innovation

With the help of Industry Canada, Mobile MUSE has completed a plan (attached) for expanding the impact of its applied innovation model beyond the Arts & Culture sector into other key public-facing industry sectors including Environment, Health and Tourism.  Your comments and ideas are welcome!

Cradling laptop bags while busily chattering into mobile phones, Bedouin workers travel nomadically between internet cafes stopping briefly to drink in equal doses of bandwidth and espresso, momentarily satisfying an unquenchable urge to stay caffeinated on the go. On Wednesday, Igor and begin our ultimate Bedouin experience, traveling to CeBIT in Hannover, Germany to observe trends in mobile media creation.

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?

Leora here, blogging on behalf of metroCode. And even as I write I'm not exactly sure where this post is going but what i do know is that every day, at least once a day, I come up against a problem that makes me think...there's a good  blog post. So I either scribble something cuneiform-like in my daytimer or write something in pen on my hand (the ultimate mobile device?) and then another emergency pops up, or the ink on my hand fades.  But today it's happening. Our topic for today (thank you Bob and Doug MacKenzie) is mobile behaviour, and yes, that's a huge topic. We at Mobile MUSE have been fortunate enough to be tasked with created culturally-based mobile experiences and assessing them in relation to technological and marketplace realities.

While waiting on a late professor I decided to whip out with my N93 (as anyone with the latest gadget is inclined to do). To a chorus of 'oohs' and 'awws' I demoed a few of its slicker features to onlookers. But there were a few detractors. One in particular loudly voiced his opinion, having the audacity to declare it just a phone. I couldn't help but snicker. I assumed he was either suffering from a mild case of bad-phone-itis or had perhaps caught a much more serious strain of ignorance. I didn't dwell on it.

Then today while reading an interview of Tony Pearce, managing director of Player X, I stumbled upon it again. A phone is a phone, Pearce boldly claims in reference to Player X's decision to expand its media base beyond mobile games. I found this much more troubling and as such warranting further reflection. Are we all getting a little too excited about something that's just a phone?