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We had a great time at Design For Mobile, our first conference. I had asked every speaker to teach me something new, and they all did. We’re still integrating everything we learned, both from speakers and participants.

Most participants were especially interested in Mike Lundy’s case study of how Sprint deployed the Samsung Instinct, with their “tiger team” bypassing the normal processes. It reminded me a bit of how the iPhone happened.

In addition to the many things I learned, I had a jaw-dropping moment, a brain-stopping moment, and a wonder moment.

Jaw-dropping: Jason Ward (Sprint) talked about the sheer scope of the research program at Sprint. Historical research, moving averages, and much much more. I was very impressed with the amount of data they had to work with, and then it turned out he only discussed one of the three legs of their program. It reminded me that there are advantages to having resources behind you.

Brain-stopping: Jared Benson (Punchcut) in his Presence Manifesto (all good points!) mentioned some inspiring research by folks over at Nokia, using the simplest of location tags: “home,” “office,” “downtown,” “grocery store,” “unknown.” The magic here was the power of the human brain to make inference. If I see that my spouse has the tag “unknown,” and I know his schedule, I can infer that he’s on his way home right now. On the other hand, people who don’t know his habits won’t get any good information. So what can we do from a minimalist perspective to facilitate connections without impinging privacy? (Jared, I’m sorry, I missed a couple minutes of your talk as a result of this).

Wonder: Liselott Brunneberg showed us video of teens playing her game prototype system. Kids used a scanning device to “hear” what was happening in different objects of their real-world environment, in a church, a field, or anything. They needed to get clues to solve their mystery. The wonder? 18 minutes into the experience, the kids were still actively holding up the scope and panning back and forth across the car. The Wii got us up out of our sofa, this prototype gets our torso and arms moving in the car. Wow.

I was also struck by the fact that no two of our approximately five researchers shared the same discipline. How lucky we are to draw from so many sources for information and inspiration!

We’ll be doing the conference again next year, and we’ll be making videos available (some for sale) soon.

Liselott Brunnberg continued the theme for the day and discussed context in a mobile sense.

The Interactive Institute is a sort of joint academic/practical organization, with many cooperative agreements with big businesses, including many mobile ones.

This project always interested us because it addressed a different market. While it focuses on the “highway experience,” their user is not the driver, but the passenger and especially children. This allowed them to build a more immersive device, that can actually distract users. Context is used in a very direct, but also an as yet unique manner. The users can get fictional information about the road, about buildings you pass by and so on, and stories and games are built around this.

One of the more interesting bits about this, which I didn’t totally internalize after reading our interview with her from a few months ago was that passengers in a car are exposed to a fixed narrative flow. Their ability to influence the world is more limited than we often conceive of users working in a contextually-intelligent system. She even showed us a video of some of the test kids actually using it; as with almost any test, actually watching people using devices is really interesting, and encouraging.

Our mini-theme of academics was wrapped up with Lee Humphreys from Cornell University on her findings from a study she did of mobile social networks. Specifically, she wanted to see them as actually used, not by some beta testers for a short time, and in multiple locations.

If you want to know more about running international studies, feel free to ask her. She has lots of tips and horror stories.

Her research sought to find:

• How might mobile social networks help to bring people together in public space?
• What is the nature of interactions that develop around mobile social networks?
• How might these interactions change the way users experience public space?

And her findings, in summary, are that they encourage:

• Social Molecularization – “I learn about new places through other people’s behavior”
• Parochialization; contextual neighborhood familiarity – “It’s helpful walking int a place and having a sense of who’s already around there”
• 3 Spaces; itinerant, not home, not work places – “Makes the social scene a little smaller and a little closer”

Jacob Lyng Wieland is a researcher for the Danish Broadcasting Corporation. If you are wondering, his first slide is “what is the Danish Broadcasting Corporation doing here?” They have the most visited media website in Denmark, and generally are strongly pursuing all sorts of media distribution.

He’s been looking into a mobile app they launched (as a prototype or beta I guess) that lets users participate with broadcast TV shows. This is an enhancement to SMS voting interaction systems that have already been used, but they wanted to make sure it got rid of all those difficulties. They also could not use SMS for children’s programming, due to the cost issues (both morally and legally, as they are a public service broadcaster), so built this first application for a popular (59% share of target audience) show targeting school-age children, which I cannot pronounce or spell.

Something like 80% of Danish children between 8 and 11 do indeed have mobile phones. Over 11 it’s over 100% (multiple devices). I can’t think of a reason the U.S. is not moving this way.

