Mobile design event - loads of great insights into mobile UI, development and design

Here are some notes to what has become my favorite mobile event - Mobile Design. 

The event was hosted by Seren a user-experience firm who work for Vodafone, Orange and lots of other people in the mobile world.  They have a great office and did a great job supplying a lot of beers, drinks and even some snacks so big up to them. 

Here's a few notes - Tom Hume has also covered it.

Ned Richards - Intel

Ned talked about some work he did on the BBC iplayer mobile site whilst he was at the mobile agency Fjord.  A great talk - nicely illustrated by slides showing some high fidelity screenshots of the BBC mobile iplayer.  

- mid-2000 everyone thought mobile TV would take over the world but we ended up with the Lobster phone!

- BBC decided to reboot this - enablers in place (3G, HSDPA, UI improvements)

- BBC let them choose what devices to support so could build something really cool rather go for a lowest common denominator approach.  However, I tried http://bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer on a N95 8GB and an Android G1 and it didn't work on either.  As Nick hinted BBC might be restricting this service a little bit too much...

- average mobile TV length is 15 mins (so need to have a last played feature, restart session feature)

- modular construction - a fall-back for every feature that can be swapped in if a particular device doesn't support it

- did lots of iterations, user-testing and research

- "SURPRISE AND DELIGHT FEATURES'' (i love this phrase) - things that you can do now with mobile, but no-one really does e.g. SMS to friend, save to calendar

Tom Hume - Future Platforms

Whilst apologised for not having time to create beautiful "web 2.0'' slides he did impart a lot of useful information about how Future Platforms manages projects and work-flow - specifically the interface between developers and designers.  Lots of great nuggets here, a lot of what Tom said really made sense and I made quite a few notes:

- everyone says they are "agile" and "user-centered" but that's a bit meaningless !

- have seen terrifying results from getting developers to do designs "database-driven design"

- have seen measureable difference in performance when move people working on same project to work close together in the office

- role of the "SCRUM master" project manager can include buying toilet roll - anything to make sure team don't have to worry about things like that and can focus on the project

- Future Platforms have defined roles (developer, designer, QA, biz dev) but also mix things up a bit

- QA seen as a menial job but really important, hard to find good people to do it

- "UI Polishing" (this really made a lot of sense to me and perhaps the key point I took from the night in terms of project management) - lots of little things build up during a project, not priority at the time but can make a massive difference when implmeented, best way of doing this is to block out time at the end and have the developer and designer sit down together and implement them - sending stuff over email etc doesn't really work that well

- QA should be used as "pre-user testing" - helps to flesh out problems early

- importance of having a "facilitator'' to manage inputs from different people but ultimately make the decisions

- importance of having planning days to really think though a project before starting

- Google docs make a MASSIVE difference vs excel etc - no problems with version control etc etc

- Skype for IM rocks - can setup chatrooms, customer channels (agree to be in there 15 mins a week to answer questions)

- use Index cards on wall for project management - instant visual input, put bug counts on wall, way to let things drip in, ambient

- documentation is fine, specification is not ...

- lots of different ways to capture information - what about a video of someone talking about what they want?

- mobile particularly hard to theorize, specify - need to see it on the screen in your hand 

UsTwo

This was the final presentation and also really killer - Ustwo is a graphical design studio. @MattPolls and
@daaain were great speakers and really kept the energy levels up at the end of the evening.  They had loads of interesting thoughts and ideas - a lot of which really need the presentation to get across but here's a few of the key points:

- 4bn mobile users, 2/3 of the population, $1 trillion dollar industry (only tourism, defence, motors etc are this kind of scale)

- 1985 - first mobile phone

- 1992 - first digital phone

- 1996 - first smartphone (nokia 9000)

- 2000 - first camera phone (Sharp GSH 04)

- mobile technology has changed a lot over the last 20 years, UI has not changed that much, e.g. nokia still dominated by grid UI layout etc

- mobile UI should be more graphical, less hierarchical

- ambient interface, e.g. weather widget, cloudy screensaver to show poor signal, change background with seasons or time of day, liquid to show battery life

- Modularity, layout free, not staticis icons, dynamnic, syncronised

- need to create a market for UI a bit like the appstore, allow people to download stuff and customize

As i say you really need to see the presentation - the ustwo guys had some amazing ideas for mobile UI that made the iphone look pretty tame and boring by comparison.  A great way to end the event.

That's it - thanks to @bryanrieger and @priyascape for hosting and to Seren for sponsoring. 

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