Favourite quote (so far) from Business to Buttons

The ‘From Business to Buttons‘ PDF and Keynote presentations are live along with some video (look for the ‘Web TV ‘link top right of the page.)

How many times have we heard this before :-P

“Here is another new thing we have developed which will help people do things they always wanted to do and will now do everyday. We have made the important decisions, worked out how it will work, chosen the suppliers and built a very expensive prototype. You have two weeks to design it, or we will be late and it will be your fault.”

Clive Grinyer, Lipstick on a Pig.

iMode vs vending machine on a cold Tokyo morning

Hillarious video (part of a larger presentation Bill Moggridge, IDEO on Interaction Design at the 2007 Potsdam Innovation Forum) demonstrating the incredible patience required to extract a soft drink from a Japanese vending machine via iMode/QR code etc. Scrub through to about 9:35 for the iMode video.

The whole video is worth a listen and begins with an interview with iMode co-founder Takeshi Natsuno regarding the creation of iMode and follows with the creation of the first computer mouse, the designs that led to the creation of MicroSoft Windows, the iPod, Google etc.

“Illustrating lifestyles from the developing world” on the MEX blog

 Thai monk with second generation NGage

Many thanks to Marek Pawlowski, organizer of the MEX, Mobile User Experience conference, for the opportunity to publish my response to the annual MEX Manifesto on the MEX blog.

“In this article responding to point #5 of the MEX Manifesto (’The developing world is the new frontier for mobile user experience‘), Stephanie Rieger of user experience consultancy Yiibu paints a detailed picture of customer lifestyles in South East Asia. Stephanie’s writing interweaves links to a community photo essay from Flickr with her own commentary on the individuals she has met in this region and her observations on the mobile user experience implications.”(more)

I will also be attending the conference on 27-28, May 2008 and co-authoring the annual MEX Report which outlines conference proceedings and the overall response to the Mex Manifesto.

Really looking forward to attending the event!

Interview with Jan Chipchase

A great interview with Jan Chipchase from the folks at the Convivio Network (“a Thematic network of researchers and practitioners from many backgrounds (computer science, human sciences, design, business) developing a broad discipline of human-centered design of digital systems for everday life.”)

A few notable passages…

The extent to which the research team spends time in context is an issue I struggle with even on something as seemingly routine as deciding where to stay during a field study. Our default accommodation is often a multi-national hotel chain with everything that that entails, but except for the financial elites in many of those societies you’re cut off from the people you’re researching. But on the other hand to function effectively the team needs to work from a safe, clean environment that supports interaction with team members, home bases and the other people that are part of our working lives. These demands create conflicting needs. My ideal situation is to book locally owned guest houses situated close to the communities where the research takes place though it doesn’t always work out that way.

This is probably a good point to raise the issue of cultural translation. Access to situations and contexts is important but how do you know you’re drawing the right conclusions?….

….Some things are obvious, it’s just that no-one has looked or asked those questions in that context before. Assuming that the research findings are both new and relevant to the client’s interests, one of the highest compliments is when they say “that’s so obvious now”. The comment suggests that we’ve picked up on behaviors that are subtle enough to be largely invisible but common enough to be understood….

Some great points. As someone who has travelled and worked on the road from odd locations with silly amounts of gear, i’ve often been frustrated by how high maintenance you become for need of reliable internet access, non-flaky power, air-con, and a place to lock up your laptop(s) at night. In an every-day ‘man on the street’ research context, i’m sure this can be even more frustrating.

Actually, a mid-range serviced apartment (fancy name for cleaning 3 times a week and satelitte TV) like the one we’re in can be a nice alternative in some cities. At least you can stay in a local neighbourhood, take public transit downtown, eat at the neighbourhood joints and get stuck in the rain like everyone else. And you don’t have to plan ahead to do it :-)

Great article. Well worth a read!

Mobile Usability & Design Resources

Most of this stuff is from Nokia and specifically S60 related but there’s lots of good information regardless of the O/S or platform you’re developing for.

