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Tuesday afternoon at Design for Mobile
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.
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