matt.me63.com - Matt Edgar

… that the internet was ever tethered to wall sockets and floor boxes.

Now obviously the participants in a Mobile Internet Portal Strategies conference are a self-selecting bunch of enthusiasts, but last week there was a distinct sense of confidence that our moment has arrived.

People who’ve spent the best part of a decade expounding the unique benefits of the mobile internet - ubiquity, identity, location, authentication, micro-billing and so on - only to be met with blank looks from their fixed net counterparts, now see the prospect of mass adoption just around the corner.

Some even go so far as to say that the fixed web we know today will come to be seen as an historical anomaly. Why “optimise” for home and office, Windows and Mac, IE and Firefox - such a narrow subset of contexts, computing devices and browsers - when there’s a whole big wide world out there? Some evidence here.

Thanks once again to Ludo for providing a cautionary image to illustrate this post. Satisfyingly, I realised this picture of my son using our home PC was taken on my mobile phone and uploaded to Flickr using Shozu - paper wraps stone!

Updates 29/05/2008:

• Si reports on We Love Mobile
• Slides from David Cushman of Bauer
• Slides fron Paul Golding

So I’m on the train home after a day in London and my phone beeps.

It’s a video message of Fabian riding his bike without stabilisers.

“I don’t know who I’m most proud of,” I tell Caroline later, “him for riding a bike or you for sending a video message.”

“Don’t patronise me,” says Caroline.

Maybe it’s just me, but as we enter the latest phase of convergence with more and more big web properties moving onto mobile, I’ve noticed a trend for work in progress to be developed and presented mainly on PC screens.

In my (possibly mythical) golden age, presentations and design reviews were stacked full of phones in all shapes and sizes. Now stuff seems to come to me in neatly zipped PDFs and Powerpoint docs, which immediately place the work into the wrong context. They introduce implicit assumptions that were set in stone in the old days of the deskbound internet. The web’s moving on - but sadly many of the ways we design it are not.

So I started wondering: could we have a mobile design process which deliberately avoided deliverables on the PC screen? You can, if you must, use a desktop or laptop as a tool (Mitchell or Webb is up to you, it’s so irrelevant :-) What matters is that the design is presented in more appropriate media. It goes like this…

Paper wraps phone: The big visual canvas of a web page can hide a multitude of sins in site strategy and structure, but on mobile they’ll be painfully laid bare. So spend some time getting straight the objectives of the mobile interface, underpinned by the things you know about your users, their relevant needs, and their existing use of mobile. Write it down in complete sentences, you know, the things they taught you at school with a subject, a verb and an object. Banish any preconceptions about the context of use - for example, 27% of mobile internet-enabled phone users in a Pew Survey had used it in the home. Sketch out the information architecture and user flows on big sheets of paper. Then get out the scissors…

Scissors cut paper. Chop up the sitemap, give the resulting scraps a shuffle and see how a user will experience your work. Yes, mobile really lends itself to paper prototyping. As the small, handheld interface takes shape, how about mocking it up on small, handheld pieces of paper? Take a stack of index cards or PostIt notes and use one per scene on the mobile screen. Or to simulate the act of scrolling, cut a card with a hole in the middle to mask off all but a screenful of content at a time. I saw this trick used really effectively in early stages usability testing on our mobile portal a few years ago. It makes for a more realistic low fi test, and gives the designers an insight into the tunnel view that users have of their mobile interface. Then it’s time to hit the handset…

Phone blunts scissors. As soon as possible, get it mocked up on a mobile device. With XHTML and Flash Lite it’s much easier than it used to be, and immediately helps you get a feel for certain issues: Which buttons will be the main controls? How will the user enter text? How quickly can they scroll up and down the screen. Critically, get the design up and running on a few different kinds of phone that represent the spread of devices your users will have. This is not something that comes naturally to web designers for whom these things come down to narrow choices of screensize and IE/Firefox version, but it’s worth the hassle. If you don’t have all the phones yourself, beg or borrow them from friends, family or colleagues. If you’re doing the work for a big corporate or telco, ask them about access to the target devices. And if it’s a consumer application, make sure you don’t inadvertently introduce a bias towards business devices, which may well have bigger screens and more capabilities than those of your target users.

