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!

• 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!

Clark’s argument is that the mobile and mobile Internet players – Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Nokia and particularly Apple – are the ones driving innovation in the industry, so any confidence derived by mobile network operators from their current position is dangerously optimistic.  As an example, Clark cites that any satisfaction operators derive from growth in mobile data use needs to be tempered by the knowledge that this growth largely results from devices like the iPhone, plus the applications and content they consume.   From which, ultimately, the operator receives nothing other than ever-commoditised data revenues. Ultimately, Clark sees this as a cultural problem:

“Carrier leaders need to recognize that the industry culture has evolved to deliver scale and reliability. Even among young and small cellcos, it isn’t geared to innovation.”

One of the challenges generally faced by “innovation units” within mobile operators – those teams chartered with driving application and services growth – is getting beyond corporate risk aversion. In the Internet world, companies can try, test, and measure new services and features easily, quickly and cheaply – Google’s “Lab” products are great examples of this.  In the mobile world, service offerings and VAS business cases face reviews by multiple committees, take months to deploy and often get launched as overly-sanitised versions of a once-original idea.  In a way, any service “innovation” gets watered down by internal processes.  Which is fine, if you are launching or upgrading multi-billion dollar network infrastructure.  But not if you just want to see if an idea works.

This month we’ve launched a new section on our web site: Locatrix Labs.  In it, we’re profiling in real-time projects and works-in-progress from the Locatrix engineering team, ably led by Andrew Eross and Johnson Page.  Of course the innovations featured all leverage or extend Locatrix/XLF, our VAS applications framework, which is exactly the point: we can provide mobile solution product managers a “safe” – in terms of both cost/capital expenditure and deployment risk- means to define, test-launch and measure new service ideas, and indeed mashups between services: perhaps Uandme supported by mobile advertising (we know one operator already is already considering this), or our entertainment/engagement application Nine with branded Facebook marketing.

By showcasing the Labs solutions we hope to provide our customers and partners a view of what cellco service innovation could look like, in an environment which allows them to (as Clark suggests):

“…marshall their strengths in network reach and enabling systems, and be the best channel partner for the broadband mobile internet.”

Which is precisely where they need to innovate!

Please check out Locatrix Labs and let us know what you think.

Entitled “Mobile Internet – Missing Link or Misnomer”, the panel is charged with discussing moneitization of mobile assets for a new Internet – location, charging and demographics, and will be held from 4pm on Wednesday, November 19th in Conference Auditorium 2.

Joining Mr White on the panel will be Mike Singh, CEO Telekom Caribe, terry Ahn, EVP of Global Business for KTF, Kul Wadhwa, Head of Business Development Wikimedia Foundation, and Aggarawal Dheeraj, CEO Altruist Technologies. The penal moderator is Martin Gutberlet, VP of Gartner.

“We’re excited by the opportunity to present at such a distinguished event”, says White. “Through helping network operators to leverage location as a mobile asset, the mobile Internet engages subscribers and makes content experiences more relevant and contextual.”

Mark White will be in Macau for the entire Mobile Asia Congress event.  For more information about Locatrix Communications, or to arrange a meeting with Locatrix in Macau, please contact Locatrix.