adaptive path » blog » Brandon Schauer » Dopplr’s moment of long wow Great post describing Dopplr's Annual Report feature. Dennis and I kicked around the idea of generating a Social Diary for dodgeball users back in the day. Great to see someone execute so well on the same kind of idea.
MEX has a great post outlining the lessons learned by comparing the user experience design on two different touchscreen devices, the iPhone and the Blackberry Storm.
While the list is pretty informal, it captures so many important considerations of mobile product design:
Touchscreens are just components – they do not represent an experience in themselves.
Tweaking an existing platform and adding a touchscreen will not deliver a revolutionary new set of products.
Touch interactions are fundamentally different from those performed with keys or even a stylus, and will often require a completely revised user interface. Nokia, which has been busily skinning Series 60 in preparation for the introduction of touchscreen products, would do well to take note.
If you start your product design process with the premise of ‘we need a touchscreen device in our portfolio’, you can expect to end up with a bad user experience.
The mobile industry has made this mistake time and again, seeking to sell users the promise of a particular technology rather than focusing on how that technology can be applied to enhance the customer experience.
Touchscreens do not change the rules – remember, always start by designing for the user rather than designing around a technology.
Following trends will only take you so far and it is easy for a company to lose sight of the unique characteristics which have made it successful in the past, especially when trying to expand into new market segments.
In RIM’s case, it built its business on providing extremely reliable and easy to use products which are great at delivering an integrated email, messaging and voice experience.
The arrival of the iPhone has produced a new competitive threat and RIM is responding to pressure by launching a touchscreen product.
By launching too early, RIM has damaged its reputation with existing users and lowered the chances of customers acting as ‘ambassadors’ for its products.
RIM would have been better served by waiting until its smart designers had come up with a genuinely differentiated touchscreen experience, built around the connected platform principles which have made it successful.
For instance, video content works extremely well on a large touchscreen. RIM’s unique selling point for a device like the Storm could have been a connected video experience with the same reliability and ease of use as its email system.
The real innovation would have been in the back-end systems and client software powering this – the touchscreen would have been the component completing the experience.
I just rediscovered this post that I had tucked away in my Drafts folder that never saw the light of day. Since my original writing (last March), Etsy seems to have changed the very approach I was praising them for so perhaps it ultimately wasn’t succesful for them (you can see the new one here).
For the purposes of this post, I’m going to be referring to the old listing (screenshot above). In addition to the usual list of experience requirements, etc. Etsy added an interesting wrinkle to the UI Designer application process – they presented an interface puzzle as part of the process and challenged their potential candidates to show their ability to synthesize and design.
Personally, I found it to be just involved enough to weed out the scattershot resume folks, but not so involved that people would feel like they were doing spec work. It also has an additional side benefit of giving the interviewer and interviewee fertile ground for discussion, as well as providing a window into the way a person presents their work.
The fact that the puzzle has been removed from their listings leads me to believe it wasn’t too successful. I wonder if it proved to be too much for people and they were’t getting enough applicants. Either way, I applaud Etsy for trying to find new ways to uncover those qualities you look for in a UI/UX Designer that might not immediately reveal themselves during a standard interview process.
Over the weekend some information came out on some location-based features of the newly announced Palm Pre:
When you’re late it — remember, this thing has GPS; it has a clock; and it has your calendar. So it not only knows where you are, it knows where you’re supposed to be and when….so when it realizes you’re going to be late, it says, ‘Hey, not only are you going to be late, but I can take care of it for you. I’ll send an email to your assistant or to the people in the meeting, which would you prefer? And oh, by the way, here’s the map.’
To me this sounds like a classic example of a company essentially showing off by finding problems for technology to solve that a) aren’t actually the big problems users in this space need a solution for and b) will never work as fluidly as described during this pre-release media courting phase.
In this case, they seem to be attacking what they perceive as the big problem by stringing together solutions to a bunch of little problems rather than addressing it as a holistic experience. I mean, it’s been how many years and it’s still tough to find a syncing solution that works across multiple devices? Shouldn’t we feel like we’ve solved that before jumping to phone as automated personal assistant?
