All posts tagged as "Java ME"

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.

I am thrilled to announce that we have announced the first of the speakers, more details, and the registration page for the first North American conference focused on mobile design, Design for Mobile.

Speakers include researchers, visual designers, interaction designers, UI developers, and design strategists. They work in operators, device manufacturers, open source, academia, content companies, technology companies. They work on web, applications, services, devices, and best practices.

We've more in the works, so stay tuned.

Register now!

AT&T has gotten a lot of press this week talking about its universal design principles. It’s worth a read for anybody in mobile development, as is the training offered by both major sources for their definitions: North Carolina State University Center for Universal Design and the University of Wisconsin TRACE Center (I’ve had training both places).

I applaud AT&T’s new-found desire for universal design. Not only did I write about the business model in my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience, but I’ve written about different software and devices to improve mobile accessibility. When I was at Sprint, I managed to get a few improvements on a few devices. Not as many as I wanted, but a few improvements.

My concern with this announcement and this document is that they are targeting it at developers, who have very little influence over the accessibility of devices or web sites. For example, a device with a web browser that can not in any way read aloud the text can do nothing to facilitate mobile web use by blind users, regardless of how many accessibility principles the site employs. Similarly, a device with only 2 font sizes will have some issues with displaying text for folks with declining vision.

Nevertheless, increasing the visibility of the problem is worthwhile. Smart phone developers at least can come up with product improvements.

While the FierceWireless report said, “Developers must first submit applications created via Universal Design principles to AT&T for certification if they wish for the apps to be available on the operator’s Media Mall mobile site,” the press release did not indicate that would be required. I hope this remains true, because this would pretty much limit Media Mall to Symbian, Palm, and Windows Mobile applications. Not very accessible to feature phone users, now is it?

What I’d like to see is the various “smart phone” operating system providers helping out in similar ways. I think the impact would go further than the AT&T document. What I’d like to see AT&T do is buy feature phones with accessible features.

In the meantime, testing for accessibility is a variant on usability testing. If you want help with this, let us know.

In a number of recent projects, we’ve wanted to help users by actually giving relevant information on how to download and install a file. This sort of thing is regularly done appropriately for high end phones (S60, Palm, Blackberry, iPhone, WinMob), because the install process and messaging is consistent for devices on the platform.

Things get more difficult for feature phones. Has the operator blocked access? Will there be a “mother may I” for each access? Can the user dismiss it? What will it say? How does the user find the downloaded content?

What I’m thinking about is a repository of instructions for users, based on class of use (such as always needs access to the web) and device. An application would detect the device and render appropriate instructions from the repository.

A download web page, for example, would give accurate instructions on how to find the specific content on the user’s device, with the instructions pulled from the repository library. As this is a key failure point in using applications, this would be helpful to both users and developers.

Please, post a reply in comments. This may be something we can work together to solve.

Usability pundit Jakob Nielsen has done much to promote usability, especially on the (desktop) web. He and the folks at the Nielsen Norman Group do a lot of meta-analysis on usability methods.

So when he measures usability ROI measures, be sure he is doing it across a large number of sites. He reports the average ROI for usability on web sites has declined from 135% (2002) to 83% (2008). What I found particularly interesting about this article is the first of his two explanations for the decline in ROI:

We have now harvested most of the low-hanging fruit from the truly horrible websites that dominated the lost decade of Web usability (approximately 1993–2003). In those early years, Web design was abominable — think splash screens, search that didn’t find anything, bloated graphics everywhere. The only good thing about these early designs was that they were so bad that it was easy for usability people to be heroes: even the smallest study would inevitably reveal several immense opportunities for improvement.

Now, over in the mobile space, the “low hanging fruit” is usually still present – even on Nokia devices and Google applications. I thus expect the mobile usability ROI metrics to be closer to 135%.

Certainly the usability testing we do for our clients has delivered significant strategic and design understanding, resulting in products that better serve user needs with less friction. And more revenue and lower costs.

If you are afraid that your site or application might have some of that “low hanging fruit”, invest a little money in an expert review. We’ll do that for you, and it’s even cheaper than a small usability test.

I’ve been getting an increasing number of requests for information on “what do I need to learn to get into mobile design?”. I always take this opportunity to mention my book, Designing the Mobile User Experience, which was written to help user experience, marketing, and product professionals translate their skills into mobile design and business.

Why? We think:

• iPhone awareness – in recent user research, one participant said of mobile Internet, “No, not on my phone. That’s what the iPhone is for.”


• one phone for every two people – 50% penetration is getting lots of business attention


• unlimited data plans – finally! For me, it’s one of the biggest draws of the iPhone.

Designing the Mobile User Experience has information about mobile users, differences in mobile use worldwide, design principles, some design patterns, sources for further design recommendations, industry structure, visual design for mobile media, and information on mobile user research including usability testing.