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One of the steps in creating a conference is deciding what to do with regards to participant networking. The last few conferences I’ve attended have each had their own networking system, and only 10% of the participants even looked at it. I only did because I have a direct monetary interest in good networking.

I believe this is part of social networking fatigue. People get inundated with network invites, made worse by some less-than-ethical designs that suggest you must sign in to your email to complete signup.

So for Design For Mobile we decided to instead use existing networking mechanisms. Once participants sign up for the conference, they will be invited to an attendee-exclusive LinkedIn group. Anybody can become a fan on the Design For Mobile Facebook page, and network directly there. As we firm up the session abstracts, each will get their own page on our own site, with comments enabled.

Additionally, you can now become a fan of Little Springs Design on our company Little Springs Design Facebook page! While there, add any fun pictures, feel free to say how great we are, or whatever you want.

Want to follow us individually? Lots of our online presence links can be found at our About page.

One of the things I like about working on mobile is that mobile really doesn’t limit what type of people we get to help.

We’ve helped one company improve mobile media playback, another increase awareness of mobile media content, another sell the media, and another create the media.

We’ve helped a company help diabetics monitor their overall health and and another help patients in general improve how well they control their health.

We’ve helped one company transform mobile web browsing and another ensure browsing would be accessible by everybody.

We’ve helped companies figure out the intersection of mobiles and money, and develop their strategy for how to proceed.

We’ve helped thousands of designers and developer improve their mobile products of all types.

I’ve been told that we are too focused. I disagree. We help mobile users have a better experience with a wide variety of content. With their online lives.

I finally got around to visiting USAA Mobile. If you’re unfamiliar with it, the company provides insurance, banking, and brokerage services to military families. (Thanks, Dad!)

I am thrilled with it. It provides text-only access to:

• View account history.
• Pay bills.
• Transfer funds.
• View transfer activity.
• View account balances.
• Place a trade.
• Check order status.
• Request an auto ID card.

They’ve made text-only access to the things that people need mobile. At the store and the credit card was declined? You can fix it! Need to send a payment to anybody? Pay bills lets you pay anybody already set up. Got in a traffic collision? Get your proof of insurance right away.

What I find so interesting is that bill payment is through a third party and their brokerage services are pretty separate from their insurance and bank services. The organizational work behind this is quite impressive. It worked fine on my old Blackberry and my Sanyo.

The home page is so simple, only 4 items for me and clearly not much for anybody, that they simply append the entire home menu to most screens. I can press 2 to pay bills anywhere in the site.

I talk to many types of people who are considering working with us. All want a better design for their mobile products. I’ve been noticing trends.

Social networking site success does not seem connected to quality of design. If it is sufficiently “hackable” (can be made to reflect participants’ personality) and gets the right balance of privacy and connection, it can succeed. Well, it can if it has the right business model, the right timing, the right viral components, the right targeting; it’s more about those classic marketing factors than the product itself. My inability to figure out Facebook’s navigation paradigm has clearly not affected their success; or at least their popularity.

When a CEO contacts us, he (it’s always been a he) pretty much doesn’t have the money to invest in a full design process. At best we can review their application and make suggestions. But this type of CEO wants not only design on the cheap, but development as well. So far, the CEO has never invested in a solid design process, with us or anybody else. And of those, only the social networking companies have done well.

Project managers are another group of people who sometimes contact us for help. Unfortunately, this has been because their boss told them to — they weren’t feeling the pain of poor design. In these cases, the company doesn’t invest in design and continues stumbling along with the same problems they did before. This is a case of insufficient leadership: the boss, usually the head of product or marketing, needs to invest her time in improving design.

When CTOs contact us, usually the company doesn’t have a person focused on product, and marketing is focused on sales. These companies frequently run into the same problem as above.

If you want to improve design process by focusing on design and user research, you’ll need to measure your team. Whether doing it yourself or working with an outside resource, your team needs to be measured on the results, the return on investment (ROI): decreased churn, decreased calls to customer support, increase uptake rate, increased purchases, increased page views, increased time on site, decreased bounce rate. Whatever it is, measure it (in a standard manner, and without changing the measurement method halfway through just to meet goals).

Be clear to your team about what you are expecting. Don’t tell your product manager, “go improve the design.” He’ll make it prettier, or more AJAX, or something that doesn’t do much to improve the user experience, or actually hurts it. Then you’ll both go around talking about how easy to use your service is. Measure results with a relevant measure from above.

I use a service that proclaims ease of use. They have nice clean pages, and good features. That’s why I’m using the service. But there are problems. It mostly works in Safari, but breaks (invisibly) deep in the site when you try to save your change. On one page, clicking a cute icon opens an otherwise invisible set of critically important pages. On another page, that same icon in the same place generates a new instance of what is on the page. The “friendly,” “designed” site is breaking down, causing user frustration. And making the user feel stupid, the more so due to frequent proclamations of being friendly and easy. And when your service that looks super-friendly makes users feel stupid, it’s breaking a promise.

Design doesn’t have to be expensive, but it does take investment in a new process. You want a balancing between what is and what could be, between customer stated desires and unmet needs, between user needs and business needs, all in a group of people who can create concepts from existing needs. This a different set of expertise than software development or marketing or graphic design, though not impossible to learn. It’s design.

We had indicated on the mobile design resources page that we would be adding design recommendations and style guide information. This information would be recommendations that don’t constitute a design pattern, but nevertheless are good or best practices. And of course, the information is free and you are encouraged to add or edit content.

We just loaded a long page on mobile game design. It’s the chapter on game design from my 2003 User Interface Guidelines for J2ME MIDP 2.

We’re still working on getting other major information providers (a quick call-out to dotMobi, W3C, Nokia, SonyEricsson, Sprint, Vodafone, and others) to provide support and/or information. If you provide support in the form of a lot of content and/or money to defray our expenses, you’ll get your logo built into the templates.

Over on the mobile design resources wiki, we’re adding some new content, as well as moving some of our older essays into the public space. Specifically, check out Design Tools. Right now there is only a list of web emulators & simulators and a full design suite; please add your favorite tools.

And since I haven’t ranted about this recently …

Simulators (which attempt to duplicate the experience of the device on the desktop) and emulators (which use the same code as what runs on the device recompiled for the desktop) are crucial tools in application development. They do a very good job of giving the developer an idea of how the application will feel to the user, and allow the developer to do unit testing. They’re also handy for demos.

Unfortunately, these tools must not be used as the exclusive means for testing the application for either functionality or usability. Do your unit testing, but then test on actual devices either in hand or via services such as DeviceAnywhere.

There are a variety of known differences between most simulators and the devices that they simulate. Usability testing using emulators, while less expensive than testing using real devices, is also fraught with problems:

• Normal device usage involves holding the device at a comfortable angle, and even gesturing with it. The unnatural use of a computer will cause your test to miss nuances in user interaction.


• The speed of transmission and rendering on the computer is faster than on the mobile device.


• Dropped calls and dropped packets do not happen as frequently on the computer.


• User input is different on the computer. Typing will be easier, unless you restrict the user to using the mouse (in which case it will be harder).


• User context is different. Sitting at a desktop computer is a fairly formal experience. Sitting on a sofa using a device is an informal experience. Users will behave differently.