All posts tagged as "Java ME"

I keep fussing about details, because no matter how much wow factor your service has, missed details can erode your brand over time. Yesterday at the Mobile Device and User Experience, Scott Weiss (now of Human Factors International) talked about how the great transitions and visual design of the iPhone provided a “halo effect” that delayed users from noticing and becoming frustrated with the inconsistent back button placement, difficult text entry, the fact that the device never does learn anything about text input.

I just tried out the ABBYY Business Card Reader for S60 so I didn’t have to bring all the cards home. I’ll spend the money on the app, but I’m not sure why it consistently puts FIRSTNAME LASTNAME into the first name field, with nothing in last name. It seems a particularly easy bit of code, so what gives?

It’s way too easy to pick on pretty much any device and any service on getting details right. Scott does a great job of pointing out iPhone issues (though my chief irritants have to do with browser behavior), but what about Nokia? Well, here are some issues I found irritating. When I swap out the SIM on my E71 and launch messages and try to view one … nothing happens. I have to reboot it again. And then, there is the lack of keyboard shortcuts, especially on my QWERTY device. Not to mention, I learned that my device had predictive input at an industry conference, not having noticed it in the device.

By the way, XT9 is terrific! It learns words immediately. Love it so far.

Another example of missed details is the latest Gmail client. Two major problems for me:

• I keep getting cognitive dissonance when it announces that I have 6 messages in my Inbox but I can’t find them; I must go Options > Refresh to actually see the new messages


• It doesn’t realize I’m using a QWERTY device and thus my delete “shortcut” is # (two key presses) and there is no shortcut for archive

Why are these details wrong? It depends.

1. Not considering target audience and their goals, activities, needs, desires. The G1 is so developer-focused that small hands will actually cramp while typing.





2. Insufficient development & testing resources, and after all something had to give (think about the abrupt transition from Flash to Windows Mobile on many devices especially HTC)


3. Legacy code (I’m looking at you, Motorola and Nokia)


4. Insufficient knowledge of the domain (it’s shocking how many companies approach us and do not have an approach for dealing with device diversity


5. Piecemeal design, like a rambling home added onto by many owners in many architectural styles, without a consistency of purpose (like parts of the iPhone UI and also like the location of my very first job, the Winchester Mystery House


6. Product management processes that rate bugs on a scale of 1 to 5, then get all of the severity 1 and 2 bugs and some of the severity 3 bugs done before launch. Oh, and typically the worst UI bug can be is a 3.

How do you fix it? It’s hard. If you’re designing a platform, try to make the presentation layer flexible, including screen and even functionality. This will allow a bit more time before things start getting clunky. Rethink your paradigms every once in a while; don’t assume that a great user experience 8 years ago remains great. Features have been added, content has scaled, device capabilities have shifted, input mechanisms changed, and user expectations have evolved.

Set standards for user experience testing. Usability must score a certain level, perhaps benchmarked by the competition, before the product can launch; a bad task score must be launch gating. Don’t just test high-frequency things. And don’t just test usability: test learnability, speed to expert use, satisfaction by expert users. And definitely test the things that drive revenue and costs. Measure how well the experience matches with your brand goals. You do have brand goals, don’t you? A story about what you provide?

Get a second opinion. Even if you can’t invest in a lot of testing, get knowledgeable but outside resources to play with

The good folks over at dotMobi and DeviceAtlas, most notably James Pearce and Andrea Trassati, have provided us more goodies. This time, they’ve given us Data Explorer so we an see how device characteristics are distributed across the device universe.

Check out the introductory video. It’s great stuff if you care about how your content is rendered.

Now if we can merge some of this data with the frequently-used data coming from AdMob, M:Metrics, Opera, and so forth, we can get an idea of how many of those 128 pixel phones are actually using the web.

A while back, I posted a link to the Squidoo lens on mobile design that I’ve been assembling. I try to keep it up to date; there are 11 top mobile design blogs represented there below the various link resources.

Content includes:

1. Mobile design resources
2. Mobile Web Strategy
3. Mobile Design conferences
4. Miscellaneous Resources
5. Design Resources on Amazon.com
6. Companies to help you in mobile design
7. Developer Resources
8. Top Blogs
9. Mobile design bookmarks

In Rachel Hinman’s ongoing thought series, she points out how we disengage with the world:

Lately I have been thinking of a sad sight I see often – a person, walking around utterly disengaged with the world around them, head buried in a mobile phone. It??s evidence of an incredibly unfortunate relationship that we humans have established with technology objects. They demand we disengage from the world and focus on the object – give deference to it, instead of the world.

The iPod Shuffle is far less likely to engage its wearer so much that she crosses the street without looking. The Touch and iPhone require more interaction. Perhaps if I were listening to music and I could just pull the earpieces out without missing much, I’d feel differently. As we frequently discuss, a good design is optimized for the context in which it will be used.

This is a problem that we as the mobile industry tend to exacerbate. Cool highly interactive experiences, like much of the iPhone’s UI and many touch interactions, require the user to stop and exclude the world. Fine for games, not so good for music players. Despite my iPod Touch, I still use my iPod Shuffle for being out in the world. I’ll use the Touch only when I have the freedom of some guaranteed uninterrupted time. I like to be able to interact with the world with only one second’s delay.

The takeaway: decide whether you need to design for users immersed or emersed in your product, or perhaps facilitate both behaviors. Then do it. But don’t assume.

From the good folks over at Vision Mobile – help out if you are a mobile developer:

We’ve launched a survey for mobile application developers.

If you’ve programmed for BREW, S60, UIQ, Android, Windows Mobile, Java, Palm, Linux or Flash Lite, we want to hear what you have to say.

The survey spans across a wide range of topics, to gauge how mobile developers feel about IDE features, ease of debugging, emulator glitches,
support forums, documentation & sample code available, application portability, pains of going to market and desirability of new features like
scripting and POSIX support.

We have announced a prize draw for each developer who completes the survey – a $1,000 Amazon voucher, more than enough to get hold of a snazzy new phone to test your applications on!

The survey is running for four weeks (closing on Friday 27 June) and the $1,000 winner will be announced on Friday 4 July 2008.

We had indicated on the mobile design resources page that we would be adding design recommendations and style guide information. This information would be recommendations that don’t constitute a design pattern, but nevertheless are good or best practices. And of course, the information is free and you are encouraged to add or edit content.

We just loaded a long page on mobile game design. It’s the chapter on game design from my 2003 User Interface Guidelines for J2ME MIDP 2.

We’re still working on getting other major information providers (a quick call-out to dotMobi, W3C, Nokia, SonyEricsson, Sprint, Vodafone, and others) to provide support and/or information. If you provide support in the form of a lot of content and/or money to defray our expenses, you’ll get your logo built into the templates.