All posts tagged as "Conference"

We are thrilled to announce our conference workshop and agenda finalized! Get the details.

Be sure to click on session details. Why? Because on these pages, you can leave a comment asking the speaker about anything you’d really love to have covered.

For example, ask Dan Saffer of Adaptive Path about the future of gesture interfaces on the session page for his talk, Tap is the New Click. Then ask Kashif Imam of ECCO Design similar questions for his session, The Next Frontier of UI Design for Mobile Devices. You don’t have to attend to ask questions.

Our two workshops are targeted at those new to mobile design. Brian Fling is presenting Mobile 2.0 – Design and Develop websites for the iPhone, and Beyond, perfect for those wanting to get into the mobile web. And I’m presenting the more general Intro to Mobile Design, for those needing to learn about devices, operators, and applications.

Once you get up to speed with mobile design basics, the actual conference will dive deep into several topics, presented by some of the leading mobile design and research practitioners.

But register soon: early bird pricing ends August 1.

This week, we're finalizing the Design For Mobile conference agenda, and celebrating by chatting with the notorious Luca Passani of AdMob. Among other things, Luca is the chief personality behind WURFL and WALL. Not only will Luca talk about designing with WALL Next Generation at the conference, but Brian Fling will provide a pre-conference workshop on mobile web design.

Barbara Ballard: What excites you about mobile?

Luca Passani: The challenge. Mobile phones are extremely poor internet clients. People don't buy phones to go on the Internet. They buy them to make phone calls. Almost every mobile device comes with a mini-browser these days, but the user experience is so poor that people continue to buy newspapers to look up the day's events, ask passers-by for directions, and or to call a phone number to reserve movie tickets. When people perform the functions above and others like them using a mobile application I have designed and built, I get a little satisfaction.

BB: Tell me about your history in systems to enhance mobile usability, including Openwave.

LP: When I started working with WAP in 1999, it was clear to me that development for mobile devices needed to include usability thinking from the ground up. This did not go unnoticed to Openwave (or Phone.com as it was called at the time). That was the beginning of a journey in which Openwave was asking me to evangelize about WAP usability to developers all over the world.

My views about usability have always been sort of extreme. I always believed that the success of a mobile web application depends on letting the UI design go very deep and influence the business logic. This is quite a strong statement, particularly if you consider that pretty much all of the web development frameworks built over the past 10 years were built on the assumption that you have data, you have business logic, and then you have the view part which can be adjusted to present any business logic. My approach has always been different, in that, the system should be defined by user experience. If business logic must be modified to accommodate user experience, then so be it.

BB: What are the origins of WALL? How will it progress?

LP: There was a point when Openwave was asking my department, Developer Marketing, to promote the creation of XHTML-MP sites. WML devices were dominant at the time and developers could not see a clear advantage in migrating to XHTML. One problem was that XHTML had dropped a lot of the good ideas of WML (soft keys, keyboard accelerators,... but I digress).

The solution was to create WALL, a tag library that allowed developers to create mobile sites for all devices with one markup. I did not have programming resources at the time, so I ended up writing it all by myself. I would do a lot of things differently today, but this did not prevent WALL from being a huge success. WALL was launched in 2004. It was a great resource at the time. Today's devices and mini-browsers are more advanced than what was available in 2004. For this reason, sites built with WALL look a bit 2004-ish today. This problem will be solved by WNG (WALL Next Generation). WNG is a complete rewrite and redesign of WALL, allowing developers to fully utilize CSS, yet still gracefully degrading on older XHTML devices and WML. [ed: learn more at the conference!]

BB: What can you tell non-coding designers about device diversity?

LP: Every device is different. Full stop. Seems easy enough, yet people continue to complain about standards and lack of standards and bad support for standards. Well, this is the way it is. If you don't like it, keep doing web development.

BB: What is the biggest obstacle to getting good design into the marketplace and your designs implemented?

LP: Device diversity. Network operators. Content transcoders.

BB: Considering anyone planning on coming to see you speak at D4M, what book / article / movie / blog would you suggest they read to understand the way you think?

