All posts tagged as "Business"

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.

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.

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is pretty good. Be sure you are up to speed on Adobe freeing Flash Lite and Tomi’s talk on mobiles as the 7th mass media. As always, Tomi is bullish on SMS and I only somewhat agree.

The dotMobi Advisory Group is presenting what looks like a really useful free webinar for mobile designers and programmers. Check it out; I hope they capture the video file for later download.

Left to Your Own Devices
Building Device Aware Content – new tools to simplify the process and increase your business

In case you haven’t noticed, Nuance is now a major player in the mobile space.

• Voice control for smart devices and Embedded Voice engines for some devices


• Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Call Steering software – it doesn’t have to be as badly designed as it is


• They now own T9 though its not on their front page


• A whole bunch of mobile messaging solutions


• Voice-driven mobile search


• Voice-based navigation services, based on search

In short, they are playing in the most important mobile content spaces these days, and are slowly working towards horizontal integration of input technologies. You probably use more than one of their products.

I remember several years ago, the Nielsen Norman Group published a field usability study looking at WAP usability. They made a number of assumptions, many of which were questionable. Their assumptions yielded incorrect results. One chain of reasoning went as follows: data services in the UK are more developed than in the US, Nokia & Ericsson devices are the best designed, so we’ll look at Nokia & Ericsson mobile web access in the UK and draw our conclusions for the entire industry.

A chief complaint in the study: you had to have an uninterrupted data connection to successfully complete any task, so WAP is crap. Never mind the fact that the Phone.com/Openwave browser was explicitly and multiply designed to not have that problem.

It wasn’t really their fault. They didn’t know mobile and its ecosystem. But they damaged an industry with their research. (No, I’m not claiming they killed WAP.)

We continue to get this. A company who has done design work for a manufacturer at one point will assert “our designers know mobile.” They do, a little bit. But they don’t know how the industry has shifted, nor do they know anything outside of handsets. Device design is a different environment than application design: in the former you get to set the environment, in the latter you have to optimize for whatever environment the application finds itself in.

We’ve done web, application, and device design. When we don’t have to worry about the environment shifting underneath us, I get a little giddy. It will work exactly as we plan it? Wow! We don’t have to worry about distribution? Wow! We can rely on certain hardware and data resources to be available? Great!

The users, of course, don’t know the difference and don’t care.

Mobile interaction design is not a separate profession from interaction design. But it is a complex space, with a similar degree of complexity as health care. As I’ve focused on keeping up to date with the users, devices, technologies, platforms, and industries in mobile, my web and desktop application skills have dropped. Sure I can design a web site, but it won’t be as good as somebody who really knows the space.

Khoi Vinh has asserted the need for the new designer to be able to successfully design native to web, mobile, print, and more. I agree, to a minor degree: any of us claiming a degree of seniority need to be able to understand each of these channels, how they can interact with each other, basics of design for each, and what is an appropriate degree of consistency between them. And to have deep expertise in at least one of them.

We need to have a good understanding of what each channel can do, set the strategy for each channel, then let specialists in each channel detail out the design.

Strategy will involve how to use each channel and how to have them interact. That is one design discipline. Each channel interaction is another design discipline. All are the same profession.