Arabella David's Forum Nokia Blog
Over the Air and through the woods
darabella | 30 September, 2009 14:01
I'll be the first to admit I've been absolutely terrible at updating this blog, and only marginally better at updating my twitter stream (feel free to add me, but if my history is any indication, there won't be a torrent of tweets arriving into your stream from me!).
However, after meeting some of the great folks last week in London during Over the Air, I'm feeling really motivated to try to post more in the future about what's happening and what I've got in store for you all regarding User Experience and Design resources.
First off, if you missed my talk in London last Friday, you can find my slides over on Slideshare. Thanks again to all of you that showed up and participated in discussion - it was extremely interesting and enlightening!
The gist of my talk was this. I advocate a User Experience driven method of service creation. User experience as applied to mobile service development can be simultaneously a very vague, diffuse "feeling" ("make sure the user is emotionally engaged with the service"), and incredibly nitpicky ("the startup screen must load within 30 ms"). When one is coming from a development background and has little to no formal user experience or design background, it can be a little overwhelming. But it's all much clearer when you just put the end user's needs and wises first; once you do this, your scope and planning become so much more clearer, and the risk of having a service that doesn't deliver becomes that much smaller.
With this kind of UX-driven process in mind, I'm trying to pull together the right resources to help you get started with your development concepting, planning and testing - looking at how a usual UX driven development cycle might go, and then supplying the right tools and resources at the right points when you need them.
I'm really open to suggestions if you have any - feel free to send me a tweet at @darabella or reply to this post if you know of something that might be helpful to you. For example, a couple of developers mentioned they use Firebug extensively in web work, and having a stronger link between working with Firebug and Nokia browsers would be really helpful. Or what they really needed for good application planning was a really good visual prototyping tool. In regards to these and whatever else you've got, I will definitely see what I can do!
Thanks again to Dan, Margaret and the rest of the Over the Air organizers for putting together such an awesome event. I'm still feeling sad I couldn't take home a giant beanbag!
Finally, a big thanks to Tina, Sumppi and the rest of the Eat.fi gang for letting me use their journey from desktop to mobile as a case study. Good luck in the SIME awards you guys!
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Re: Over the Air and through the woods
darabella | 02/10/2009, 10:47
Thanks for the great comments! I hear you loud and clear when it comes to the prototyping/concepting need- in the internal reviews of what we've got as well as what you and others have been saying, we really need to give you something that would help! I can't say too much about them at this stage, but let's just say I'm working on it :)
I know the whole Designers vs. Developers debate is as old and hoary as the PC vs. Mac debate, but what I do believe is valuable from this kind of stereotyping is that good user experience can only stem from an understanding of both sides. If you're only approaching a mobile service from a coding or a design perspective, then you're already handicapped straight out of the gate.
Prototyping tools
marcusjpotter | 02/10/2009, 00:57
The big one for me is rapid mobile prototyping tools, and one I'm quite passionate about this subject! Such apps are slowly emerging through a range of web/desktop tools; Catalyst, Balsamic, Flair Builder to name a few (Microsoft has added range of tools in their family) but I tend not to go there :P
To me there is simply no substitution for playing with concepts, feeling interactions, and implicit control on timings, states and navigable screen objects. I have used a mixture of tools over the years, from quickly ‘polished’ artwork components, mixed with JS to get things moving around, flash, CSS trickery or even PowerPoint (dare I say it) you will be surprised how quickly you can mock concepts when you combine it with a range of Adobe tools and trickeries, it surprises me how you can tweak its usage to allow for fine execution/control of mobile simulations with its precise control of timings and fairly crude tools.
How ether here’s no substitution for experiencing items on devices or intended platforms, so this is another factor you have add into the mix, Hence rapid tools for app concept especially more complex long winded ones) to me are the key issue here, designers need to feel their work, breath their designs and constantly change ideas throughout the reiteration cycle, let alone the pain of multi screen design, and no, I don’t just mean different mobile screen sizes!
What’s my point? The mobile 'space' would certainly benefit from a range of tools to build slick (polished) rapid prototypes, for a range of devices, for varying screen sizes and yes even though there are a range of cheats, I would hate to imagine how puzzling it would feel for 'designers' who work alone, to turn their artwork into navigable experiences, let alone learn CSS or tweak with JS libs or make their own variations of standard components.
Well after a rather long ramble, Great slides, smiled at the slide on getting a balance in the 'middle' (programmers 'sweet spot' Designers) shame I missed the event to get the full A/V experience: P…. Force yourself to keep YOUR blog posts coming :) Nokia needs more 'articles' for creating beautiful ‘yet usable’ experiences on its forums, 'HINT' keep up the good work and keep em coming!
PS: If you are interested feel free to DM (twitter) or mail me, I would be happy to share links of rapid prototypes outputs with the 1-54 painful process/tools used to make them happen. Perhaps we should find some time (yeh I know!) to create some articles so users can share their current cheats and experiences too!