http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog designing the mobile user experience Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:22:53 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I have been been working on an ereader project lately,* and thinking about it a lot therefore. This has been soaking for a week now, it isn't coming together with a common theme as I like all my posts to do so; so I give up and am just gonna ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/03/10/the-future-of-the-e-reader/ On some of my latest projects the phrase "collaboration" has been thrown around a lot, as part of being Agile with a capital A. But generally, my initial reaction is that hardly ever does anyone mean it, or mean the same thing each time. For anything that strikes me like ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/03/04/handbook-of-collaborative-design/ I need to start just writing down about half the things I say, apparently. I am constantly finding some other brilliant blog post or tweet that makes me go "of course. We already do that." Kate Rutter at Adaptive Path recently posted about no longer using the word "web page." ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/02/26/there-are-no-web-pages-anymore/ Somewhere in my Twitter feed, I was pointed to Rita McGrath's Why I Hate Micropayments on Harvard Business Review. A nice read, and points to several problems. But I'm not ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater. When originally conceived, micropayments were pennies, fractions of pennies, or maybe ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/02/24/micropayments-and-so-called-micropayments/ The other day the team here at Little Springs working on [the other big project] were talking about one of their next phase deliverables, a help system. So I jumped in and intruded with all my ideas. Open plan offices are great for this. Especially in my time at Sprint, building ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/02/22/best-practices-in-interactive-help/ Lots of "speed" tips are focused on content providers. Plenty of information available. Here's a starting point. In general, tips for speeding up a web site will help for at least some devices, but there are some extra niceties for mobile optimization. Start with the giants: check out * Yahoo: ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/02/15/the-speed-of-the-mobile-web-part-2-tips-for-content-providers/ With all the latest announcements for e-readers and book pricing, I've been thinking a lot about the nature of reading recently. It seems like each company's reading experience presumes everybody and every bit of content is the same experience. Amazon is quite proud of their $9.99 pricing for e-books. They ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/02/10/paper-or-plastic-e-readers-vs-mobiles-vs-book/ I was in a game on my Android. I kept seeing this kinda-teasing ad for a game; I thought it might be relevant to me as a casual puzzle game player. Finally, after hours of play, I clicked on the ad. Many users do this, in higher rates than on ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/02/03/are-you-wasting-your-mobile-advertising-dollars/ I regularly encounter people, or posts, that refer to all criticism as bad. That it stifles creativity, especially for us sensitive artsy designer types. I could hardly disagree more. Criticism is a key part of discovering new ideas and working collaboratively. I am not brilliant enough to get by without ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/01/11/how-to-criticize-design/ A long-time friend of mine works at a major defense contractor, and is regularly providing me an interesting background in corporate telecoms. Most relevantly, his departent (company?) went wireline replacement some years back, so he's issued a smartphone. They've had well-publicized lost computers full of employee data, so exercise ... http://www.littlespringsdesign.com/blog/blog/2010/01/07/designing-notifications-that-dont-anger-your-users/