[ Transcript Available ]

Mobile is the “hot topic” these days. It’s increasingly at the front of designers’ minds. In a world where the power and capabilities of the device in your pocket are so great, the possibilities become somewhat astounding. The mobile landscape is changing so rapidly that it makes developing a formal strategy to “figure mobile out” all but impossible.

Luke Wroblewski is at the forefront of the mobile design movement. He suggests that it’s better to put something, anything, out there and see how it fares. Excessive planning in the mobile space leads to missing opportunity after opportunity. Taking advantage of the market as it is today and the capabilities of these devices can lead to the refinement and evolution of your product.

Luke will be conducting a full-day workshop full of his thoughts on mobile, including why you should design for mobile first, at the User Interface 16 Conference, November 7-9 in Boston. Learn more about Luke’s and the other 7 full-day workshops at UIConf.com.

Here’s an excerpt from the podcast.

“…today, [mobile] devices have a lot of constraints based on the ergonomics. They’ve got a small screen. In many situations, you’re using them in environments where there’s other stuff going on. You’re not hunkered down at a desk for an extended period of time.

You may be at home on the couch watching TV, or you may be in a line somewhere, or passing some time in, hopefully, not the car. So there’s these constraints. Low bandwidth is another constraint. And when you use the devices, you familiarize yourself with what those constraints are.

But there’s also a lot of opportunities in terms of capabilities. And if you use lots of apps, you can see, how are they using the accelerometer? What have they done with front and rear-facing cameras? How are they using location in order to deliver information? How are they using the video port, the camera, the audio input? All those things can open up new ideas about how to take advantage of those capabilities in your service.

This is a device that you can use pretty much anywhere and everywhere. You have it with you all the time. Coverage of networks is way better than it’s been. And so, through the fact that you have it with you everywhere and anywhere and you can pull it out and access a network and access assets, all these new use cases emerge that you didn’t have before…”

Tune in to the podcast to hear Luke answer these questions:

What is the alternative to sitting and planning your mobile strategy?
Where should teams start to familiarize themselves with mobile?
Is there an advantage to playing with as many apps as you can to learn about the interaction design?
What are some things that make good mobile design stand out?
What is the benefit of desktop operating systems emulating features on touch-based devices?
How is multi-platform emergence affecting approaches to design?

Do you design for mobile? Share your thoughts with us in our comments section.

Recorded: September, 2011
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Full Transcript.

Jared Spool: Welcome, everyone, to an episode of the “SpoolCast”. Today I have the amazingly awesome Luke Wroblewski, who is going to be speaking at UI16, our User Interface Conference.

It’s coming up this November. He’s going to be giving a full-day workshop on designing for mobile, a really hot topic. And he is the guy I know that knows the most about mobile, and I’m very happy he’s here today.

Hello, Luke.

Luke Wroblewski: Hello, Jared. Thank you for having me.

Jared: Thanks for being here. So let’s just get into this. I’ve got all these clients now, who are pushing hard on their mobile, and they’re really trying to get there, but it’s really hard to figure out what to do right.

There are some crazy things that people have been trying to do. What are some crazy things that you have seen organizations do with their mobile implementations, particularly organizations that should have known better?

Luke: If they’re doing small, crazy things, at least doing something, I think that’s OK. The biggest issue I’ve seen is people running around and making PowerPoint deck after PowerPoint deck, trying to figure out their mobile strategy.

Jared: I saw that! I saw a guy on the plane. I’m sitting in the aisle, and then there’s someone in the middle, and this guy’s in the window, and he is editing up a PowerPoint deck of a mobile app.

And then, every 20 minutes, taking his laptop and passing it to the woman in the window behind him. [laughs] And then they would have some conversation, and then he would come back and he’d make more changes to it.

Luke: Wow. So there you go. And real-time, on the plane, even.

Jared: On the plane. [laughs]

Luke: It’s gotten to the point that I make this joke when I go and talk, especially at corporations. I say, “The worst thing you could be doing is just sitting around making PowerPoint.”

And pretty much inevitably, I always get this nervous laughter and someone coming up to me after the meeting: “You just nailed what’s going on over here! How did you know?”

[laughter]

Luke: I know because it’s pretty much what everybody’s doing.

Jared: Wow. And so what’s so nutty about that? On the surface, it sounds like a great prototyping tool.

Luke: [laughs] Well for building an app within it, sure. But when you spend all your time trying to imagine the future of mobile and planning accordingly and not taking a move until you’ve got everything nailed, then you’re just missing opportunity after opportunity right now.