LP: GAP is a good introduction. It puts web developers on the right track of thinking mobile, raising awareness and challenging everything they think they know. Once they have absorbed GAP, then they will understand why WURFL and WALL exist, and why they may want to adopt it for their projects.

Check back periodically for the rest of our interview series with the speakers of Design for Mobile 2008.

Yesterday, Gizmodo published a great comparison of four large touch screen communications devices, a.k.a. iPhone clones. While I’m not sure that “clone” is fair, certainly they are perceived that way by the customers and are being targeted at the same market. So they are perhaps intended to be iPhone “killers.” If they work. And it looks like the Instinct – which officially launches today on Sprint – does.

At Design For Mobile we will have Mike Lundy talking about getting Gizmodo’s winner, the Instinct, from concept to market. He’s Sprint’s UX lead for the Instinct, as well as many other Sprint phones.

As you might expect, with such complex products to manage, Mike’s been super-busy. He is relying on us to organize his talk for him, and we’re going to leave that to you instead. What would you like to see him talk about regarding product management, vendor relationships, product design, feature setting, or anything else about handset/carrier decision making?

Post your ideas in the comments, and we’ll gather them all up.

Two weeks ago, we spoke with Liselott Brunnberg, who has been researching the impact of context on mobile design. Now we talk with C. Enrique Ortiz, Founder and CTO of eZee, who has been working on context from the technical and platform sides.

Barbara Ballard: What excites you about mobile?

C. Enrique Ortiz: Back in 1997 I was working with embedded systems, but when I first saw mobile and wireless technologies, people carrying handsets – carrying little computers everywhere – I knew it was the future of computing. It excited me that you could have personal computers you could take everywhere, that you could use them for communications and access to the internet.

I realized that personalizing the experience was important. Even though I'm not a designer like you, Barbara, I spent a lot of time studying the user experience on a mobile handset and how to deliver it. I for one believe this is the era of mobility, and that context will be king, much like content was supposed to be king on the internet. If you go to our website, you'll see that all over. Our product delivers such high degree of personalization and relevance to the handset; it’s good that we are finally delivering this, something that we've been talking about this for years. I will touch on this when we get to the conference, when I get a few minutes.

BB: It sounds like you are a founder of a company trying to do all of this.

CEO: The company is called eZee, and delivering this experience is hard. It takes many moving pieces.

For a very long time, we as an industry have been focusing on the “micro” aspects of mobility &ndash the device and its capabilities, web vs. other technologies, APIs, and so on; lots of low-level details. But delivering the right experience is much more than that. That's what we are delivering at eZee. To truly deliver on a contextually relevant experience for the consumer, many elements must come together in real time; and we have a 3-level approach to this problem. This requires a complex and sophisticated platform. I personally have been putting the pieces required to do this since 1997 and the culmination is something we call 3D Mobile. It is the integration of data, domain expertise and demand management and we believe it will touch nearly every component of the global economy. That’s what we are delivering at eZee.

BB: So the work you are doing at eZee helping you realize the vision you had in 1997?

CEO: Yes, exactly. We started in the mobile payments space, and it amazes me where we ended up; in exactly the area I’ve been preaching for a long time; that is a testament of what mobility is about; about complementing the Web and delivering the needed information, no more, no less, all depending on the user’s situation, interactions and context – and for that, it is about understanding the mobile user.

With eZee, and with the help of my team, I’m not just realizing the vision, but I continue to learn; research and explore the space, and deliver. It is a lot of fun.

BB: Do you have a recommendation for people who don't yet have the eZee platform to improve contextuality?

CEO: You can write some of the server side components, or even do it client side. There are a lot conversations about mobile web versus local clients and even messaging, but each approach is good for the right problems. If we want to use mobile context, we can't really use the mobile web as it stands today. That means that you have to do some level of context awareness by asking for ZIP codes, or the new Google location APIs, to learn part of the context of the user and apply it in your application.

If you want to really leverage the user's mobile context to its fullest, you have to use the capabilities of the handset. Right now that means a local client. In the future this can be mobile web, or even a hybrid web runtime approach.

BB: You probably have a story about the major use case with your work at the company. What is that story?

