I have never been such a mobile guy, mainly for two reasons. The first that I am born in Italy, a country where mobile devices are highly diffused (we are one of the most important market in Europe) and, paradoxally, the infrastructures that should support them suck. And I am not taking into account the network operator competition that only recently has seen the entrance of the virtual ones).
The second reason is that mobile has always been associated to limited and essential. Small display, tiny keypads, limited amount of memory made mobile devices the perfect device to accomplish simple but yet important tasks: calling., text messaing and taking pictures. The advent of “smartphones” had the consequence of pulling me even further away. With smartphones my idea of mobile devices just turned into platforms stuffed with buggy applications that offered everything but working interactions or, better, interfaces. Even though Symbian and Windows mobile have changed mobile world a lot, they haven’t made the real difference: the feeling was that the PC had been transferred on a different platform that was even more uncomfortable: why? For years, mobile phones have tried to emulate the personal computer world without any success. They were just adopting things that worked nicely on a desktop computer but could not work on a mobile platform.
Moreover, there were other two important factors being underevaluated in designing mobile applications (and that probably still are): context and users.
The context of mobile interaction
You don’t have to read this post to understand the gigantic difference between a desktop environment and a mobile context. I really enjoyed reding “Design sketch: the context of mobile interaction” by N. Savio and J. Braiterman. The paper is about mobile context. It tries to build a sort of layered model of mobile contexts where each context is enclosed in a wider one . I do not agree with it since it forces the idea of context too much, trying to define devices, connections and carriers as contexts themselves (“For mobile computing, context is everything). To me a context is a set of physical, social, cultural and personal layers in where inter-actions happen. Devices are not contexts but interfaces akin what is between people and data. On the other side, this work really points out interesting sides of mobile design and outline a list of useful euristics which can be used when thinking mobile. Among them, all mobile interactions are user-driven, calm technology will be valued over constant disruptions and the device as continuous companion opens the realm for mobile experiences of different intensities and durations (which really made me think of the concept of fluency by Lowgren).
About mobile users: I am sure we will start exploring more and more the variety of needs, situations and contraints that make a mobile user something unique. It’s like a Vico’s historical circle: what happened for desktop user research is going to happen for mobile one. On how different design can be in order to respond to the new mobility needs, please read the inspiring Mobile Web Design Trends for 2009 .
And here are few lines I’ve just found:
Out in the woods
Or in the city
It’s all the same to me
When I’m drivin’ free, the world’s my home
When I’m mobile
Hee, hoo!
beep beep!(Going Mobile – The Who)
