Is Mobile Design Really That Different?

I’ll be honest.  I’ve only dabbled in the mobile app design and development space: one app for fun, one app for work (hopefully to be released in the next couple months).  At today’s iPhone Design Conference, Brian Fling argued that mobile design is totally different that web.  But I still don’t see how mobile app design and development is that different from traditional software or web development.  Mobile devices offer new capabilities and require learning new tools, but the fundamental design and development tasks remain the same.

Mobile design reminds me of designing desktop apps in the late 90s.  Multiple platforms, small screen real estate, limited computing resources (although an iPhone would probably

Back in the day, VisualAge for Java provided a way for designers and developers to jointly build "cross-platform apps." It used a drag/drop GUI editor to generate java code. In other news, I'm old.

run circles around my 486).  Each application was an island, with little or no way to share information or task flows between them. Users probably didn’t have that much experience with computers.  Your job as a designer was to understand the users key tasks and success criteria, and  iteratively perform design and development to reduce time on task or errors.  You differentiated your product by closely aligning the user interface metaphor with the users’ mental model of the task or process.  Back in the day, we called this User Centered Design, and later Usability Engineering.  Over the next decade, hard drives got bigger, screens got bigger, processors got faster, and networks and application mashups were everywhere.  Users learned what to expect on websites.  We designers stopped talking about usability — how well do people get through the task flows we have created — and started talking more about a more holistic User Experience.

Mobile application design exploded with the iPhone.  Again, we find ourselves designing around constraints of small screens, multiple platforms, and limited computing resources.  This time around, however, we’ve got some additional capabilities.  Geolocation, gesture and multitouch interfaces, photo and video streams, anytime/anywhere network availability.  We have cloud processing and data storage that we can use to offset device limitations.  Even better, we have a generation of millions of users that are eager to embrace new technologies, pretty much willing to pay for and try out whatever we can think up.

But some things haven’t changed.

The basic cognitive and physiological capabilities of people haven’t changed.  We’re still resource constrained people, who can only focus on one thing at a time, have relatively shoddy memories.  We can only get our fingers to click on something so fast.

We all have the same basic needs.

Because of these basic human traits, designers still have to take care of the same basic interaction design requirements:

• Visibility (also called perceived affordances or signifiers)
• Feedback
• Consistency (also known as standards)
• Non-destructive operations (hence the importance of undo)
• Discoverability: All operations can be discovered by systematic exploration of menus.
• Scalability: The operation should work on all screen sizes, small and large.
• Reliability: Operations should work. Period. And events should not happen randomly.

As Don Norman recently pointed out, we’re not doing a great job with this on gesture interface devices

When we build these interactions, we’re still not doing it by ourselves.  We want to continually align our designs with users expectations and developer feedback.

We still need to understand users’ mental model of the task domain first and foremost.

Mobile gives us some new tools in our design toolbox, and we lose the assumption that the user is sitting at a desk, working on a single task by themselves.  New device capabilities…natural voice control, natural human gestures, thought controlled interfaces, semantic or linked data…are in active research and will make even more things possible.  But the basic job of the UX designer is still the same…to use the resources available to make our users more efficient, effective, safe, and if we’re lucky happier.  We still need to work iteratively with developers, business stakeholders to make that happen.

Am I missing something?  Am I thinking about it at the wrong level of abstraction?

On a side note, I’ve previously discussed that UX Designer/Developers should have a strong foundation in human factors, psychology, and computer science.  I think that (and experience) gives you the background to see beyond the new shiny toys and identify the real trends and innovations.  Jared Spool seems to agree.

Is the future of information design DIY?

Joe Lamantia has posted some interesting ideas on the future of information architecture and design.  I really wish I could hear this presentation so that I could understand all the nuances.  I believe the key assumption is that as information becomes more modular, consumable, connectable, and mixable, people will start to build their own information experiences from available components.  Therefore information architects and designers should think about designing frameworks and environments that enable this.

The Web is shifting to a DIY [Do It Yourself] model of user experience creation, one where people assemble individual combinations of content gathered form elsewhere for expressive, functional, and (many) other purposes. The rapid growth of widgets, the resurgence of enterprise portals, the spread of identity platforms from social network destinations to blogging services, and the rapid increase in the number of public APIs syndicating functionality and data, are all examples of the DIY shift.

Frameworks are the Future of IA: A Case Study and Example

I think this assumption that people will want a DIY web experience can be debated.  Surely, there are some alpha-geeks that are extremely comfortable building and using technology to suit their specific needs.  By virtue of reading this post, you are likely one of these.  I would argue that most people — your grandma, your mailman, your barber — don’t want to spend the time tailoring environments to fit every need, and don’t care enough about information tech to do so.  Most people employ a satisficing strategy, where they go with a solution that’s good enough, rather than going after an optimal design solution. Some examples:

• Take hodrod, customized cars in the 50s/60s.  A few people became expert at building sweet hotrod cars.  They wanted to find the right carborator to fit the engine that they custom built.  And a lot of people envied those souped up cars.  But most people just got in their regular old car and went about their business.
• A few people will build their own computer to get the exact configuration they want to maximize performance.  A far greater number of people will go to their local big box store, or Dell, even Apple, and select one of the preconfigured systems that meets most of their needs.
• In the early to mid 90′s, dial-up internet service providers provided people with internet access (you remember when you finally got to 56kbps, don’t you?).  AOL came along, and sent you a disk with a simple install process.  Millions of people joined AOL, even though you had to use their browser, and could only access services they allowed.
• A few people will host their own blog, photo gallery, etc.  And as Joe suggests, syndication feeds, web services, and widgets are making it easier to mix and mash functionality to make your own site.  But a lot of people are getting a lot of value out of Facebook, MySpace.  Sure, you could build your own site, but Facebook and MySpace hits a lot of the functionality that you want most often.

Satisficing means that people don’t typically search or work exaustively to find the best solution.  Instead they have some criteria for ‘good enough, ‘ and go with the first solution that meets that criteria.  Its why you don’t look through all 1.6M search results Google gives to you; its why you don’t compare results between Google, Ask, Yahoo, Live, and every other search engine out there.

Now, one might argue that Gen Y and neomillenials (people born after 1980, often called digital natives) are more active participants in social media, and are more likely to want to create content.  And a few of those natives will likely create a cool framework or mashup that allows his peers to connect in ways we haven’t thought of yet.  But based on my limited experience working with these digital natives (3 years in grad school, some mentoring, some TAing an intro programming course), most in this age group almost take the presence and abundance of technology tools for granted.  I don’t believe they want to build or tailor an experience; they expect the experience to be there, or will come along soon, and don’t care to expend the time/energy to create it.

Given that, I think the future is bright for excellent designers, user experience researchers, ethnographers to understand the wants, needs, and environments that people consume information products, and design solutions that meet those needs.  Yes, we need good frameworks to enable more powerful, effective, and efficient information products.  But people want, and will continue to want, excellent experiences given to them, rather than taking the time and effort to develop their own.