Blackbeltjones/Work “The cosmos is a deeply dangerous thing to think about - into it, vacant minds expand” - Dr. Jonathan Miller

More on mobile phone design, usability and business success

Frank Gaine mailed this to the London Usability mailing list today
which has a little heuristic evaluation to back up some of the opinion
pieces on mobile phone UI success transalting to business success that
have been in the press recently.

“The mobile phone is an example of an interface whose use is very
visible in everyday life. Unlike other interfaces, issues relating to
mobile phones frequently pop up in conversation. People discuss the
tariff that they have subscribed to, phone accessories, ring tones
and, without knowing it, the usability of phones. How many times have
you been frustrated when you’ve had to use a friend’s mobile phone – activating the keypad, sending an sms, even ending the call cause
problems. How many times have you or your friends complained about
not being able to remember where functions are located, such as
reviewing missed calls and adding a name to the phone book ? People’s
perception of ‘user-friendliness’ certainly impacts on the choice of
ones first and subsequent mobile phones. Nokia’s user-centred
approach can only serve to perpetuate their position as the world’s
leading maker of mobile phones going forward.”

Usability Evaluation Rates Nokia 3210 Above Siemens C25

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Good design not a ‘nice-to-have’

It’s being highlighted as a survival issue for cellular handset manfacturers and cellular network providers in the UK media.

“The networks are looking at how much revenue they are
making from each handset,” says Rockman. “They will know that they make
more money from a Nokia [usable] phone than from another model. It may
be a very small amount per user, but you are dealing with very large
numbers of people.”

and

“OK, I’m just going to come right out and say it: Ericsson lost $2.3bn
on mobile phone handsets last year because its products are ugly. We
all know it, but are too polite to say so. So instead we talk about
poor market segmentation, or excessive costs, or a slow product cycle.
All true; but if the handsets had been prettier, these would have been
merely glitches.”

The FT article is a little off-base in my opinion,
especially when the writer refers to palmpilots, but makes good points
about the initimate and emotional nature of design for personal
technology.

FT.com | Ericsson in the ugly business

BBC News | UK | Secrets of good phones

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How soon is now?


Mark Bernstein on Akscyn’s Law and response-times in hypertexts.

Hypertext Now: “Akscyn’s law”

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The case for plastic pages

In the past I have done a number of websites with page-layouts that
establish themselves at a fixed width, usualy for reasons of
development time, and I supposed [I admit I did minimal research], ease
of reading. Here’s some interesting research about reading on screen
which has made me rethink…

An experimental investigation of the effects of line length, document height and number of columns when reading from screen

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Social networks, web-as-brain, and ‘emergent’ infomation architecture


Ooohh – this pushed pretty much all my buttons… again, from today’s tomalak’s realm

“Some scientists argue that the structure of the Web
mirrors the organization of human and animal brains. The brain’s
architecture, a highly connected network of neurons joined by synapses,
is responsible for important functions such as perceptions, learning,
etc. The basic idea is that Web pages act as neurons and hypertext
links act as synapses. Web pages exist in complex patterns and
hypertext links direct the flow of information from one page to the
next.”

Transforming information retrieval on the Web: a new direction

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It’s my birthday


Surprise me…

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David Gelertner interviewed

‘Mirror Worlds’ author on GUI operating system deficiencies as they
relate to ‘real-life’ and the organisational power of computingf; and
being blown-up by the Unabomber.

found via Tomalak’s Realm.

The Standard: There Must Be a Better Way …

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Poetic Programming

This reads like a retread of ‘e-services’, asp’s or one of the
other ‘software-on-demand’ visions of the world that have done the
rounds of the last few years. But this article has some nice
turns-of-phrase and take on why this model of software development and
deployment should be driven from the need to reduce complexity rather than any other motivating factor.

“Writing code, he explains, is like writing poetry: every word, each
placement counts. Except that software is harder, because digital poems can
have millions of lines which are all somehow interconnected. Try fixing
programming errors, known as bugs, and you often introduce new ones. So far,
he laments, nobody has found a silver bullet to kill the beast of
complexity”

The Economist: April 12th 2001

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Communicating interaction design


Trying to find as many schools of thought and techniques for
representing complex interaction design and information/content
architectures – if you have any favourite texts/techniques, please mail me

uidesign.net: Write Once Display Anywhere
Analysis and Comment on the XML Document Navigation Language

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Semantic Web

Here is the Tim Berners-Lee article in Scientific American that seems to have caused a lot of discussion.

Scientific American:
Feature Article: The Semantic Web: May 2001

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Survivability in networks

Just gave a talk and participated in a discussion at the london Advance For Design
on what happens next for interaction/experience designers in the
current difficult times. A little random, but I think it went down
well. Some of the org. design I did in my last days at Sapient
(informed by some of the themes in this presentation) seems to be
getting put in place (a year later!) which is encouraging.

Advance for Design London: 11.04.2001: powerpoint presentation: 471k

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Five fallacies

“Content is a commodity. Anyone with $99 is a published
author. Anyone with a computer is a publisher. Today’s New York Times
is free online. Your manifold value proposition is being erased. Your
key remaining strength is your historical strength: anticipating what
people want to read and knowing how to sell it to them.”

see also, as per bloody usual, Shirky...

http://www.siegelgale.com/fivefallacies/

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Architecture will eat itself


Presentation given at Game Developers Conference 2001, where current “real” architecture is seen as more fabulous and exotic than architecture in current games…

GDC 2001:Current Architecture and Potential Approaches to Level Design
By Duncan Brown

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Ben Fry’s Thesis

“There is a space of highly complex systems for which we
lack deep understanding because few techniques exist for visualization
of data whose structure and content are continually changing.”

thanks to Andrew Otwell for pointing this out.

organic information design

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“There’s nothing so uncommon than common sense”


HCIRN Reflections: Why is usability so hard?

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Self-organise yo’self a CLUE…

“Reputed ballbusting megalomaniac Don Tapscott has made
a breathtaking discovery: “Self-organizing communities.” They come as a
revelation to executives whose entire knowledge of the Web dates back
to 1997 and revolves around Microsoft MSN Hotmail, Microsoft Internet
Explorer, and Microsoft Outlook. To this clientele, the only Internet
is the corporate Internet. The only sites they know are those subject
to extensive ad campaigns and regular coverage on CNN, which indeed is
now the proprietor or competitor of nearly all such corporate sites.

It astounds these ignoramuses that “consumers,” the only
audience they could imagine for any Web site, would dare defy the
instructions of marketing and read what they want without being
herded.”

NUblog: Are you self-organised? Have you been self-organised recently?

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More ammo

Very, very useful process diagram from the lady who does emdesign.com. I wish I had something this good to give away to the design community…

AltaVista Experience Design Process

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Infotech, biotech and nanotech

“...at the age of 2 to 3 years old, humans hit their
peak with a quadrillion synaptic connections, and twice the energy burn
of an adult brain.”

No wonder my brain hurts when I try to think.

The new convergence: Infotech, biotech and nanotech
By Steve Jurvetson

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A prize…

...to the first person who writes a wireless worm to nuke novelty
ringtones and set all phones in the world to silent alert permanently.
Random
thoughts: this sound like it’s just meXe from a couple of years back,
yes it’s a probably gonna be full of hideous security holes, and more
evidence that the wireless world is NOT going to be ANYTHING like the
page-based web.

Wireless software just a phone call away

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Paul Kahn’s ‘Mapping Websites’ seminar


I haven’t read the book so let me know if reading this can save you 20 quid.

d/D Seminars: Mapping Web Sites: Outline

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