  • Usability Culturally Speaking: Short paper by Nokia introducing common issues such as differences in text direction, colour usage, iconography, number and date conventions etc.
  • Series 60 UI Style Guide: Just what it sounds like :-)
  • Series 60 Usability Guidelines for J2ME Games: This is a really useful document. Many issues addressed will be useful to not only Flash Lite developers but creators of small advertising or content based application. Also includes sections on game experience and gameplay.
  • Turn Limitations into Strengths: Design one Button Games: Another good one for Flash Lite developers. Short but useful article with reference to an old Gamasutra article/tutorial and a great quote by Noah Falstein “When you find yourself constrained by a difficult circumstance or combination of limitations in design, look for a solution that turns those very limitations into a fun solution. Try to make the limitations work in your favor, not against you.”
  • User Experience Checklist for J2ME Applications: Once again, good reference for everyone with headings to indicate which checklist items apply best to which OS or type of application (ie. games etc.) Lots of good stuff including handy tips like “Application has been tested with actual end-users, not just in-house developers, The user is not forced to guess the right format for information and Obscenity or foul language is not used.” LOL!
  • Designing XHTML MP Content: From Nokia again. Includes a checklist of “top guidelines for optimizing mobile XHTML services” as well as details on each XHTML MP element. Found through the W3C Mobile Web Best Pactices reference section.
  • Browsing on Mobile Phones: Short paper from Nokia discussing usability as it relates to mobile web content and the Opera-style single column layout.

And just for fun, the Series 60 Themes Illustrator Sketching Templates. Great idea this—an Adobe Illustrator file including real vector S60 UI layouts and menu elements. Great vector artwork. Very handy for mockups!

BTW-Most of these were found on Forum Nokia.

Mobile Learning Reading List Part 2

After a far too long hiatus i’m back (from Bangkok!—more on that very soon.) So for starters, a bunch of new mobile learning material :-)

Mobile Learning on the Cheap

Lots of good ideas here that range from how to use PDAs in the classroom to SMS based activities.

Mobile and Media Literacy

Equitycampaign—out of the UK is an initiative that hopes to decrease the digital divide in the EU. Not specifically mobile focused but some of their rationale can easily be applied to justify mobile learning and i’m sure there will be some mobile components in all of this.

In essence, the digital divide is the difference in access to learning resources that modern technology offers young people, usually a working computer and an Internet connection. While our schools are better equipped than ever before, the variation in the quality of learning that takes place at home is huge. And as children only spend 15% of their lives at school, the learning that takes place at home is extremely important to their future success.

Technology offers us a unique opportunity to extend learning support beyond the classroom, something that has proved impossible to do until now. But the digital divide means that millions of children are currently denied this help.

On a somewhat related note, the European Centre for Media Literacy (ECML) was a 24 month program from 2004-2006 with the following objectives:

With media technology becoming so prevalent in homes, and with multi-media education more possible now with student access to computers and the Internet, “media literacy” expands the basic concept of literacy (i.e. “reading” and “writing”) to all forms of communication – from television to T-shirts, from billboards to multi-media environments. ECML project would like to help stakeholders to understand why teaching media literacy is so important and give students new education tools.

And finally, an ambitious Mobile Content Education campaign from the Australian Interactive Media Association:

…with increased sophistication, comes an increased burden on the consumer to understand, interact with, and consume mobile content. Recent reports such as the Australian Mobile Phone Lifestyle Index, international research and much consumer feedback shows that only a relatively small group of early adopters are engaging with mobile content. Early experiences with mobile content—good or bad, will spread quickly via word of mouth. We need to ensure that consumers overwhelmingly have positive experiences with mobile content—and tell their friends!

…The AIMIA Mobile Content Industry Development Group is inviting mobile content companies to join with operators, content providers, trade associations and handset manufacturers in developing a cross-industry national education campaign focusing on:

  • What is mobile content?
  • Why engage with mobile content?
  • How much does it cost?
  • How do I get it?
  • What do I do if I have a problem?

The campaign is envisaged to include television advertising, in-store brochures, web site and a mobile site and will be ‘owned’ by the industry as a whole.

Lowest Common Denominator

Leonard Low with another great post pondering what it will take to make the mobile web truly useful—not only in education—but to the masses.

