Inspiring Articles in Mobile Design

With all of the work on the conference, I've not been able to keep up on things like blogging very much. That's not because not much is happening in the mobile design world; quite the contrary. In fact, Adaptive Path's Rachel Hinman had webinar for mobile web design during our conference + webinar, and Mobile Design UK had their monthly meeting.

So you get a tour of recent mobile design articles:

From Point & Do, 5 Questions To Ask When Planning Multitouch Interfaces is good for those working on sophisticated iPhone apps and future multi-touch displays.

John Keith of Cloud Four gives us Mobile Device Detection Results comparing four cheap or free device detection mechanisms. Good reading to improve your mobile users' experience.

Roger, Wilco responded in a comment about my Mobile SEO post (better yet, see the wiki SEO page) with a link to Mobile Search and SEO Considerations for Mobile; he's updated the wiki page as well.

You can vote on entries in the MEX Mobile User Experience conference mobile design contest. Perhaps more interestingly, conference organizer Marek Pawlowski asked 20 mobile entrepreneurs what the startup community could do to improve the mobile user experience. I think it's really worthwhile to see what business folks want to do here.

And of course the UI-as-business article from Fierce Wireless caught my eye, Eye on the UI: The need to differentiate. In particular, this paragraph caught my eye:

In general, Wugofski said that the user experience needs to align with the device that it's on and around how that device operates. "Users use lots of different applications," he said. "For your app to be successful on that phone, it generally has to follow the same paradigms [of the phone]."

I've been thinking quite a lot about this over the years, and this year I'm making it one of my speaking themes. You can check out the first of the presentations in the series at SlideShare: A Foolish Consistency.

Object-oriented design is something we've practiced for years, even before it was "invented" in 2005. It's also explicitly discussed in Steven's recent book, Designing by Drawing. It's still useful to understand and discuss, even more so now with the numerous screen size & device capability variations found in mobile, and more and more different internet-enabled devices.

In a more design-theory vein, check out A Framework for Gesture Generation and Interpretation which is a fascinating analysis of gesture recognition.

Michael Mace of Rubicon Consulting brings us Smartphones as appliances: Different phones for different usages, with the great takeaway that users of different devices value different things from their devices. Blackberry users value email more; iPhone users value web more. It suggests design directions for several services.

And last but not least, fellow mobile design firm Punchcut posted an animation for Design Considerations for Touch UI, following up on a previous blog entry on the same topic.

Hi Barbara,

Thanks for linking to www.pointanddo.com It would be great to learn more about your conference.

Thanks u r information