What We Mean by Mobile
Designing Mobile Interfaces ► Preface ► What We Mean by Mobile
Over the years, the reaction to my job title, “mobile interaction designer,” has migrated from blank stares to significant interest in this suddenly mainstream technology. Still, only about half the time do people have any idea what that title means. And if they do, they almost always assume my job is to design mobile phones or apps for them.
Figure P-1 — Traditional media, and desktop computing, require the user to make an effort to go to where the display is; even a laptop requires creating an ad hoc workplace. When the mobile device is always with you, everywhere is a place to do work, be entertained, or consume information.
Occasionally, someone asks if we also design games for the Nintendo DS, or make maps for GPS navigation, or do work for some other sort of device. Has the definition of mobile changed? This is a list of the types of things we looked at to find and validate these patterns:
Mobile smartphones
Mobile feature phones
Mobile network access points (aircards)
Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs)
Tablets
eReaders
Media players
Image viewers and digital picture frames
Portable game systems
Remote controls
Handheld navigation devices (see Figure P-5)
Portable scanners
Cameras and other capture devices
Printers, scanners, copiers, and mopiers (multifunction devices or MFDs)
Kiosks
Wearable computers
Telematics, and vehicle-mounted devices
Industrial automation
Portable surveying, measuring, and metering equipment
The preceding list is not exhaustive. And although the items in the list share many characteristics, many are not particularly mobile. Kiosks are, by definition, bolted to the ground, for example. And no one much thinks of a camera as being similar to a phone.
So our first answer is that mobile is not a useful word, and that this book addresses a lot of these devices. Their design can be informed by the mobile patterns in this book and elsewhere. The ubiquity of mobile devices also may mean that employing these as universal patterns is a good thing, as users may require less training when using interfaces to which they are accustomed. If you design cameras or printers, you should be paying attention to the state of the art in mobile.
Figure P-2 — Always-available devices encourage use at every idle moment, with an increasingly broad definition of idle time. Law, custom, or commonsense notwithstanding, devices will be used in every conceivable environment.
We didn’t come up with this answer out of the blue or just trust our instincts. Instead, years of work, discussion, writing, and arguing led to some principles of “what is mobile.”
We like to think of the evolution of mobile telephony as having occurred in four eras:
Voice
Paging and Text
Pervasive network connectivity
General computing devices
Yes, this leaves out a lot of interesting devices that are on the longer list shown earlier. The Game Boy and GPS receivers predate by several years what most of us would call mobile phones. But mobile telephony is what changed the world and ushered in all this, so it’s a good anchor point.
If you consider a current mobile phone as being a “fourth-era” device, you find that it has the following characteristics:
Small - It’s small enough to carry with you all the time, preferably in a pocket (see Figure P-1).
Portable - It’s battery-powered and otherwise independent of the world, so it doesn’t have to be plugged in or attended to regularly (see Figure P-2).
Connected - It’s wirelessly connected, not attached to the wall or connected only when the user makes special effort. Whenever possible, it is connected in multiple ways, to both voice and data networks (see Figure P-3).
Interactive - It’s inherently interactive. Unlike a watch, or even most MP3 players, which are lim- ited to display, playback, and a small subset of interactions, a mobile phone allows more undirected actions to be taken, such as text entry and keyword search.
Contextually-aware - It (or services it is attached to) uses its ability to understand the network to which it is attached, and its other sensors, to help the user get things done, and preemptively gather information (see Figure P-4).
With this many facets, it’s easy to disregard any one of them and still feel the device meets your needs. By strapping an iPad to a wall and calling it a kiosk, all you’ve done is simply remove its “portable” feature, so it’s still a “mobile” device.
Figure P-3 — This wearable scanner, attached to a Tablet PC (used for inventory control), is representative of trends in workplace computing: contextually useful so that the operator has it with her constantly, and connected so that the enterprise can use the intelligence immediately.
Consider the Wii or the Xbox Kinect instead. Though the display used on these devices is not at all portable, at its core it is aware of the user’s position, it changes with the type of input being used, and the entire interface has been designed to support interaction via a game controller, or via the user simply waving his arms at the screen. These meet the interactive criteria to be a “mobile” device.
Now take a Windows Tablet PC. It has pen and touch input, can be quite small and portable, is networked, and has sensors. But we argue that it is not mobile. It’s not really connected, because it connects like a desktop, so you have to open dialog boxes and press buttons. It isn’t usefully interactive, because you cannot use it on the go, but rather have to stop to use it. It’s not contextually aware, because the GPS, or camera, or accelerometers don’t do much of anything by themselves.
What Type of Patterns We Will Cover
So, although this book does still focus on the mobile phone and, in particular, the smart- phone, similar interactions from kiosks to game stations to telematics are also considered. In some cases, we’ll even refer to these devices directly in the patterns.
The patterns are guidelines for implementing interaction design on these devices. So they talk about page-level components such as scroll bars, display components such as pop ups, widgets such as buttons, and input methods such as keyboards.
Figure P-4 — A few years ago, I used this combination of a GPS and Palm OS smartphone to record and track my location (in a snowstorm, no less). Today, the results of sensors in mobile devices can be seamless, automatic, and so intelligent as to risk violating privacy.
But they also talk about things such as the labels and lights for hardware keyboards. These are covered because you can influence them. You can fail to implement the keyboard correctly, and cause keyboard entry to fail. You can change scroll bar behavior, if there’s a special case for your application. Increasingly, as HTML5 technologies roll out, mobile websites can take advantage of interesting interactive features.
Also, you might be working on a device operating system—likely the GUI layer on top of an existing OS. There are many, many devices, and new classes are still emerging. Overlays have migrated down to the point that end users may change the basic behavior of their handsets. You may have to work in this space sooner than you think.
If not, you still need to understand why certain OS-level behaviors are standard, or should not be, so that you can make informed decisions about your design.