Sherwin Huang, Interaction Designer

Sherwin, briefly describe your role as an Interaction Designer.

In brief, I find creative solutions around technological boundaries, guiding and participating in production by balancing aesthetics with functionality to create a visual package that fosters user delight.

What do you think are the key issues in designing for Mobile Devices?

Uandme user experience

Applications – including the ones we create here at Locatrix – are increasingly feature packed and complex.  There is always the temptation to create user interfaces that display information equivalently to what one would find on an application designed for the desktop.  All this is done with the best of intentions thinking that it will allow users to have all the information at their fingertips.  But doing this on the mobile is sometimes akin to trying to squeeze an elephant through a door!

The mobile differs from the desktop in that often visits are purposeful. Users to go a site on their mobile because they know what they want (and there is a context to their requirements), whereas on the desktop users follow trails and search results to a site. So in designing for mobile you aim to fulfil this contextual need as quickly and easily as possible.

We often see different mobile applications that aspire to do similar things. How do you evaluate a “good” experience compared to a “great” one?

On the desktop, we can quantify this kind utility by looking at factors like learnability (how long it takes users to reach a given level of experience), clarity of structure (time taken to find a piece of information) and satisfaction from the overall experience. On the mobile this is even more important, because users are on the move. They are distracted, they need information quickly.  The equipment is often uncomfortable (small) and quite unforgiving (a slip of the thumb will take them out of the browser).

The most important questions to ask when designing for the mobile are: How will this be used? What will the users want in order to achieve their goal? How can we take the user to what they want in the shortest possible number of steps?

Answering these questions lets us produce an application with a goal in mind. The goal is to produce an application that a user can get into and use right away. Minimal learning curve. Minimal questions. Maximum results. That’s how we know we’ve got a great mobile experience!

How are you applying these mobile design principles here at Locatrix?

One of the most important aspects of our design work at Locatrix is that we have to deliver applications that work and look terrific on literally hundreds of devices – there’s many different handset vendors, and a variety of mobile browsers. This calls for a sense of simplicity in design and presentation, but simplicity itself is not necessarily a bad thing.

Chime provides a simple mobile user experience

Presenting information on the mobile is like drinking a double espresso coffee in the morning – it has to be smooth, potent and fast acting. We can create all sorts of fancy accompaniments like big headers and fancy graphics, but if they aren’t relevant to the core intention they just become “noise” that distracts the user and wastes precious screen real estate.

The other advantage of simplicity is that it serves as a great base to build up on. Once you have a standard for information architecture in place, it becomes possible to add flourishes for the different handsets that can handle it. The iPhone is a great example of this. It displays simple designs well, but because of its browser’s webkit based heritage, nice things like shadows and rounded corners can be easily added to enhance the aesthetics.

We use a tool called Salamander to great effect at Locatrix. Salamander is a web service that lets me know what style sheets, fonts, and graphics to use on a given handset, the screen dimensions, and whether the device supports assisted-GPS or just CellId location methods. We can then perfectly render maps, images, and specific CSS elements for an optimum user experience.

What advice would you give to mobile product managers who want to maximize the stickiness of their application services?

Wireframing helps visualize the user experience

I’d suggest they remember that sometimes “less is more”. Working with such a creative engineering team like we have at Locatrix is a real buzz; we can literally do anything on a handset. But designing successful mobile applications usually comes from creating a utility that does one or two contextual things really well, and doesn’t try to become a sort of mega-solution. I’d often recommend that product managers look towards launching more “simpler” initiatives that can be measured and refined to maximize subscriber returns, rather than one single product with dozens of options.

An excellent technique we use during this refinement process is wireframing – or sketching out the entire application experience, screen by screen. Wireframes clearly define the structure of information, as well as user flow on a site, and they are an information visualisation tool that allows all involved to contribute to the process of design. In the right hands if can help ensure that the site is on the right track, creating a reference for use during production that can help prevent feature creep which in turn reduces noise and increases product effectiveness. It is also a benchmark that can be used to simplify the experience.  Remember, less is more.

Do you have any final comments for our readers?

Mobile interaction design is really a crucial element in the success – or otherwise – of a great service. It is a crucial process to understand, and to execute well.  And make sure you use a great designer. Like me!

At first glance, this initiative had a tremendously successful outcome for the MNO. Their mobile Internet usage saw double-digit percentage growth overnight. And kept growing.

A week later, the operator announced increased usage caps for all of its data plans. No great problem here, as subscribers rapidly became new mobile social networking enthusiasts, often in their thousands each day. But certainly less revenue per MB.

In fact everyone was terribly pleased until later in the month they discovered that while overall mobile data was substantially up, their on-portal traffic had actually decreased, by more than 30 percent. And adding to that dilemma, ARPU decreased for nearly every VAS product they offered to their subscribers.

