GregBellDesign

If you are as exited about the iPhone as I am, then you will appreciate these videos:

Never Been an iPod

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Adaptation is an essential feature of the human psychological make up. It allows us to become comfortable with seemingly impossible situations and move forward together as a species. We can adapt to difficult situations which allow us to spend more time concentrating on how to make our current situation better. The flip side of this coin is also true: we adapt to good experiences.

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Since beginning my look at the mobile web, and the products used to access it, I have found one common theme: UI Laziness.

UI laziness is when products or services remove functionality because it seems difficult to design on a small screen. Or when interfaces are difficult to use, and it is blamed on small screen. Or any other problems to the UI when it is blamed on some other circumstance. It basically means that the designers (this includes anybody who is involved in producing the product, even people who's titles may not include "design") have come up with an easy solution just because it's easy, not because it's better.

This bothers me.

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What makes a really great service a really great service? This is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. But, we do know that really great services exist. I would consider Amazon one of these really great services. That's why I was so surprised to see what they did with their mobile service.

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One of the interesting differences between the mobile web and the desktop web, is that page weight is even more important on mobile devices. You can't just slap on a bunch of information and call it a home page. The information needs to be the most important, no more, no less.

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"Individuals and businesses in more than 100 countries around the world registered more than 100,000 .mobi domains in the first four days of the domain’s general availability, demonstrating a strong demand for the next evolution of the Internet." [Mobile Monday][1]

This is great. It means that there is a demand for the mobile web. Not that it was all that much in question, but this type of growth is a good thing, or is it?

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I have to say, in my limited time of surfing the mobile web, Yahoo!'s mobile site is the best that I have seen (this includes flickr).

It seems like they are putting a lot of effort into making a good user experience online. I just thought that I would share some screenshots of what it looks like on my mobile device (Cingular 8126).

Yahoo Mobile Home Page

Good use of icons to show navigation items. Also, the navigation list is simple, uncluttered and easy to navigate with a keyboard.

Yahoo Mobile News Page

Another style of listings, but also easy to navigate. Short titles allow for very little text link wrapping which makes the list easier to navigate.

Yahoo Mobile Headline News Page

Longer titles, but because they are numbered, they are visually distinct enough to make it easy to navigate. Also, only the essential information is shown allowing for quick download and less clutter.

Flickr Home Page

Simple and elegant in classic flickr style.

Yesterday, I wrote about my research question. Today, I would like to look at some of the task categories people are completing on their cell phones and pda's using the web.

This list is more of a starting point for discussions than a finished product. I will be using this list to start having discussions with people to find out what types of sites they are visiting on their mobile devices.

My starting list:

• Photo Sharing / Services
• Personal Radio
• Online Music Stores
• RSS Feedreading
• News
• E-Commerce
• Maps & Directions
• Spreadsheets
• Finance
• Blogging
• Search
• Games

For my research, I plan on narrowing this list down to 8 - 10 clearly distinct categories.

To me, the category of e-commerce can be blown apart into many smaller categories that would be far more directed in terms of a study. The smaller categories could also be more representative of what users are actually doing online. For example, you may want to look up a review of a book on amazon, and possibly buy it, but you probably wouldn't be browsing through their entire listing of housewares for your new set of pots and pans.

So, the plan is to narrow this list down to what users are actually doing online with mobile devices.

This year at school I will doing research and usability testing on websites viewed on mobile devices. I am extremely interested in how information architects and visual designers are currently designing web sites for small screens and how the small screen experience can be made better.

The first part of my research will be looking at the current state of the mobile web and figuring out what type of visual standards have emerged. I have drafted a research question, with the help from Karyn Zuidinga, that I think nails what I am trying to accomplish.

Research question: What display standards (graphic design, information design, interaction design, and content) exist for websites and web based applications on mobile, hand-held devices?

I plan on looking at sites and recording data in regards to each of the display standards mentioned above.

My next step is to figure out what sites to include in the research. I am currently working on a list of site categories that I would like to deal with, then I will try to find 5 - 10 sites for each category. I hope to look at about 75-80 sites.

If you know any cool mobile research or are interested in this topic, leave me a comment and we can chat.