In my research into best practices for designing mobile learning, I’ve recently come across a number of sources that advocate, strongly, that a LCD (Least/Lowest Common Denominator) approach to designing mobile experiences is a bad thing….An LCD approach to interface/activity design is one that caters for the widest range of platforms by creating a single, non-adaptive document designed to be viewable on the most basic and least functional of those platforms. The currently prevailing philosophy regarding resource generation for the mobile web is that documents should be designed to exploit the functionality of any platform on which they render, to maximise the user’s viewing experience. This view is strongly advocated by leading mobile web commentators, researchers and academics, and indeed, the W3C itself through its Mobile Web Best Practice standard and MobileOK project:….My feeling is that web content design guidelines used to be centred around avoiding problems; current mobile content design guidelines are centred around maximising user experiences. Both perspectives have pros and cons – what do you think?

This on the heels of a recent announcement by the W3C of a workshop on the Mobile Web in Developing Countries. Mobile learning is such an obvious fit for many emerging nations as larger numbers of the population have mobiles compared to PCs. That said—content creation for mobile is still relatively difficult and for this reason, many mobile learning initiatives still focus on PDAs rather than handsets. With inexpensive or free applications like mobile Word, Excel and Power Point, a good PDA with memory card and wi-fi can easily be incorporated into both lesson planning and student generated mobile activities. As for mobile web on PDA, it seems to be limited to surfing and i’ve yet to hear of any projects willing to take the leap into actual content creation via XHTML and CSS for the browser environment—possibly because it’s still too difficult and/or unpredictable in its results.

Wildlife in the Field

A lovely example of fun, simple practical mobile learning from the UK. WildKey is an interactive identification program that enables pupils to take ICT beyond the normal limits of the classroom and identify and record species in the field.

Using simple prompts and images, pupils of all ages (KS 2-4) can quickly learn to identify species and record their sightings. When collated in a systematic manner, yearly data provide a picture of how climate change may be affecting British wildlife. This enables pupils to understand why classification is important and allows schools to combine data with remote partners. WildKey thus has applications in both the Science and ICT subjects of the Curriculum.

Presentations

Lots of eLearning and educational technology groups are starting to discuss mobile learning as part of their offering. This recording from an American conference (I can’t figure out what this is from as I only bookmarked the mp3 file) discusses examples of pilot programs from nursing colleges and the military. Also “Learning for a New Information Society” by David Metcalfe from the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning provides examples of recent projects as well as some great commentary on the benefits of mobile learning.

Development

I always enjoy finding practical material for teachers and developers. First, an article outlining guidelines for development of Flash applications for the Pocket PC. The article provides a nice mix of information including a primer on Flash vs Java, vector vs bitmap (always a popular subject for beginners :-) as well as a fairly in depth tutorial.

On a related note, I ran into these Pocket PC User Interface guidelines from Microsoft and of course the recent announcement of new Flash Lite 2.1 support for Windows Mobile 5.

Paper Prototyping in a Design Framework for Professional Mobile Learning” (PDF) describes the advantages of paper prototyping in the development process and offers some basic guidelines useful in the development of learning materials.

“Prototyping mobile device screens with sticky notes is an extension of paper and pencil prototyping methods, so the same core activities apply to design workshops using this technique, namely: (1) identifying needs and establishing requirements, (2) developing alternative designs that meet those requirements, (3) building a conceptual design, (4) path determination, (5) accommodating for user error, and (6) prototype….”

We’ve recently taken to using pads of yellow 3M stickies when prototyping for the small screen. The small size of the paper forces you to think small and the ability to move the papers around yet have them stay put for later is really handy.

And finally, “Developing Courseware for Mobile Devices“—part of a larger series of presentations from the Asian Development Bank Institute—provides usability and content related guidelines useful in the development of mobile learning objects.

Non Literacy and Mobile Communication

Understanding Non-Literacy as a Barrier to Mobile Phone Communication is an excellent article by Jan Chipchase outlining the challenges and techniques devised by illiterate consumers who own or use mobile devices.

Two basic tasks were easy for almost all our participants to complete: turning on the phone and answering an incoming call. Beyond this, there were various degrees of success. Dialing a local phone number is relatively easy, but problems can occur when there are variations such as dialing a national or international number, or using IP telephone prefixes. Dialing an incorrect number may require starting from the beginning of the task since the cancel button is not always understood.

