florencio and Cormac Herley from Microsoft Research asking Where Do Security Policies Come From? (PDF). Found via Bruce Schneier’s always great blog on security, in his post on the Economic Considerations of Website Password Policies quoting this and another research paper.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is hosted by Carlo Longino at Wireless Industry Partnership We’re proud to be included again.

The Carnival is a weekly collection of the Web’s best writing on mobile and wireless, hosted and collected by a different site each week. If you are already reading our blog, or Tomi’s, or anything else mobile, you should add this collection to your subscription list as well.

This week, my link in the Carnival is about information architecture and how to use it in design. If you use it differently, or have a different definition, post a comment and tell me about it.

Supposedly, next week we’ll be hosting the Carnival here at Little Springs, so come visit us next Monday for the best in mobile writing.

This whole iPhone 4 radio thing (death grip, antennagate, whatever) has been annoying me more and more over the past week, and now that the press conference is done, and every tech pundit has had his say over it, I am more annoyed.

This is how radios work

First, the tech issues. Since I haven’t seen a wholly comprehensive review of them, and the few really technical discussions are mostly hidden away on nerdy, electrical-engineering focused forums. Radio is an electromagnetic phenomenon. Radio antennas are electrical devices. If you short one to ground, or to another antenna, they will fail. Disregarding air interference, and just mechanical/electrical shorts, restivity differences in the the shorting medium mean you can get anything from a minimal signal drop to the whole output grounded, and no transmission.

I have actually experienced this. Bang around a handheld radio enough and the rubber cover wears …

“ What’s the main difference between successful Google applications (search, maps, news, email) and a successful social applications? With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave. ”

Adam Rifkin in in his post Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications… . During his discussion of Google, interesting in it’s own right, he covers generally how people use the internet, and what makes social media tick.