So while the social networking traffic was increasing, the mobile operator had become a dumb pipe – and found themselves dramatically exposed to churn in a competitive market. Because “m-site” social networking on network A is an identical experience on network B. And C. Or even D. Popular social networking sites are attracting millions of unique visitors to their mobile portals every month, and while mobile data usage rises, the ARPU curve – from data usage alone – is trending ever downwards. What should be an opportunity for mobile operators can very quickly become a massive problem.

To help mobile product and VAS managers meet this challenge, we devised the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops. Our thesis is this: mobile operators don’t need to “introduce” social networking services – their subscribers are already there. Instead, they need to formulate and execute strategies which provide a re-engagement path, via and through existing social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and Friendster.

Delivered in either half-day and full-day seminar formats, our (Re)Engage Workshops help mobile product managers and network executives better understand the demographic mix of social networking users, and teaches them how to create a subscriber engagement strategy by working within the social networking paradigm. Creating, for example, a framework for injecting your mobile brand and VAS solutions into social networking portals, and helping your customers promote their favorite services to their friends. And while we of course present engagement examples based on Locatrix solutions and services, there is no ongoing commercial obligation from the (Re)Engage workshop – just an opportunity to learn and refresh your strategies for leveraging mobile social networking within your subscriber base. And (Re)Engaging with your customers!

There’s more information about the Locatrix (Re)Engage Workshops on our website, but for a limited time we are offering a free half-day (Re)Engage Workshop to qualifying operators who are readers of this newsletter: simply mention “Position Update” when you contact us, or use this special e-mail link.

• Develop for the most common devices.
• Develop so that it looks “kinda ok” on most devices.
• Use hacks to get it to work on a couple of other devices.
• Somehow use the WURFL database.

Several of our solutions revolve around displaying maps. We want the maps to fit to the width of each device. We also like to know what an acceptable base font size is. We want to know as much as we can about every device, so that our solutions work perfectly regardless of device. We run Salamander behind every major (and minor!) solution we develop here at Locatrix Communications to solve this.

Salamander lets developers write layout code for all devices at once. By allowing any service to get any attributes about any device. Mobile applications no longer have to look “kinda ok” on some devices. Applications become tailored to each device. For example:

• Display size
• Supported WAP version
• Supported Java version
• Official support by an MNO
• Default font size.

The web-based front end of Salamander also allows us to instantly change and/or rollback changes on any device-specific attributes across all our solutions. Additionally, it automagically pulls community updates from the WURFL database.

To call Salamander, we simply create a new Salamander object and then query the attributes we need.

if (!isset($_SESSION['device'])
{
    require_once('/include/Salamander.class.php');
    $salamander = new Salamander("http://salamander.me");
    $_SESSION['device'] = $salamander->getSalamanderDevice($_SERVER["HTTP_USER_AGENT"]);
}

The Salamander class handles all the communications with the Salamander server. It returns an array of various required attributes for applications to query.

We then query attributes such as:

• $_SESSION['device']['baseFontSize']
• $_SESSION['device']['imageType']
• $_SESSION['device']['imageWidth']
• $_SESSION['device']['imageHeight']
• $_SESSION['device']['is3G']

From there we resize images, set font sizes, enable/disable bandwidth intensive features, etc.

Want to try out Salamander with your applications? Want to send feedback? Send me an email!

I have to confess, I was holding out a little longer, thinking that perhaps the Storm was the device to make all the Locatrix office iPhone huggers go “wow”.  Despite the fact that Telstra aren’t (yet?) releasing a Storm, an impending month of travel made me finally make the decision, and in doing so consolidate two SIM cards into one (my other handset of choice is/was a Nokia E51, which I still kind of like).

But the Bold arrived, neatly packaged and very shiny, so I couldn’t wait to try it out.  So I charged it, threw a SIM card in, spent a bunch of time on the phone to Telstra’s mobile data support folks (there was a problem in the transfer of my service from one MSISDN to another), pointed it at our hosted e-mail server, and….wow.   There’s so many features to play with that….. well lets just say I spent a warm Brisbane weekend cloistered in air-conditioned comfort playing with my new toy, and now have no idea how I lived without it.

The GPS works fine, and the Google Maps application for the Bold is a dream; I love the “Show Address in Google Maps” capability from the address book (amazingly helpful when doing sales calls in foreign cities).

Calendar & Syncing is OK; I wasn’t the biggest fan of the BlackBerry desktop application, and while it’s improved I felt it should have maybe moved on a bit more in the past year.  The e-mail application (admittedly with a QWERTY keyboard layout, which my 7100 lacked) works fine – I’ve found myself answering e-mails at my desk with the BlackBberry instead of the PC, although I will save my ranting about Outlook 2007 for another post.

The application support for social networking is good – MSN, Facebook and the TwitterBerry applications are my standards – and the WiFi support is brilliant.  Unlike the Nokia, where you get to set default networks/access points, the BlackBerry makes the very “bold” assumption that of course you want to use Wifi when you can.  Very cool.

I’m thrilled, and will probably write more in coming days.