Now step outside. Stand in broad daylight on a busy street corner, preferably in a slightly dodgy area of town, and most likely realise that the fontsize needs to be even bigger than you thought. And if the fonts are bigger, than means fewer lines of text, which means revisiting those flows. Paper wraps phone once again in our iterative process :)

What do you think? Who is doing mobile design like this already? Who is doing it even better?

Matt

Pascal adeptly demonstrates the archetypal use case for mobile video - I reckon I managed to catch steps three, four, five and six :)

Overheard conversation with the cloth-eared computer of a national cinema chain. Or why context of use is all-important for mobile applications :)

There’s a brilliantly observed article on mobile child tracking services in the States on Kelly Goto’s www.gotomobile.com.

As a parent, I can identify with the insights. I grew up in a small town in the 1970s and enjoyed far greater freedom than we seem to be able to offer our own boys living in a 21st century city.

In particular, the article notes that the age of the kids makes a huge difference to how the service would be perceived. Age 6 to 8 seems to be the sweet spot for parents wanting to give their kids freedom to roam, although of course:

Most kids between 2 and 8 lose anything that is not permanently attached.

I can identify with that one too :)

Read the article

So I know what you’re going to say, text isn’t the point of mobile blogging - it’s all about pictures, videos, media, capturing the moment and storing it up or sharing it out. Yes, I love taking pictures with my phone and zapping them up to Flickr, and yes, Shozu is one of that rare breed of sensitively designed mobile apps that does one thing really well.

But the thing is, if I’m going to carry around a “reality acquisition device,” I’d like to acquire the whole of reality as I experience it, not just the bits that can be captured directly as light waves or sound waves.

There are places a cameraphone just cannot reach.

And anyway, sometimes a handful of words can paint a thousand pictures. Take this August 2001 mobile post:

Circle Line, King’s Cross to Liverpool Street. Boy 11ish is playing the accordian for money. Badly. He looks exhausted. Most of us ignore the upturned baseball cap. Boy 9ish gives him a half-finished pack of mints

Get the picture? Text is still one of the most expressive ways we people have of capturing reality. Take it away and mobile blogging will be like a foreign language film without the subtitles.

i’m typing this on my phone, top deck of a bus travelling up chapeltown road. i reckon i can enter text at about a 10th the speed i think it. that works out about 30 words a mile on the number 3a bus. less outside the rush hour.

Equipment used for benchmark (should you wish to reproduce this study):

• 1 Sonyericsson K600i running Opera Mini
• 1 number 3a bus (Gledhow circular) - a bit like this
• 1 sore thumb

August 21, 2001. Newly armed with Nik Haldimann’s Wapblogger (2001-2005) on my trusty Nokia 7110i I bash out a record seven blog posts in one day. On the bus, in the lift, in the café, In just a few short hours I live every mobile blogging use case known to marketing.

That date remains my personal best in terms of posts per day, as the temporal Swiss cheese of this site testifies. But the moblogging bug stayed with me and shaped my writing. There’s something about having only eight buttons for a 26 letter alphabet that that forces thoughts down to the bare essentials. Maybe that’s a good thing. Later came photos, also often posted to Flickr direct from mobile (hey, someone else pays for my data.)

Has mobile blogging changed the world yet? No, it has probably not even changed blogging very much. But like Bill Gates said, “a lot of people overestimate the changes in the short run and then when they see that they’ve overestimated those changes, they underestimate what’s going to happen over a five to 10-year period.” And I bet he didn’t SMS that to his website.

As 21 August 2006 approaches I’ll be thinking about what’s changed and what needs to change next for this capability to reach its full potential. I’d love to know what you think too.

There are places a cameraphone just cannot, umm, go. Places like the men’s toilets at King’s Cross Station. (Stay with me on this one.)

There you’ll find a sticking plaster product design solution that would be at home in a Don Norman book: a hand-dryer so sleekly built into the wall that someone’s sellotaped the laser-printed word “HAND-DRYER” in Times New Roman bold caps onto its brushed steel surface.

[is it the same in the ladies? reports from the other 51% of the King's Cross traveller population would be much appreciated].

At this point, I’d inline a picture to show you what I mean - but taking photos in the men’s toilets at King’s Cross would be wrong on so many levels.

Update: 2 December 2007 - apparently there’s now one of these in the gent’s at Leeds Station, and I shall shortly be parting with 20p to investigate. Unlikely that pictures will follow. Also (have to be careful how I say this) I stumbled upon Clive Grinyer blogging on the toilet. As it were.