Documentation: the Hidden Challenge of Mobile Interface Design

The increasingly influential EuroIA Summit, held at Amsterdam this weekend, includes a growing mix of technology, ethnography and sociology, as well as straight technology. Scott Weiss, HFI’s Executive Director for EMEA, will be presenting his paper, "Documenting Mobile 2.0 IA", at the Summit, focusing on how mobile design differs from documenting desktop designs, and the challenges associated with mobile information architecture.

Key challenges under review include the changing focus of soft key labels, animation as part of the application’s interaction, gestural user interfaces, and the constraints posed by the business requirements of the telecoms industry.

Documenting mobile designs, Weiss says, differs from documenting desktop designs. Oddly, mobile designs are trickier to clearly describe, since soft key labels change as the 'focus' moves about the screen. These IAs are further complicated when animation becomes, not just adornment, but an integral part of the interaction of an application. Touch, surprisingly, is more closely aligned with desktop UIs, due to the direct manipulation parallels; however, gestural user interfaces present yet new challenges.

Mobile design is further complicated by the business requirements of the telecoms industry:
1. Multiple versions of a design are required to accommodate different brands and different feature sets;
2. Designs must be delivered on extremely tight and often-changing schedules;
3. Equipment samples are rarely available until after designs have been finalised. These challenges have contributed to the lightweight, quick-to-generate methods presented in this session.

Weiss bases his reasoning on a documentation methodology honed through years of client-facing experience and the maturation and melding of several different strategies to produce a particularly clear and easy to follow strategy. Those attending the conference will hear Scott take a finished design, break it into its design and documentation components, and walk through how the documentation for the design was produced.

Associated Link: EuroIA

Online poker company uses Science to assess Player Preferences
Source: Recentpoker.com, 8 January 2009
 
Working with customer experience consultancy Foviance, PKR is exploiting the benefits of electroencephalography (EEG) technology to gather information on poker players' emotional relationship with a brand or service.

Do Users really love Laptops?
Source: channelinsider, 7 January 2009
 
More than one-fifth of all laptop computers will break down over the course of their life, and other limitations frustrate their users. From this list of user complaints come laptop opportunities.

User Interviews - Analysis Simplified
Source: Webcredible, 6 January 2009
 
You’ve conducted your user interviews, but now you need to make sense of all that information you’ve gathered.

Why Products Fail
Source: ComputerWorld, 5 January 2009
 
Most gadget and software makers don't understand what users want most: control.

How to Design Websites for Mobile Phones
Source: stemkoski.com, 3 January 2009
 
Tips from Ryan Stemkoski's web design blog.

Pioneer of Cyberspace honoured
Source: BBC, 2 January 2009
 
A professor who invented a forerunner of the world wide web has been made a dame in the New Year Honours.

2008 in Review: Developments that rocked the world of User Experience
Source: Catalyst Resources, 1 January 2009
 
A look back at 2008 highlights some of the key developments that rocked the world of user experience.

2008: The Year Online
Source: MIT Technology Review, 31 December 2008
 
The business of social networking, cloud computing, and a flaw in the fabric of the Internet top the most notable stories of 2008.

Shoveling through the Spamalanche
Source: UN, 30 December 2008
 
A ‘Spamalanche’ of 3,000 emails will be waiting in your inbox by the time you get back to work. What can you do besides 'delete all'?

New guidelines boost Web Access
Source: BBC, 29 December 2008
 
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has announced a new standard to make sites more accessible to older and disabled people.