The test was fairly open, so several thousand apps were downloaded, but they also observed several children directly.

• Mobile competency was very high, including understanding of billing and data connections
• When bored with the show, they’d just play with the devices, and do things like customize the wallpaper by transferring one from their own
• They did find it fun to interact with the TV show
• They did claim it was easier than SMSing votes, but there’s no solid data on how much children do that
• There was some fear that the app download would be charged to them (or their parents, but they are aware of the consequences of high bills on their phones)
• The requirement for a network connection (and the permission interceptor) hung up those with less mobile competency, who could not pass it without assistance
• Some issues with only presenting items that related to what is on the TV at the time
• Skilled readers disregarded intro text, much as adults; those with lower reading skills agonized and could not always tell if it was important
• Participants had issues correlating a spoken name to a printed name in a list; the recommendation now is to use photographs when possible
• The value-add of real-time voting results reduced viewing of the TV broadcast

And, except for one last night on the town, we wrapped up with a round table I hosted, on the future of app stores. It was going to be a panel, but since almost everyone in the room was asking questions of other speakers, it seemed best to just involve everyone anyway.

Sadly, we didn’t have an actual round table. The points I threw out there to start the conversation were:

I didn’t have a chance to take notes during it, and now I’m tired so if anyone wants to comment on their participation, please do so.

Torrential rains slowed me down (I have to drive in from Kansas City), but despite a pretty long night of drinking and eating, everyone was still energized this morning.

This morning we set up sessions about the people side – vs. the business side – with a focus on research.

After much fiddling with his UMPC tablet before the sessions started, Jeff Axup talked to us about mobile community research, and how to turn that information and mindset into design.

A lot of his work is on “backpackers.” To me this term means some of the long-range outdoorsyness I participate in, and I’m vaguely aware of the alt music style, but this means a sort of tourist. Apparently it’s common in the rest of the world; this is the young, hostel-staying euro-trekker as well as a the european style of adventure traveller. He shared with us the story of a specific person (whom he interviewed for his research) and then discussed how mobile tools could have solved some of her issues, presenting maps, transport schedules, translation services.

As part of the University of Queensland, he brought a set of backpackers to an animal park and had them indicate during the day how they would use little paper and foam “devices” to improve their day (e.g. information gathering, geocaching). This was cheaper and quicker than prototyping these devices, and allowed a more free gathering of information. And he’d say it proved out his middle ground of “weak determinism,” where almost everyone follow the rules, even though they are free to use products or technology in other ways. Design provides a social path, with some situations easier or cheaper, but you can always break the boundaries. I used to think I was pretty humanistic, but this makes a lot of sense to me.

All of his thoughts here, in much greater detail, will be included in his “Building a Path for Future Communities” section of the forthcoming Handbook of Research on Socio-Technical Design and Social Networking Systems.

C Enrique Ortiz, of MoMo Austin among other things, then talked to us about a concept near to our heart: context. He used different terms than me, but characterizes good design as being practical, relevant and interesting.

Today we can do this because of better handsets, better (faster, cheaper, more open) networks as well as the “mobile lifestyle” that leads to more innovation and increasing indispensability by users.

Luckily, he also gave us a checksheet for designers and developers to make their products be contextual:

• Support as many interactions as possible – this changes over time, and by region; the U.S. has much poorer support for NFC and 2D barcode than in europe
• Capture the interactions and related information – digital footprints are out there, so capture them
• Understand the interactions – Intentions vs. actions

Mobile context is a good thing because it can make your device or service more informative, timely, accurate, relevant, connected, dynamic, adaptive and even transformational, promoting behavioral changes.

He also covered some good strategies, and warnings, regarding storage, analytics and of course privacy and identity. This stuff takes a lot of room, a lot of time and some clever processing to work fast, well and securely.

After a break for yet more fruit and baked breakfast goodies, Jason Ward came to talk to us about “field research,” which he heads up for hometown mobile carrier Sprint. Field research there means mostly surveys and similar, generally very quantitative systems; a different team does observational, ethnographic work, actually in the field.

While no longer a designer per. se., the goal for his team’s work is to inform design. His programs look at interactions between:

• People and the environment & ndash; find customer needs
• People and products – view behavioral responses to the product
• People, products and the environments – assess the product through the lifecycle, in the market

Although there is lots of good value in one-off studies to answer design questions, he likes the program approach. With this he can start to form baseline information about user behaviors and acceptance across the market. How well a service works on one device can be applied to new handsets, as well as tracking across revisions of a single product or device.