CEO: I think one of the key insights we have learned over the last few years is that businesses will be a major factor driving the need for relevant context. Let me take a moment to explain. Helping consumers find things or learn about specific things as they interact, with the physical world, or via the web – location based services and the like – will have a big role in developing the extended mobile experience for the consumer. But we believe the real impact of mobility will be in helping consumers get real savings and/or information, and creating unprecedented supply chain efficiencies, all available at their fingertips, all triggered by a simple interactions using their personal mobile handset.

And at the center of this are the user interactions, the physical-world interactions, the consumer and the business factors, and more importantly, putting it all this together and making sense out all of all it.

Not many companies are talking about this right now, but we believe this is where the industry is headed. If I am at Sony and I can look at my supply chain information and realize that have too much of product X at my Austin warehouse, I can use mobility to influence consumers on the web, and in stores, and really anywhere, in that area. By doing so, Sony benefits by alleviating an expensive inventory management problem and the consumer benefits from aggressive pricing or other aggressive incentives. Win-win.

Recently you may have heard Amazon offer to have consumers’ text in a product name or ID number and Amazon will tell them what they can sell the product to them if they can wait to have it shipped. This is very interesting as Amazon is aggressively trying to disaggregate retail outlets. However, what is to stop Sony or any other manufacturer from disaggregating both? Customers of eZee’s Prime platform can be in that position hours after signing on to our service.

BB: Sitting at an intersection, thinking of lunch. Is anybody nearby having a sale?

CEO: Our customers are businesses. Most companies are really going after consumers, in social networking and photos, and so forth. Our customers will develop the scenarios and the one that you described is certainly one. As a matter of fact, our largest and most active sale to date is with Moe’s Southwestern Grill.

BB: What is design?

CEO: Design is the phase in the development of something such as software, the creative phase of that longer cycle or project, when you to create and define the approaches to a specific problem. Through design, you define, decide and organize the elements of and the corresponding relationships for your solution, for the purpose of solving a specific problem. Design requires domain expertise to understand the issues to address and solutions to put together.

BB: So many people in design, development, and business have different understandings of design.

CEO: It's about figuring out how to solve the problem. We are a startup, so we do design, development, and research ourselves.

When I was younger, I was focused on scientifically complete software. Now I know the better solution is to work on getting enough completed and working well to go to market. We work in a very iterative manner, with quick design and development cycles. You certainly can't do that for truly mission-critical software like space shuttle, but for business software you can do it.

In the shuttle software, even comments in the code have to go through a review and testing proces. One time somebody put in a comment that accidentally told the compiler to execute something; it would have been a disaster if that had flown.

BB: Who, other than eZee, is doing context well in mobile right now?

CEO: I guess Google is doing well in some ways and lots of potential. Who else? There are a number of mobile marketing players doing well in different ways. They're figuring out this approach. By name, none are using a similar approach.

BB: What do you think about locative media projects like 230 Miles of Love? Is that context?

CEO: Yes. It's about the circumstances that surround a person at a certain point in time. It could include location, what is around, many things. Anything that uses some piece of the context is using context. You can find some of my writing on the topic on my website.

You can use one piece or ten pieces of it, depending on what is available or what is needed for your product or content to work welll.

Check back periodically for the rest of our interview series with the speakers of Design for Mobile 2008.

We'll be posting interviews with various speakers from the forthcoming Design For Mobile conference on this blog. First up is Liselott Brunnberg, whose design research into mobiles and context will soon earn her a PhD from The Interactive Institute of Sweden.

Barbara Ballard: Liselott, thanks for talking with me today. Let's start with some easy stuff. Why do you like design, what excites you about it?

Liselott Brunnberg: I am excited with doing experimental design in areas that is rather unexplored. It's really thrilling to see if your ideas work and how they are received by the users. If you explore new areas you don't really know about the result &ndash it's more like gambling.

BB: So seeing what you created in front of users is the most fun?

LB: That is just part of the fun – the nerveracking part. It's also fun to be the developer. To see what solutions work out technically.

BB: What will you do next, now that you have the PhD?

LB: I believe we will try to develop the concept into a commercial product. I will probably work with location-based gaming or location based experiences in one way or another.

BB: Will that be as an entrepreneur, or working with an existing company?

LB: We will work with an existing company.

