Recent Blog Posts

We have to expect that oppressive governments will figure out text and picture messaging soon, so the current Myanmar blip probably won't be repeated.

Solution?  Manufacture satellite picture phones.  Any picture they take gets automatically loaded to Flickr or another service, tagged with a custom tag (such as Myanmar_monks).

Build the things with a solar cell, so they can charge themselves.  They can be somewhat big, but they must be small enough to hide.

Put them in airdrop-proof boxes with a picture of a phone on the side.

Airdrop them all over the countryside.

Today I received a promotional email from Southwest Airlines, letting customers know they launched their mobile site (not a dotMobi domain). It had two features of particular mobile note:

• Mobile check-in: check in on your phone and pick up your boarding passes at the desk. This allows you to check in much earlier, and get earlier in line and hence a better seat.
• Contact information: convenient if you're stranded somewhere or need service or re-booking

In other news, I'll be on vacation next week, so I probably won't be posting.

At the recent UX Week, it seemed like the most-represented industry was banking. User experience folks from a large number of companies were there: USAA, US Bank, Bank of America, Checkfree, and others - including at least two Scandanavian banks - were present. The repeated explanation was that user experience is one of the few remaining (obvious) arenas in which banks could differentiate themselves.

At the same time, mobile banking is heating up, with some dedicated blogs, including:

• Brandon McGee's Mobile Banking provides news and analysis from a VP in charge of mobile banking.
• Online Financial Information's Mobile Money & Banking looks to be a good industry news source.
• Hannes van Rensburg's Mobile Banking is the blog of the CEO of a South African mobile banking provider Fundamo

There are several important players in the space, including Paypal and mFoundry; some banks are building their own solutions.Of particular interest is the fact that Africa is more advanced than the rest of the world in mobile banking. After all, for many Africans the mobile is the only access to the Internet they have.

Beyond just banking is mobile payments. Expect this to work great in niche markets - using your phone to pay for access to the subway is already happening in Japan and London - but for now you can only "load" one payment instrument onto your phone. As a result, there is a two-tap interaction for most solutions: one to alert the point of payment you are there, and the second (after user interaction) to actually pay. Oh, and the data doesn't really flow two-way for most solutions ... so you may have to have coverage in the store to make it all work.

Another form of mobile payments is person-to-person, enabled by Paypal and Obopay. I don't really consider this to be mobile payments so much as web-based payments with mobile access.

Banking has a number of important user experience challenges. Not only must it be secure, but it must be perceived as being secure ... without the cost of heavy amounts of data entry. Couple that with the various security breaches on SMS and other gateways, and you have a bunch of fun. Further, mere account access isn't going to be enough (at least for long). Forgot a bill? Need to send money to a friend? Want to jot down what that expense was? Mobile access is key.

We all know that text input is hard. URLs and passwords are especially hard: they can't use word completion such as T9 or eZiText, they use odd combinations of letters, and they are unforgiving of errors.

Despite this, many users do not bookmark sites. They type in the URL once, then use the browser history to find it again. And again. And again. The good news is that they have gone off-deck; the bad news is that navigating history is a challenge unless careful attention is paid to the history UI as well as page titles.

Alas, that frequently doesn't happen. 15 entries all of which say, "MySiteName.com" do not help. Almost as bad is titles that say "MySiteName.com - we are a great site - Home Page", as you're unlikely to be able to read all that on the mobile.

So I was interested when I learned about http://www.pa.gd/. The concept is fabulous: want "www.gmail.com"? Type the first three letters and the last one letter: "gmal". Want "www.rememberthemilk.com"? Type "remk". Great, and you can certainly learn it.

Alas, this works best for folks who are likely to either bookmark the page, or make it their home page. These are precisely the people who will find it a little less useful because they are bookmarking other sites.

It also works best for popular sites. This site, for example, is not present. (edit: it is now) Nor is livejournal.com, which is more surprising. (edit: I made an error in entry.) They do some error-catching, but its design could very much be improved. For example: crawl the web and find all domain names that match the pattern, query their Google page ranks, and return a list sorted by page rank. At a minimum, fix the not-found page, which looks like this:

Paged mobile service message: unfortunately the requested input cannot be found. Please go back to try another input or modify the following pick to the desired web address:

Better would be something like this:

Oops, Paged doesn't know about livj. Try again or enter a URL:

Unfortunately, the service is not for novice users.

EDIT: I stand corrected. Livejournal is indeed available as a shortcut, and my (rather extensive) experience using Quicksilver with its arbitrary shortcuts had me using LJ as my shorthand for Livejournal. Don't take that as a complaint for how pa.gd is architected:   Quicksilver works for things I regularly visit, not the entire Internet. Also, as noted in the comments below, www.littlespringsdesign.com is now available. Thanks!

I recently joined Slideshare.net, since three different people connected to me in some way recently recommended or used it.  If you want some fun, do a search for "mobile" and "design".

In the meantime, I'll post Slideshares of some of my presentations here on occasion.  Many of them can be downloaded from Slideshare. This one is a brief overview of The Carry Principle.

This is yet another complaint of "why haven't the operators done enough of this yet?"

Accessibility is the degree to which a product or service can be used by people with various disabilities, including auditory, visual, and tactile. Not only is good accessibility the right thing to do (as practical), but it can also make a company quite a bit of money. The U.S. Telecommunications Act specifies that the federal government must purchase accessible options for telecommunications equipment.

As local governments tend to adopt federal government practices, this means that 25% of the U.S. adult population could be covered by this purchasing practice.  European regulations are similar in scope. Yet the big players (Nokia excepted) are ignoring the market and regulatory implications.

Besides, lots of accessibility practices have non-disabled markets available. Wouldn't you like the ability, at least sometimes, to use your entire phone by voice?

The current state of affairs is pretty poor. Nokia, in general, is the leader. They've had hearing aid interfaces for at least some phones for a decade or so. The fact that their devices run the same software plus their huge market share (at least out of North America) makes them a good target for developing software solutions. Indeed, Code Factory's mobile Accessibility is a Symbian solution to make many phone functions hearable with a voice synthesizer. The page's Spanglish is such that I'm not sure whether there is voice input or not.

The American Foundation for the Blind's technology magazine helps readers navigate the array of technology usable by those with vision impairments, though be sure to search for "cell" not "mobile". A review of mobile phone options gives you some of the lay of the land. They also compare cell phone reader software, which will go a long way to making mobile web sites potentially accessible.

Hard of hearing users are not being left out. While text pagers and Blackberries have long been wonderful tools for deaf users on the go, WGBH is extending its closed captioning technology to mobile media. Expect this to take a few years to pan out.