Josh Ulm, Director of User Experience, Adobe spoke at the company’s annual MAX conference in Chicago.
I especially liked his before and after review of Yahoo! Go and Google Maps for mobile.
His comments on “Demonstrating the Brand” were right on — especially his point about the newish Yahoo! Go application. The user interface is a huge improvement over the previous Yahoo! WAP version, but even though the visual branding is much better aligned, the application falls short of the Yahoo! brand promise. Yahoo! is built on bringing me my content, and somehow the Yahoo! Go app manages to deliver merely generic content.
This point is one the mobile industry, and more specifically, the mobile user experience community is not focused enough on. Focusing on getting the usability and the interactions right is only part of the equation. Don’t lose sight of the content. Is it right? And is its delivery true to the brand.
Since a majority of Ulm’s thoughts are shared in Mobile Persuasion I’ve just focused on the highlights.
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1// Adobe is reporting that Flash Lite will now support video.
2// Wired has posted their interview with John Maeda, who spoke at the TED Conference in Monterey, CA this week. When probed on his favorite manmade designs, he offered this:
“I like stuff designed by dead people. The old designers. They always got it right because they didn’t have to grow up with computers. All of the people that made the spoon and the dishes and the vacuum cleaner didn’t have microprocessors and stuff. You could do a good design back then.
I think if you’re a young designer now, you’ve got the internet and you’ve got screens all over the place — it’s awful hard. Technology is just so powerful now. You can do so much with so little. You can shove it into the size of a quarter. For designers to design great objects where technology is concerned, that’s hard.”
Too true. (Thanks Nancy.)
3// Last weeks’ Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, yielded some interesting discussion, like the keynote on networked mobile gaming.
4// File under: alternate desktop metaphors. Check out “BumpTop,” a desktop UI paradigm that uses physical behavior to aid organization of files. Whether or not the desktop metaphor is appropriate to mobile UI, could this type of physics and motion apply to mobile touch screens using a finger tip or thumb as the stylus?
5// Opera Mini. At most it looks like a strike against the operator content foothold. At the least it may be a reason not to have to buy a smartphone. (Thanks Christian.)
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The best mobile news and discussions for the week of 19 January, 2007.
Culture of Mobility
1// Mayor Bloomberg announced that New York will soon allow 911 (and 311) to accept digital photos and videos.
“If you see a crime in progress or a dangerous building condition, you’ll be able to transmit images to 911, or online to nyc.gov,” the mayor said in his annual State of the City address. “And we’ll start extending the same technology to 311 to allow New Yorkers to step forward and document nonemergency quality of life concerns, holding city agencies accountable for correcting them quickly and efficiently.”
2// Book, I hot mod balk. (a.k.a - Cool, I got one call.)
Kottke.org has a mention of kids in the UK using “book” as a synonym for “cool.” It’s rooted in a T9onym where the word cool and the word book both come up when you enter 2665 on a T9 keypad.
3// In the clamor of the Apple Keynote, Nokia and Visa’s announcement of mobile Visa payments in the US snuck under the radar.
Mobile technology news
4// Mainstream press picks up on Qualcomm: BusinessWeek has a feature on emerging mobile technologies primarily mentioning Qualcomm’s mobile TV offering, MediaFLO.
5// Mobileburn has a review of Samsung + Cingular’s latest sleek little smartphone — the BlackJack, a Windows Mobile handset that is slightly smaller than Motorola’s popular Q. Being skeptical about Samsung handsets doesn’t mean I don’t want one. Did I mention it’s black?
Mobile UI
6// Looks like Alltel is doing the widgets thing.
7// Mike Krisher has an interesting piece on FlashLite.
8// Mike Rowehl on Rails Dev for the Mobile web: Rails and Mobile Content
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