Mobile Monday London 7 April 2008 - Mobile User Experience

Went along to Mobile Monday last night (April 2008) in London on Mobile User Experience.  Probably one of the best Mobile Monday's I've been to - great speakers and interesting topic.  Here are a few notes of the key points for anyone interested:

Steve Ives - CEO Taptu

Taptu is a Cambridge UK based mobile search startup where you can search myspace, wikis and other stuff. Steve previously started Trigenix and Taptu has raised £5m of VC money.  Steve gave a great presentation with interesting slides and lots of good tips. 

- search needs to be different for mobile (constraints of screens, inputs, latency)

- Google mobile, Yahoo onesearch are trying to take web search to mobile, Taptu is trying to start with a "blank slate"

- Taptu has done loads of User experience testing (14 user studies in a year, 133 tests of 1 hour per user)

- Taptu aimed at four types of people

• ipod generation (gen Y, like shiny things)
• careerist power user (25+, functional uses)
• unwired social (dont have PC access at work, out and about all the time, includes users in India, SA
• Digerati (bloggers and influencers)

- Taptu built for three main types of devices with customized UI for each

• low end - RAZR
• mid - N95
• Hi - iphone and more to follow...

- Taptu  go through "paper prototyping" (drawing the mobile screens on paper) and "device prototyping" stages and usability testing before they start actually building anything

- A portable usability lab is used for testing out Taptu with people using the service, they have a nifty setup with two cameras (one on the phone and one on the user) which they splice together.

Scott Weiss - Executive Director, EMEA, Human Factors International www.humanfactors.com

Basically Taptu follow a user-experience design process similar to that recommended by Human Factors which is a UE consulting firm.   This was another presentation which went over the methods and processes in a bit more detail.  Key points:

- people can react to things very differently depending on which country they are in

- you need to understand the audience and their goals and iterate based on their feedback

- aim is "persuasive design" get people to love the service, come back and enjoy using it (like Apple stuff)

Key stages of user-centered design

- Design Strategy - goals, scope of project, tech constraints, marketing goals, key success factors

- Personas and Profiles - basic characteristics of users as used by Taptu

- Scenarios - how are people going to use the mobile service, what's it for?

- Task flows - map out steps and decisions in a flow diagram, try and think of the key "nouns" that describe the main functions of the app e.g. for email "account, messages, contact"

- Prototyping - use paper, mockups

- Usability testing - get users to perform tasks using the demo, see where they  "struggle" and try and improve it

Bryan Rieger - Future Platforms Creative director www.futureplatforms.com

Future Platforms are a mobile design company behind cool stuff like Locomatrix.  Great presentation that went into a lot of detail on mobile design tips and really challenged the audience a bit. 

- implementing designs on mobile can be hard due to memory issues etc

- try and simplify and hone design as much as possible (system fonts, flat colour) - break it down to the bare bones!

- composite images are a good way of keeping down the size of the app

- developers and designers need to work more closely together

Marek Pawlowski - MEX www.pmn.co.uk/mex/

- there's a user experience conference going on looks pretty good 

- also a competition for cool mobile designs http://www.mobileuserexperience.com

Alex Craxton - Mobile Monday - Over the Air Mobile Developer Event

Alex did a rundown on the Over the Air mobile event that happened at the weekend.  Sounded pretty good.  Great video of one of the hacks built during the weekend by Future Platforms. 

Panel Session

Panel Panel was also pretty good with some interesting points cropping up:

- UI often involves a lot of management stuff (e.g. trying to convince your boss its important) - sometimes top management need to go "back to the floor" to get how important it is

- Cost of user-experience testing etc justified by looking at the cost of additional engineering time to re-do the site if there's problems - simple ROI!

- one of the most successful mobile services Pepperonity has a basic UI but between 2 and 8m users ... (good to hear people checking the mobile underground!)

- user experience goes beyond the app itself, retail experience, the tariffs people are on etc

- at Apple the chief designer reports into Steve Jobs

- Motorola RAZR is an example of what can go really wrong if you cock-up user-experience design (Moto sold loads of RAZR phones which looked great but were terrible to use, putting off everyone from ever getting another Motorola phone)

Final Demo - Phone Fight!

A great demo of a mobile sword game built by the lastminute.com team, using bluetooth built at the OTA event.   This won awards for Best Hardware hack, Best design / user experience prototype and (best of all) the Fun Award.   Look out on their blog for photos and pictures. 

So all in all a great Mobile Monday - many thanks to the organizers.  If anyone has any video or pictures of the event send us an email or leave a comment and we'll incorporate them into the post. 

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