He went over in some detail how the several programs they employ work, in quite a bit of detail. He also skipped a whole lot of slides, partly because we just got a short version of the presentation, and partly because we kept interrupting him with questions.

For another view of Jason’s opinions on all of this, check out my Carnival-mentioned interview with him from the other week.

And before lunch Jared Benson gave us the Punchcut manifesto on presence. By the way, now I know what the name of the company means; it’s a reference to hand cutting lead type. They had lots of cool stuff that can’t be shown, as we often encounter, where all their cool stuff is under NDA.

Presence has formed a traditional, technological sense in the AIM status mode. But with mobiles always being in the hand, the world is changing. How is 24/7 presence going to work. He talked about explicit vs. implicit (location, sensors) status; this should all be removing the “it’s not a good time to talk” issue, and give options to communicate and improve a sense of communicatedness without direct communications.

7 points to consider when designing (or living) with a presence system:

1. Presence should not be interruptive – probably both ways; Twitter is pretty intrusive
2. Presence should be open and non-proprietary – don’t you have friends on other carriers? Do you even know this information?
3. Setting presence should be quick, simple and easy – flip side of point 1; this is why I never tweet, and rarely change profiles on my Nokia
4. I control how others see me – comm preferences, what apps can report, and how various people see (or do not) see you; consider proximity, both physical and societal
5. Some presence info works harder than others – time delays are a killer; social closeness lets small notes imply further information
6. Presence should work at a glance – can an emoticon be enough; app context as presence filter (current music)
7. Presence can extend beyond people – all technology can be linked, and display it or react appropriately

Check back at the end of the day for the last of the session summaries, and in the coming weeks (probably) for further information we will be distributing.

The afternoon got a bit more technical. Yusuke Fukazawa from DoCoMo gave an overview of robotic AI theory, and the current state of the Japanese market.

I might have to rethink my opinion on customization having impossibly low take rates; it may be temporary, or something only about western culture. In Japan, 98% change their ringer, 27% changed the theme (mostly more extremely than I am used to), but most amazingly 16% decorate their phone. This means deco-den or exterior customization, often to the degree of adding LEDs and other warranty-voiding work, at custom shops. It’s more like custom hot rods. The whole audience got hung up on this for a little while.

DoCoMo perceives their job as a carrier is to meet these user needs, providing more content, easier ability to customize, or the point of the talk, “automatic customization” (which I always differentiate as “personalization”). Not just for satisfying emotional needs, but to build custom menus as another approach to overcoming the growing number of device features. To my satisfaction, they also discussed how context (location, activities, social situation) should also affect the interface, by changing the interface, and even offering activities and functions to the user.

He was followed by Luca Passani, covering the history, issues and best practices in developing for a fragmented mobile world.

After that quick background, he showed us code for WALL Next Generation, which can help designers and developers quickly create a web site that adapts well to devices from WML to the iPhone. It takes a little bit of coding, but really not much. If you can do html with any proficiency, you can do this. Check out the tutorial to get started!

Morten Hjerde (after he said it, I still don’t know how to pronounce his last name) now with Vodafone, talked about two topics I love, information design and information visualization. He tied them together interestingly by discussing how navigational systems work (in the real world, and to navigation information systems) can change with improved interaction systems; direct manipulation and higher resolution screens on mobiles can allow better methods of finding and using.

He also challenged repeatedly that we don’t really do user centered design. If we did, you wouldn’t put mms and sms in different buckets. We’re still, in fact, doing computer-centric design. Organizational systems are too artificial, and too designed for cataloging, or information processing, and not as much for human interaction.

He detailed some design principles, and showed an example using them, his flat music player. Some asked about scaling and whether it actually works with users, but I also have worries about the encoding of metadata as true data. I’m probably all alone here.

He was followed by Francis Djabri from Nokia, who talked about all of our challenges in designing mobile services today. He explained a theory of software as service, which to him means the concept of providing the right data to users at the right time, creating a new category of information for users.

As a sample, he showed a video of a system Nokia helped pilot, using N95s to feed live traffic data in order to attempt to predict and modify traffic networks. This sort of product starts using existing concepts of mashups,
collective intelligence (from long tail theory) and the network effect, where user contributions improve the service.

Design challenges:

• Development processes don’t [currently] work like this.
• Networks and hardware can’t change this fast.
• User testing is often slow or doesn’t well focus on aspects of the use.
• Adoption challenges of privacy, trust, reliability and quality.