BB: I think that the reason why I went into industry instead of staying in academia was because I really wanted to see my work become real.

LB: Oh, cool. so you have walked that road already. It would be great to get to know more of your experiences from that. I'm not sure I will stay in academia.

BB: I was half through my dissertation before I quit – so you did better than me, congratulations. Do you consider yourself having a specific design focus, such as interaction design

LB: Interaction design is part of my focus, but a large portion is also focusing on expreience design and entertainment.

BB: How do you understand each of those fields? How are they different and similar

LB: I consider interaction design to be more on usability issues. Experience design is more on creating the actual content. Such as a game – to be the more artistic side. They do both overlap.

BB: Oh, that's interesting. I think that you have some interaction design practitioners arguing about usability.

LB: Probably. It's just how I have defined my work.

BB: I understand. Since I came to this field via Human Factors engineering & psychology (then HCI, industrial design, usability, and business) I find the whole question of definitions a bit irrelevant to actually doing my job.

LB: It has two quite distinct parts. One is to develop the possibility for interaction in the game. To make it possible for players to play the game and also look out at the scenery. One is to create the content itself in regards of the context, and I see that more as experience design. But the interaction side is also about creating a good experience of course.

BB: So as far as specifics: what brought you to location-aware gaming?

LB: When I started as a PhD student I had to do something related to the road context. My colleagues were all doing mobile applications for drivers. I was more interested in doing something for passengers. Children are often spending a lot of time being quite inactive when traveling and I wanted to do something that could engage them more with the surrounding context. So I started to experiment with the idea to make the road side into an exciting game-world.

BB: So mobile and location are inseparable as a motivation?

LB: As motivation for me? Yes, I find that interesting. How to create an experience that realties to how people move around. Traveling on road is quite different than walking around for example.

BB: Are you currently working on one application per context such as back seat, or adapting applications based on context?

LB: So far I have only developed applications for backseat. If it would be in an other context such as walking, the whole game concept would have to be adapted a bit. In a bus it could work okay.

BB: So what key discoveries did you make in designing for back seat use? Any principles our readers and conference attendees can take home and use?

LB: The players really liked the concept of creating a fiction connected with objects and locations. What we could see was that the fast movement created a special relation to the surrounding physical context. Even quite simple games became fun when they were linked to the context. The passengers' uncontrolled movement added to the challenge of the game play. Issues in much location based games is how to scale up the experience to cover vast areas, such as a whole country or continent. We saw this is possible to develop engaging experiences based on map data order with scale.

BB: Do you have any intuition for how that could extend into non-game applications

LB: The closest would be to extend into interactive storytelling as experiences in general. Applications where you get to know more about places or objects such as tourists, crimes, history, geography, general knowledge etc.

BB: Oh, education and training is a good one.

LB: Yes, an interesting area is to explore more how children can use the time to learn things about our geography, about places and such in an interesting way.

BB: There are some classroom games around here, not mobile, that have students plan from an 1840's mindset how to move their family across our continent. This makes me wonder about "virtual" location. The games last for several weeks, with different schools participating. Over time the kids have illnesses and whatnot happen to their virtual groups.

LB: We have an old book in Sweden where a boy travels on the back of a goose to experience adventures in different cities around the country. It's for children to learn geography in school. Quite nice.

BB: How could your learnings about context make that into a better learning experience?

LB: Not that it might be a better learning experience then other alternatives; It should give another sensation as if you are actually present at a place then if you are just hearing about it. If you read about an accident in the news paper it may affect you more if you have actually visited the place.

BB: Hmmm, maybe especially for different learning styles. Okay, some technical/practice stuff. What are the challenges in prototyping and testing a context-based application?

LB: Testing can be problematic when you need to experience the product within the field for which it was developed.

BB: Okay, we can wrap this up. One final question you can answer later if you want. Have you seen 230 Miles of Love? Any comments?

LB: I have not seen that – so I will check it out and get back to you. I have pictures to send also . I would enjoy talking more next week when I have my own computer.

BB: Sounds great! Thanks for your time, I know it is getting late.

LB: okay great.

Look for our interview with Enrique Ortiz late next week to see the developer's perspective on context.

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.