Our hypothesis is that once the non-literate user has learned how to make and receive phone calls to their close circle of contacts, their primary reason for owning a mobile phone has largely been met. There is, therefore, less motivation to spend additional time rote learning other features on the phone, unless someone can proactively demonstrate the worth of the features, and spends the time to teach them the steps required to complete the task.

Phone features that require text editing such as creating a contact, saving a text message, and creating a text message present too great a barrier to use.

Enjoy!

Carnival of the Mobilists #42

This installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists (#42) is hosted by Mobile Active and includes my mobile literacy checklist.

Carnival of the MobilistsA great linelup includng a very interesting ‘post of the week’ from Scott Shaffer about Google’s creation of QR codes for the masses (a great idea in my opinion. One of the simplest and most elegant ways to solve the mobile content discovery issue.) Enjoy!

Mobile Interaction Terminology 101

This is probably one of those totally geeky things to worry about but what exactly do we call a directional key-press on a handset?

So you have your typical navi-pad—except not all navi-pads are typical and not all are actually ‘pads.’

My Nokia 6600 has a little 5-way (left/right/up/down + click) joystick, as does my E60. My Sony Ericsson 800i has a navi-pad + something that looks like a directional joystick but can only be clicked. Meanwhile the 6680 has a more traditional navi-pad looking thing. The Razr we just gave away to a friend had a flat, shiny, space-aged looking touch pad looking thingy.

So when creating instructions, read-me’s (or even just talking to people around the office) what exactly do you call a ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’, ‘down’ or ‘simple (non-directional)’ key-press?

  • Click (“click left to navigate/click to start “—seems the most intuitively familiar but should we just assume that ‘mouse-like’ terminology is the most suitable?)
  • Press (“press left to navigate/press to start “—seems like something you’d do with your finger on a touch-screen rather than via a set of keys)
  • Push (“push up or down to navigate/push to begin”—sounds ok with a joystick, seems silly on a navi-pad, also sounds a tad strenuous)
  • Move (“move left to navigate/move to start:)—hmmm…’move to start’ seems just plain wrong but ‘move left/right/up/down’ has a certain ring to it (consistency would be nice though :-)

A collection of recent Flash Lite examples I have handy:

  • The Nokia S60 casual tutorial application says “Click to Start”
  • Whack Attack by DRD (now Moket) says “Press Start to Begin”
  • The MXDU conference guide by Moket says “Press Select to Access Menu”
  • Blue Sky North uses a collection of visual cues
    • PresiDance has a big red flashing “Start” button, then flashing arrows pointing left or right with the word “Select”,
    • LogJam has a downward pointing arrow with the word “Play” (which strangely responds not to a ‘down click’ but a simple ‘click’. Screen two offers the instructions “move left or right to balance on the log…”
  • We use visual cues (mostly…)

I’m personally leaning towards the big flashing visual cues—that and the word ‘click.’

Does anyone have any non-english examples? Is there this much variation in French, Japanese, Arabic…? (Does anyone but me care? :-) )

Mobile Disconnect Part 2

Sometimes, there’s a disconnect on the device itself.

So the phone rings and I pick up our new Sony Ericsson W810i. We bought it for testing so i’ve never actually heard it ring or picked up a call.

Being a Nokia Series 60 junkie I look for the Green ‘answer’ button but can’t find it so start hunting around for Sony’s version. My choices are…

  • what looks like two regular soft-keys (positioned left and right—directly under the screen with a non-descript ‘line’ icon on them)
  • a key with an icon that looks suspiciously like the Wikipedia ‘external hyperlink’ icon,
  • a key with an arrow pointing backwards,
  • a key with a very small thing that looks like a pixel-font letter ‘c’
  • oh—and a bright red one with the squiggly walkman symbol on it

So i’m a bit stumped and Bryan yells out “it’s the one that says ‘answer call’ on it!”

Huh? What? Hmm…ok, now I see it.

Call me a newbie but the last thing that occurred to me when he said that, was that the button that “says answer call’ was actually a button mapped to ‘answer call’ displayed on screen.

So this kinda contradicts the observations in my previous post—or does it? When does what’s on-screen map intuitively to the handset keys, and when doesn’t it?

Does it depend on the situation you’re in and the task you’re trying to accomplish (are certain tasks percieved as device-based tasks vs display-based tasks?)