Some design principles:

• Enrich the data; many services are data impoverished so license metadata if not otherwise available.
• Augment data through digital convergence; combine services like music, social networks and location.
• Allow users to add value to the data; commenting, rating, etc.
• Assume devices are used in the real world; account for motion, interruption, poor connectivity.
• Avoid errors, and fix them
• Safeguard privacy, without burdening the user; present only the data needed to 3rd parties, and only connect data to identity when needed

And we wrapped up the sessions today (as we will tomorrow) with a panel, where Barbara invited Marcus Grupp (Rogers), Neil Pfeiffer (Hallmark), Jared Benson (Punchcut) and Frank Bentley (Motorola) to take questions about the mobile future, first showing off a DoCoMo video. The discussion was pretty self-sustaining, with the panelists talking amongst themselves about current trends, emerging youth trends of information consumption, multitasking and constant connectedness.

Most interesting to me was a discussion (which we’ll have more of tomorrow) on adding and changing the value of reality by using mobile devices, tagging and other digital content management. The discussion continued far and wide, and we’ll share it sometime later, in some format or other.

This evening we’ll be across the street at Teller’s having drinks and dinner, and if last night’s event is any guide, talking more about the same stuff. Check back tomorrow for more notes, in the future for slides and videos, and be sure to check services like Flickr for other media and chatter.

The workshops are over, and the evening get together was lots of fun, with a chance to meet a bunch of people I only know from by reputation and blogging.

The first half day of the conference itself feels harried to me, running around plugging in cables and taping things down, but the presentations are all good, and everyone seems really engaged. We're taking breaks late as no one wants to stop asking questions.

So far we've heard from:

Marcus Grupp, formerly of Orange and Telus, but now with Rogers in Canada. He covered the typical method of designing device interface, and selection of devices. Mostly how it's bad, and UX people need to be there, and consider the entire experience, and not just try to enforce static requirements strictly across all devices. He also shared a very good example of a poorly designed download screen that directly cost a carrier $560,000, entirely aside from the loss of goodwill and churn.

Mike Lundy continued the exact same topic, first talking about how Sprint normally executes in this exact manner, but then how his work as the UX designer for the Instinct broke the mold. Well, except for device selection. At the end he neatly summarized The Big Lessons as:

• Enforce consistency with code
• Determine how you make your money, then subjugate all other considerations to design
• Use visual designers up front (as well as technical folks)
• Have a clear goal (here: habituating the user to an unlimited phone)
• Limit complexity (justify every feature in the phone)

Taking a break from device design, Joe Grigsby from VML talked about how his interactive ad agency has become increasingly focused on mobile. We've all seen the numbers about use of mobile, which is why advertisers are interested, but he also talked about how mobile is good for consumers and advertisers; how mobile is part of life, so the real-world can integrate with information services, how location (and PANs) can add context to the experience, and more interesting reporting.

He shared some examples of how clients are meeting direct customer needs – sometimes after being pushed that way by VML – by exploiting the value of mobile to provide services.

And right before lunch, we had a panel from Motorola talk about their design group, and how they executed on a few example products and how their lab works to rapidly build and test.

They also shared in full detail their processes for design, and where they are moving towards and how they are changing. Of note to me was that their ethnographic studies, and other research is drawn from and shared with designers; all of whom seemed happy with the results. Another point of integration was between the hardware and interactive designers; they even ambushed one of the non-speaker Motorola attendees – who works on hardware design – for an answer.

And of course, they were asked about the various integration-with-carrier issues addressed by Marcus and Mike earlier.

Then they gave away a couple of unlocked Razr 2 phones. One off a drawing, one by Anthony Hand knowing the Razr and StarTAC are the two top selling devices of all time.

Jana has been taking graphical notes of each session, and shortly we'll get those photographed and posted up for another view of what everyone said.

We’ve started Design for Mobile. Brian is downstairs teaching about mobile web design, and Barbara is right over there covering her Introduction to Mobile Design class.

If this looks fun, and you aren’t already registered, there’s still time to hop in the car and come to see us for the conference sessions tomorrow and Wednesday. Register now or come see us in the lobby first thing in the morning.

I’m spending my time working on revisions for [a client], and helping put out organizational fires so am not watching any of the sessions. But I get this neat table in the lobby right next to the sign. Say hi to Alison, Jana or myself if you stop on by.

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