Raising the Bar for Mobile Standards

Mobile is amazingly versatile, and design for mobile is about the culture of your audience, the tasks they are trying to complete, and the context in which they are completing them. Design for mobile and therefore mobile standards need to be approached from a human perspective. The primary purpose of mobile standards is the same as if they were created for a more traditional interface. From a business perspective, they are created for two reasons:

• Standards save time and money by avoiding duplication of effort by developers and designers across projects and interfaces.
• Standards enable the creation of interfaces that are efficient and familiar to users, thereby increasing usability and decreasing the learning curve.

These two benefits should be fulfilled in any guidelines documentation. But with the advent of standardization of mobile interfaces, there are so many other ways guidelines can be expanded to serve the audiences they affect: the developers and designers who implement solutions based on the standards, and the end-users of the products being created.

Understanding Designer-Developer Workflow

The most appealing software applications developed today are produced by a close collaboration of designers and developers. Unfortunately, the existing development and design tools have been a barrier that keeps everyone from working with a productive workflow. As of late, rich Internet application (RIA) technologies such as Silverlight, WPF, Flex, and client-side HTML5/JavaScript have attempted to destroy this barrier with varying degrees of success.

Designing Objectively

Design is inherently an objective process, yet when it comes to designing for people, we tend to cloud this truth. As emotional beings, our judgment is often greatly affected by how we feel, and how we feel is often unpredictable, uncertain, and complicated. Therefore, we can’t design for emotion; everyone experiences it differently. But we can design for the fundamental psychological underpinnings and biological traits that influence perception. When we do that, we find design to be much simpler. All we must do is define a core concept—a problem to solve—and make logical, subsequent decisions off it, maintaining focus and keeping in mind the psychology of how we learn and remember things.

iPad vs. iPhone: A User Experience Study

As slaves to our digital devices, we find that the physical world is constantly competing for our attention. Seconds matter here. This hasn’t been an issue with computing until very recently; usability scientists in the 90‘s claimed 8 to 15 seconds was the maximum time someone would wait for an interaction using a desktop computer (see Shackel’s Acceptability Paradigm). But with any kind of portable device, seconds mean the difference between a seamless user experience and pocketing the device to pay with cash or talk to a stranger.

Eye Candy vs. Bare-Bones in UI Design

Bare-bones GUIs prioritize the task at hand and all variables that it has to deal with. They say: “Users use me because they have some task to accomplish, and I want to help them reach that goal ASAP”. A commendable approach.

Unfortunately, by focusing on handling the task, they neglect to spend some tender love and care on handling the GUI itself. They may succeed in facilitating fast task-completion times; they fail at being pleasurable to use. And because they fail at being pleasurable, the user has a hard time entering a state of flow. Emotion plays a big role here. If the user has a negative state of mind, he or she will also have a harder time using the application. This state of mind might not have been induced by the bare-bones UI, but it won’t be alleviated by it either.

As Donald Norman pointed out in his book Emotional Design, prettier things are actually easier to use, or are at least are perceived to be. This book is all about the relationship between aesthetics and experience, and is a mandatory read for those interested in any kind of design.