design

Handset makers at CeBIT presented mobiles which specialized in many areas. TV, cameras, texting and music, all were present in numbers. Another area of phone specialization targeted specific age demographics. In Canada we’ve already seen a number of phone models designed for kids, like the FireFly. But what about the fastest growing segment of the population? What about phones for the elderly? How about a phone for my Grandma?

The Austrian company Emporia thinks they’ve found my answer. Their over-sized Life phone offers friendly buttons (read you can see them on Google Earth), a monochrome screen and clear text, supports calling, texting and little more. My Grandma would probably be right at home with the phone. The only problem I can see with it is that my Nokia from 1999 does the exact same things. And in the exact same way. And has Snake. It honestly might as well be the same phone in a different case. I’m willing to bet my Grandma would just as happy using it as Emporia’s latest creation.

From public displays to cellphones and everything in between, touchscreens are in at CeBIT this year. On hand was what might be the first to market consumer touch cellphone, the LG KE-850 Prada. Alone with the phone for a precious few minutes, I took the opportunity to test its text messaging implementation. Given touchscreen technology and the ability to do anything you wanted on it from a software perspective, how would implement text messaging on a high-end consumer phone?

LG has bravely decided to emulate the standard numeric pad. Ouch (fashionistas don't worry, it still looks good).

A standard outliving its usefulness? Yes. The interface for text messaging we see today is a poor compromise between design and the limitations of a numeric keypad. Just to make our clunky method of inputting text work we are forced to implement ingenious but unfortunately unintuitive hacks like T9. Without the hardware limitation of a keypad why design cellphone software like we need a crutch keypad? Touch screens allow for complete context aware input. In the context of creating a text message, a numeric keypad does not make sense. So why provide one? If it sticks, the move to touchscreens on mobiles will force a re-evaluation of every standard on mobile phones. Things will have to be shaken up. New standards, created by the unique opportunities and limitations that touch-screens provide are already being created in the first wave of touch based devices.

Vista's tablet support is trying to introduce new touch screen standards based on real world motions. Testing out Vista on a tablet laptop for the first time I initially found writing words difficult. Frustrated, I scribbled them out with the stylus unconsciously. To my pleasant surprise the words and the scribbles disappeared. That's context aware input. Microsoft would like to term these actions are flicks but they are better understood as gestures or context aware motions . Not be be outdone, Apple's iPhone contains support for a number of multi-touch gestures. Steve Jobs specifically demoed two in his iPhone introduction showing gestures to zoom into and away from images by pinching or spreading fingers across the iPhone's screen. Even Apple's laptops have included support for gestures on their trac pad for some time. Moving two fingers along the pad is interrupted as a scrolling action.

Standards exist to minimize the learning curve across different situations. If actions like writing with a pen or erasing can be emulated on a touch-screen why not implement them? What better standards exist than those we find every day in the real world? Implementing touch screen gestures based on real world actions will ensure a smooth transition to from numeric pads to touch screens.

-jb

Many standards in modern software have existed for so long that we take them for granted. Take for instance the notion of saving files. In About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, Alan Cooper argues that explicitly asking the user to save a file is a complete waste of time. And he's right.

The idea of saving files lives strictly in the digital world. When you write something down in ink you expect it to still be there when you come back tomorrow. Why shouldn't you expect the same from your digital documents? Why force the user to explicitly save files? Nevertheless whenever you close a Word document (or almost any other kind of document for that matter) you are constantly bombarded with dialogs demanding to know if you want to save your file when the computer should already know the answer (you just spent time creating it, I'm pretty sure you want to save it). A decade later, designers are finally starting to catch on and new applications like Google Docs save files and revisions automatically. This saves you not only extra clicks but also protects you against losing work in a computer crash.

Last Monday, Jo Stichbury a Symbian Developer for Nokia spoke at Mobile Monday SFU about a collection of "Best Practices for Mobile Game Development". With the current state of the mobile games industry I hope someone important was listening. The points were valuable for all mobile applications and ranged from the seemingly obvious (applications must be able to suspend themselves to answer an incoming phone call) to the less apparent (remember to turn off the phone's back-light after extended periods of no input to conserve batteries). One lesson in particular struck me because I had not heard it used in the context of mobile development before. Graceful degradation.

To use an MP3 player to listen to a song would you rather press 'Play' or 'Ok'?

While many mobile phones tout themselves as MP3 players very few provide an obvious dedicated 'Play' button to listen to music. In a world where convergence is king this damaging oversight seems down right embarrassing. It just doesn't seem easy to listen to music on a mobile phone. If phones are ever to have a hope of one upping traditional MP3 players then it's time to get designers back to the drawing boards.

Designers face a clash between two seemingly conflicting interface design heuristics. An interface should be as simple as possible, of which Google's homepage is the classic example. An interface should always provide controls to do what you want as quickly as possible, everything should be just a click away, you shouldn't have to think about it. Of course current cell phones can do a lot. To have everything close at hand would be impossible without breaking the first heuristic by introducing a huge number of new controls. Balancing the two has become a problem of providing relevant generic controls. We can all recall a horror story of trying to set a car clock.

Mobile phones provide functionality above and beyond what typical MP3 players are expected to do. Though most phones have some space for additional buttons, they can only be added at the risk of overwhelming users. Instead phones tend to err towards simplicity in that they provide a handful of standard controls which cater to the lowest common denominator of functionality. An 'Ok' button is useful in many circumstances so it is provided as a one size fits all method of addressing most actions. MP3 players, cameras and all manners of devices have controls specifically designed to make them easy to use. On an MP3 Player, an 'Ok' button is far less useful than a 'Play' button in this regard. On a MP3 phone how can designers provide controls both for media and call functionality without making the device too complex?