Recent Blog Posts

All About Symbian posted a feature on The Future of Nokia Maps, and it provided some interesting insights into what was undoubtedly expensive user research:

“Interestingly, the Maps team talked about six “experience clusters”: drive, walk, discover, collect, share and meet. As Nokia Maps evolves, we can presumably expect more functions to allow sharing (of locations and stuff [e.g. photos, videos] associated with locations) and meeting (coordinating locations between two or more incidences of Maps?)”

This goes a long way to answering the sorts of questions numerous hopeful entrepreneurs ask (such as over in LinkedIn Answers), without us having to do explicit user research.

“Drive” and “discover” are well-supported with current applications and services; “walk” is only somewhat supported. “Meet” is supported well by non-map applications such as Dodgeball.

I’m curious about “collect” and “share” as location experience clusters. Do you have any examples? Or more examples of “discover?” Or great examples of any of these?

I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests for information on “what do I need to learn to get into mobile design?”. I always take this opportunity to mention my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written to help user experience, marketing, and product professionals translate their skills into mobile design and business.

Why? We think:

• iPhone awareness – in recent user research, one participant said of mobile Internet, “No, not on my phone. That’s what the iPhone is for.”


• one phone for every two people – 50% penetration is getting lots of business attention


• unlimited data plans – finally! For me, it’s one of the biggest draws of the iPhone.

Designing the Mobile User Experience has information about mobile users, differences in mobile use worldwide, design principles, some design patterns, sources for further design recommendations, industry structure, visual design for mobile media, and information on mobile user research including usability testing.

If handset manufacturers won't give us widget-based idle screens, maybe individual app providers can just cheat their way into it for us.

My N75 is pretty customizable for a mobile phone, really. But it only allows me to customize a small line of icons (six, actually) on the idle screen. The rest of that screen is occupied with an events list from the calendar I never use. And of course, I am always reminded its an AT&T phone; 'cause the screen-printed logo is almost 2" away from the top of the screen.

One of my favorite mobile apps, LCG Jukebox, snuck a sort of portlet/widget thing onto an unused spot on the idle screen while playing music in a very useful and unexpected cheat of the interface.

And now google has made their new mobile search a downloadable app for the S60. And it puts a neat little (passive) widget thing on the home deck.

It even fades away after a while, which is perfect since they recognize that this is a reminder of a shortcut, not an interactive element itself. Clicking the shortcut key (the little pencil is a key on most S60 devices, like mine) brings up a real, interactive search widget!

This search widget, unlike some full-screen apps I have used lately, supports the existing device interfaces completely. The input method is changable (from predictive to triple-tap, for example) and uses the conventional symbology, just inside its little widget. Simply pressing OK/Enter submits the search, and it even takes over the softkeys for options.

The results are full-screen, as they should be and are basically identical to the web based search results and are just offered up in the default web browser. Options are available, but are at the bottom of the screen, again exactly as they should be. If there is anything odd, its that the app has a cursor.

Despite being a very standard-looking list-based layout that would have worked fine with simple scroll-and-select indicating, its got a pointer . Not sure why that is. because its in the default browser, which I don't like much. I wonder if there will be a way to change to results target, so I can just open them in Opera Mini instead? Especially when following links to other sites, a better browser and single set of bookmarks would be nice.

I don't think Symbian originally expected Google (or LCG) to do this with their software. I certainly see nothing about this functionality in their documentation. So I wonder what else can be pulled out of various existing OS's as clever developers work to bring us better experiences, one app at a time.

(I also sorta wonder if this will change Google's ranking of device use; I for one will never, ever be using the yahoo! search built into the Opera Mini browser anymore.)

For our complete thoughts on how widgets and home decks could and should work, request a copy of our widgets white paper.

In this "year of the mobile web" where pundits everywhere are talking about how "the web is the platform" ....

In this time of "let's get a good enough browser and then mobile will take off" ...

In this time of "Java ME is dead" ...

4 of our 6 first quarter projects have major components in Java ME. These are new applications, from companies who understand the porting issues and the complexities.

Why are they using Java ME?

• Because they need to store some of their application logic and/or data locally
• Because the app or data needs to be available without the network
• Because the application would be dreadfully slow as a web app
• Because they are creating a push messaging client that needs more rich interaction than simple SMS (and better interoperability than MMS)

This quarter is not particularly different from other quarters: we get far more work designing applications than designing web sites.

Java has lots and lots of problems. You know what they are. I think they are fixable, and the good news is that we can use the platform now. So many of the browser and widget platform possibilities keep being "just around the corner" and the opportunity is now.

Java ME is going to keep on chugging, maybe even seeing a rebirth, for quite a while yet. SavaJe doesn't spell the death of Java ME either.

Nokia has launched an application to geotag photos. The post says that this won’t be the final user experience for geotagging; we expect that the recent announcements of built-in geotagging on the N96, N78, and others will be closer. Non-phone cameras will soon do the same.

Geotagging used to be a very difficult process, and some folks on and at flickr found it to be so even with Series 60 software.

Mass adoption of geotagging photos will enable the creation of a model of the world through technologies such as Photosynth. Imagine going online and virtually walking through the Parthenon on a spring day, sunset, or a clear night … all without anybody explicitly modeling the Parthenon in those conditions. Just 5% of camera (and cameraphone) users geotagging and sharing their pictures would create an incredible database.

We need to be careful about forcing such disclosure. Privacy, security, and of course simple preferences. We’re not the only folks thinking this way.

I’m pleased to announce that we have re-launched our mobile UI patterns web site. It is now intended as a full mobile design resource center, and is built on MediaWiki, the same software that runs Wikipedia.

In the long run, we’ll want to provide full style guide type information, device information, and so forth. For now, it is the mobile UI patterns plus some more. Oh, and there is a new pattern in there.

So have fun, add whatever resources you think are relevant, edit a page (there are several that are incomplete), and contribute to the community!

Mobile Design Resource Center

(Morten Hjerde, you are specifically tagged to incorporate some of the principles you discussed at IxDA Interaction 08)