And frankly, if you look at the space, I think it’s changing so dramatically day after day that any strategy, long-term, you put together is likely to get pretty disrupted.

Just looking at the past few weeks, right, we had HP getting out of WebOS, killing their tablets. We had Google buying Motorola. We had Steve Jobs resigning.

It was just bombshell after bombshell after bombshell in terms of what’s going on in mobile.

And so I think, when you get in this mode of all you’re doing is planning and things keep changing on you, you just keep planning, planning, planning; you never actually do anything.

So what you’re describing, where the guy’s actually designing an app, in whatever prototyping tool he needs, I think that’s great.

My concern is more along the lines of, “Hey, we’re planning out this large architecture. Hey, we need this long-term road map.” While I’m not completely ragging on planning, I think it’s very, very possible for organizations, especially bigger organizations, to just get stuck in that phase and never get out of it.

Jared: Yeah. So the alternative is what, then?

Luke: The alternative is just to put something out there and see what happens. If you actually look at the big companies that are currently doing well in mobile, that’s what they did.

So I keep hearing stories of a small, rogue, or interested team just went out and made an app or a mobile website, and all of a sudden it started taking off, and now that has gained a lot of momentum in the company and they’re taking off from it.

So one of the, perhaps, biggest examples is eBay. eBay was one of the first ones to pull together an iPhone app. And that was essentially a product manager, designer, and they worked with outside contractors just because they were really interested in it and wanted to make something there.

And you look now; eBay has 50 percent of mobile commerce in the US, and 70 percent of that is coming from their iPhone app.

At least as far as I hear the stories, I wasn’t there, obviously, this wasn’t some huge effort in terms of strategy and planning. It was rolling up your sleeves, making something and getting it out there.

I heard a similar story, for example, from Expedia. For a long time, I used Expedia, the travel site’s mobile app as an example of “Look at how focused their mobile experience is compared to their desktop Web experience.”

And I heard from someone after one of these talks that that app was created in their R and D Department by, again, two or three guys who were just really interested in, passionate about the space, and now they’re taking a lot of what they learned from there and applying it to the desktop and other places.

So this “just roll up your sleeves and do something,” I think the type of market it is and the type of environment it is lends itself a lot more to that kind of effort.

Jared: The folks over at Disney, there was an article recently published that had this visualization of all the Disney mobile apps, and there’s like 35 or 40 different Disney mobile apps.

Is there a point where just getting out there and doing it and having all these different parts of your organization just trying something gets in the way, and that maybe you should be sitting back and saying, “Well, do we have a strategy here?”

Luke: Yeah. Well, once you hit the point where you’ve actually done something. I guess I should clarify. I’m talking about people who are trying to, “figure mobile out.”

Jared: Right.

Luke: There’s organizations that have been in there from the beginning and have done a ton and they’ve learned a lot.

And once you’ve learned a lot and you understand, if they’ve got 35 apps, they probably know which ones are being used. They probably know where they’re getting new customers, where they’re making money, which platforms are working for them.

They have a crap-pile of information upon which they can start to build a strategy.

Jared: Right.

Luke: Whereas if you’ve never done anything, and all you’re doing is thinking about the re-architecture, which is going to take you two to three months, yo[…]

In our ongoing research into design excellence, we’ve come across an interesting correlation. The designers who are at the top of their game are mostly people who sketch.

Even though every designer we talked with had completely different backgrounds, training, and work habits, they all shared one common element—they sketched their work. In addition, they weren’t just sketching their designs. They were sketching their notes in meetings, their conversations with their co-workers, and their understanding of their design research. Sketching was a common medium for a variety of design-related activities.

In this issue of UIEtips, we look back at an article from a year ago. We take a tour of the different activities and the sketches we saw during our research. These sketches solve a multitude of important design problems and are key to becoming a design master. I’m sure you’ll find this as interesting as I do.

Read the article, Why We Sketch.

One of the most popular workshops at last year’s User Interface Conference was Good Design Faster. The workshop had a strong sketching component. Once again we’re offering this workshop, taught by one of its original creators, Brandon Schauer. On November 9 at the User Interface 16 Conference, Brandon will show you how to bring out innovative design ideas in record time. Explore Brandon’s workshop and the 7 other fantastic workshops at UICONF.com.

How do you use sketching in your work? Is this something new or something you’ve been doing for a while? We’d love to hear about your experiences below.