Archive for April, 2009

Keeping up, as the world goes mobile

April 26th, 2009

How does your website perform when accessed from a mobile?

Have you ever used your mobile to check the score for the football game you missed, because you were stuck on the train? Or used it to look up the address of that store you were certain was on Oxford Street, but just couldn’t find when you got there? Well, a recent article in The Independent suggests that you’re not alone; twenty five percent of British mobile phone users currently access the web from their mobiles at least once a month, and an estimated 1.2 billion people will regularly use their mobile phones to access the web by 2012.

What does this mean for businesses who currently provide websites and web-based services optimised for desktop browsing rather than mobile users?

Some of the issues

  • Your website may provide a poor user experience when accessed by a mobile browser, it or may not work at all. As mobile web use increases, it will be those businesses who offer usable, useful, and satisfying mobile web experiences that will be perceived as innovators and leaders by the web-savvy market.
  • You may be missing out on new potential revenue streams. The Independent reported that London has become the core for mobile start-ups, even surpassing Silicon Valley thanks to lower mobile tariffs and an abundance of talented people. The same article notes that major Venture Capitalists value mobile users in their business models at up to six times higher than ‘traditional’ web users.
  • You may risk losing customers to competitors who have used their mobile web experience as a differentiator for their services, particularly in highly competitive markets. Personal Banking is an example of an industry where offering best-of-breed mobile services might be a compelling reason for customers to switch.

The way forward

So what can you do now to start building a mobile relationship with your customers, and to make sure you stay ahead of your competitors in the mobile space? Here are a couple of ideas:

First, make sure that your website meets your customers’ real needs when they access it from their mobile phone, and offers a usable, useful, and satisfying experience. You can focus your design and development efforts by:

  • researching what users expect from your website when they are mobile
  • identifying and documenting the most important tasks for your mobile users
  • testing to make sure new designs allow users to perform those tasks
  • reviewing your website using different mobile phone browsers to identify high-level issues.

You can also look for innovative ways to engage your customers in this new mobile-oriented world, and stand out from your competitors. In order to stimulate and direct your creativity towards a successful product, consider activities such as:

  • conducting creative user research including cultural probes, focus groups, and participatory design techniques to help you understand what is important to your users today, and to help you explore new mobile revenue streams for the future
  • making your product development process user centred, to ensure your creative ideas develop into a product which is effective, efficient and satisfying to use.

So, what next?

If you’d like some help improving your mobile presence, feel free to contact me.

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Posted in Mobile, Usability | Comments (0)

What makes a great HCI Designer?

April 24th, 2009

(I originally wrote this article for Usability News, after spending a fantastic week enjoying florence for chi2008).

After spending a week in Florence surrounded by the work of some of the world’s greatest artists and in the company of many of the best and brightest in HCI, it was hard not to start wondering just what it is that sets great HCI designers apart from the rest of the crowd. What qualities do the elite designers at places like Apple, RIM, and Google share, and what do they know that other members of the HCI community could benefit from? Looking back on the CHI proceedings for some insight, here are a few ideas.

One possibility, hinted at in a handful of talks, is that in order for a designer to deeply address the full user experience they have to be able to readily imagine themselves in another’s position, and understand what it feels like to be that person; namely, they have to be able to be empathetic. ‘Knowing the user’ is a central tenet of user centred design, and being able to perceive and feel the emotion of others would certainly provide an edge in doing so. Perhaps then, one quality that great HCI designers possess is the capacity to be especially empathetic.

Another factor separating the good from the great may be related to the selection and application of design tools. Is it possible that the HCI ‘masters’ have a more in-depth knowledge of the available tools, or when and how to use them? Usability evaluations have become the de facto standard for product evaluations at nearly all stages of development, but perhaps being open to employing other methods, especially early on, will more likely lead to getting the right design instead of getting the design right. So perhaps a key to joining the ranks of the world’s brilliant HCI designers is to be well-versed in all of the other non-empirical design methods and, probably more importantly, to be able to choose the right method for the problem at hand.

Related to this is the possibility that today’s great designers are more familiar with the history of product and system designs, and are more willing to leverage this existing design repertoire when faced with new challenges. As Bill Buxton discussed in the closing plenary and also in his BusinessWeek article The Long Nose of Innovation earlier this year, it is critically important to know what has already been done and what is already out there, and not to be afraid to learn from it, build on it, and stretch it. Whether this knowledge is acquired through formal education or simply out of a pure passion for and interest in the field, a depth of understanding about designs past and present and an ability to draw on this in new and creative ways could certainly set some designers apart from others.

Of course, there is always the possibility that great designers are just born that way!

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And so the procrastination ends…

April 21st, 2009

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow – Mark Twain

I have been planning to start a blog for ages (read: years). So far, I have:

  • acquired a stock pile of domain names
  • spent hours browsing for just the right wordpress theme
  • downloaded, and even purchased, several themes
  • installed and played with a handful of CMS systems
  • written articles and posted them elsewhere, because my blog wasn’t ‘ready’ yet
  • helped convince several of my friends to start a blog

But as of yesterday, 20 April 2009, I still didn’t have a blog. Well the madness stops here! Thank you Leo Laporte for your rave reviews of squarespace on TWIT, and thank you squarespace for being oh-so-simple and exactly what I need.

As an HCI geek and a User Experience Consultant, naturally I’ll use my new blog as an outlet to write about usability, user experience, accessibility, ergonomics, HCI, and the like. Its what I do, and its what I love. But at the same time I don’t want to limit the scope of what I write, so who knows just what other content you’ll end up finding here – the possibilities are endless!

And so ends the procrastination, and begins my life as a blogger. Hello, world.

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