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Designing for mobile is a constantly evolving art, and we’re thrilled to have on the Locatrix team one of the best Interaction Designers in the business: Sherwin Huang. I recently sat down with Sherwin for a Q&A on what makes for great mobile design.

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?

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!

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