Of course it all comes down to the execution and most importantly (as John from Boing Boing points out) user control but my point is that not everything that can be automated, should be automated (even if it’s a technical hurdle developers drool over) and I’m not yet convinced this particular scenario is something I see improving people’s lives in the near future.
It’s funny to have these screenshots from November resurface after this week’s news that dodgeball was getting the axe and somehow it feels fitting that dball is spelled wrong.
Oh – if you care about the new WinMo UI, you can read more about it here.
I recently downloaded Flixster for the iPhone, a mobile movie application that, by all accounts, has everything you’d expect from such an app: show times, nearby theaters, upcoming releases, trailers, reviews, etc.
While they do a great job of making all that content easy to navigate on the device, it got me thinking of a feature that would better reflect an understanding of mobile users, rather than just making existing content available on a mobile device (with basic leveraging of the phone’s location to help narrow theater lists, etc.)
Rather than just letting users sort movies by rating, popularity, title or even theater proximity, wouldn’t it be great to have the option to sort movies by proximity and start times – i.e. “I wonder what’s playing nearby and starting soon.” That would give you a list with a rich, relevant context empowering you to act on that information quickly.
When I saw the “Upcoming” tab in Flixster (above) that’s actually what I expected (and was excited) to see but instead was given a list of upcoming release dates for movies – something that feels decidedly less tailored to a user on the go. Perhaps it’ll come in a later update.
I believe the apps that show an understanding of the nuances of mobile users rather than the ones that simply plop their content on a smaller screen (Flixster is by no means guilty of the latter) are the ones that will truly push mobility forward, and ultimately reap the rewards (in the form of customer loyalty) down the road.
Though everyone knows you can’t trust a CES Demo to be the real thing, what I’ve seen of the Palm UI looks great. Boing Boing has a great breakdown of Seven Features that make the Palm Pre better than the iPhone. Palms were great smartphones when they were just starting out and it looks like they might be able to be relevant again. For me personally, I’m more interested in checking this out than I was the G1, N97, Garmin, etc. phones.
Unfortunately, the challenge for Palm lies in treading water until June to sell them (in the meantime, do we think a lot of people are running out the buy the Palm Centros that creepy Claus is selling?) and then delivering on the buzz they created yesterday. Not to mention that it will probably be another 6 months until you can get one and not be forced to go with Sprint. Can the company hold out that long? Om Malik has a good counter argument as to why the Pre might not be the savior for Palm.
As an aside, I love the nod to their roots by evolving the graffiti area from old Palms to be the “gesture” area.
Scoble’s got an interesting take. He also points out something that drives me bananas about most of the players – no attention to lower level menus (I’m looking at you, Blackberries!)
Palm just did what Nokia and Microsoft and RIM couldn’t do: deliver a better experience than Steve Jobs did.
“Give me a break Scoble, you are drinking the shiny new object Koolaid,” I can hear you saying.
This is why I didn’t post a blog about it all day, even though everyone else did. I wanted to let the Koolaid wear off. I went back to the Palm booth again tonight just to make sure what I saw this morning was real.
I learned even more stuff that just blew me away.
From Palm? Give me a break!
Nokia’s devices that I saw last month just suddenly seem so lame.
Why? Well, when you look at the Nokia N97, which will be out at about the same time as the Palm Pre, you see that they also have a nice UI, but it falls apart when you click down into apps and try to do things. Palm doesn’t fall apart. Click down and you keep getting shocked.
Palm’s bet on social networking integration is a game changer. Click into a contact and you see people’s Facebook info and other info from their social networks. That is huge and not many people will get it.
As he did for Helvetica’s namesake typeface, Gary Hustwit gathered the world’s top designers for his forthcoming documentary Objectified, telling the story of the magic behind the objects we use every day.
I haven’t been this excited for a documentary in a long time. Coming this Spring.
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I maintain a more traditional blog, covering a wide range of topics over at www.alexrainert.com.
I'm a husband, new father & owner of a lovably neurotic vizsla. Obsessed with information, design, emerging tech, sports & food. Years ago I co-founded dodgeball.com and I'm currently head of product at foursquare.
