Imagine having to swipe your credit card before you can walk into a retail location. Imagine giving them your email address before picking up a catalog. That’s what Pottery Barn hopes you’ll do when you download their free iPad catalog app.
PixelMags may make a great catalog engine for iPad, or then again, they may not. I didn’t bother to create the mandatory account in order to find out.
Pottery Barn’s mistake is not in selecting a platform like PixelMags. Their mistake is requiring account creation as an entry-point for the experience. This needs to come almost last, just before a user orders something through the catalog.
Clearly business requirements trumped user requirements.
Not all capacitive touch screens are equal. The impact of less accurate input may demand bigger hit targets and more space between onscreen keys/buttons. We’ve noted in the past the difficulty of UI elements that butt the edges of screens, it’s interesting to see that represented in this simple test.
The test below was put together by MOTO, a San Francisco based mobile development group. It’s a very simple, but highly illustrative test to check the accuracy of capacitive touchscreens. Could be a useful method before delving into that upcoming touchscreen interface.
And lest you think Apple has the corner on touchscreen accuracy, it’s interesting to note the differences in accuracy are a function of the materials and sensors (OEM hardware), not the OS/platform itself.
Of course you’ve already read or heard about Steve Jobs “Thoughts on Flash” this morning, putting to rest any rumormongering about Apple’s intentions.
Wired’s tweet this morning captured it in a nutshell, “Steve Jobs writes about his beef with Adobe Flash. Still a little unsatisfying.”
My take can be summed up simply. The evolution of mobile computing — especially the emergence of rich and ubiquitous mobile browsing — is forcing the web to keep up.
1- Adobe asked for this kind of response. The Adobe Flash evangelists and the attendant Flash community can only take jabs at Apple for so long before Apple squelches the whining with some hard realities (and some unnecessary jabs). Adobe has let Flash rest too long on web-based video delivery to carry the Flash platform. Despite lots of pioneering in mobile and on TV, the Flash platform has struggled to stick on non-PC devices. Jobs’ point about .H264 is right on in the mobile context. Which leads to a second point… Continue Reading »
A lot of Wired’s premises are spot on, regarding the trends and the emerging ways users will consume “print-centric” media on digital devices. The notion of print design as storytelling is also compelling, and one reason why print still feels manicured and curated, versus many online publishing outlets where content is merely poured into a content block. Our friends at Adobe should be congratulated for the richness of the Wired tablet UI. Like the New York Times Reader app (another of Adobe’s collaborations), it succeeds at considering content in the post-browser internet (or, if you prefer, the splinternet).
I’m sure a major consideration in this Wired/Adobe solution is the print-centric nature of magazine design. Layouts appear to be adapted from print and ported to the digital screen, which is compelling for now. Where this model succeeds is that it’s much more compelling than pouring content into a “page” rendered by a browser, and may be precisely why readers still want to engage with a publication where each story is curated and designed. Continue Reading »
Are you designing a promotion experience or a product experience?
App-vertising is emerging as a means for brands to engage with consumers through downloadable mobile apps. Marketing and advertising professionals herald the growing app trend as a more sure entrance into the elusive mobile landscape. The fragmented mobile device and mobile OS landscape confined marketing to the lowest common denominators: which meant WAP sites and SMS campaigns.
That landscape has shifted significantly and is primed for brands to connect more deeply with consumers. Four key reasons the opportunity is real:
Smart phones are capable of delivering rich applications (not just games and wallpapers);
A critical mass of mainstream consumers now have smart devices in hand;
Users have a voracious appetite for app downloads (and not just for iPhone, Android, Palm, Nokia all have app stores in play)
Brands can stand alone in app stores and are no longer constrained by carrier’s walled gardens
Yet, slow down a little before throwing your budget at an iPhone app. I’d like to offer insights on the approach that will make the difference between mobile experiences that get adopted – and therefore extend brands – versus those that provide merely a flash in the pan. Continue Reading »
The August issue of Communication Arts includes the feature “Don’t Call it a Phone“, which highlights emerging mobile trends. Columnist Sam MacMillan sought input from Punchcut’s deep mobile experience in informing the direction of the piece.
SELECT QUOTES
“Mobile is not a device, it’s a lifestyle. Life is mobile, media is mobile; your mobile is the ultimate social networking tool. The information and the tools built into the virtual world of mobile provide the ideal way to meet up in the real world.” — Jared Benson, Executive Creative Director, Punchcut
“[clients] are increasingly asking for embedded social networking aspects across device experiences. Our handset and carrier customers want to give users ubiquitous access to the people users care about. Users want to see their address book paired with location, so they can view their friends in the context of who is nearby.” — Joe Pemberton, Brand and Marketing Director, Punchcut
“We begin by asking, ‘How can we use a mobile device to help us connect in the real world? What contexts do we include, and what tasks do we want to perform?’ Consider how social networking can be combined with a mobile handset to supplement the physical experience of shopping. The mobile phone can enhance real experience by including maps to find friends …The virtual device adds to the experience.” — Shilpa Shah, Associate Director of Interaction Design, Punchcut
ABOUT COMMUNICATION ARTS
The magazine is in its 40th year and has a very strong reputation in the visual design and marketing communications fields and boasts a worldwide distribution of 60M.
The user interface designers at Cisco have an excellent example of ways mobile applications are enhancing user experiences. Rather than merely replicate the desktop Webex experience on a smartphone, they’ve addressed the unique ways a mobile device can extend application functionality; accounting for the impressive strengths and the inherent weaknesses of the mobile device.
Watch this piece demonstrating Cisco’s Webex app for enterprise iPhone users.
This is what you get when you add a compass to a data and GPS-enabled handheld device that has a camera – an extremely useful concoction of sci-fi proportions. Leave it to Yelp to deploy this type of AR to the iPhone first.
I’m not sure why Mashable is calling this an Easter Egg. Probably because “shake-to-activate-super-cool-feature” is not intuitive to discover at all. (I’m also not sure why Mashable suggests Yelp snuck this one past Apple.)
In March this year Boxee announced the Boxee remote app for iPhone. Now TechCrunch is reporting on the new Remote app for iPhone with gestural support. Watch the video, it’s pretty impressive for it’s intuitiveness. Notice how the user is not required to look at the mobile device to use this. The lack of cues on the screen may be a problem for new users, but users are encouraged to keep their eyes on the television, where they should be focused.
Of course this remote doesn’t ship with the set top box. The remote requires a smartphone, something more and more people are carrying — for AppleTV of course, an iPhone or iPod Touch are required. We’re delighted to see a mobile device embraced this way in a living room context, but don’t look to Apple to make an Android/Symbian/Palm/WinMo/etc version any time soon.
The 9 minute video interview discusses Punchcut’s points of view on designing for people in a variety of contexts for a variety of consumer devices across mobile, television and other emerging electronics.
“Punchcut’s really committed” says Benson, “to understanding people’s changing lifestyles as new technologies are introduced. Designing for mobile is not just taking an experience and shrinking it down.”
Discussing television, Robertson asserts “Television is already such a shared experience. The question is how can a connected TV experience bring that natural desire to share right into the experience of watching TV to where it becomes a participatory experience, even with people who don’t happen to be in the same room with you.”
