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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[…]

Asimov’s three laws of robotics, though currently fictional, are an excellent set of design principles:


A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.


One could easily imagine a similar set of laws being applied to field of user experience and interface design:


An interface may not injure a user or, through inaction, allow a user to come to harm.
An interface must obey any orders given to it by users, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
An interface must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.


Okay, that last one’s a bit of a stretch but you get the idea.

In his later works Asimov added the zeroth law that supersedes the initial three laws:

A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

I think that this can also apply to user experience and interface design.

Take the password anti-pattern (please!). On the level of an individual site, it could be considered a benefit to the current user, allowing them to quickly and easily hand over lots of information about their contacts. But taken on the wider level, it teaches people that it’s okay to hand over their email password to third-party sites. The net result of reinforcing that behaviour is definitely not good for the web as a whole.

I’m proposing a zeroth law of user experience that goes beyond the existing paradigm of user-centred design:

An interface may not harm the web, or, by inaction, allow the web to come to harm.

Tagged with
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  Start-up organizations provide an extraordinary example of chaos organized into manageable chunks. Perhaps more than anyone else, the individuals who comprise a start-up team are required to understand their team’s goals across a variety of disciplines — research, marketing, design, development, architecture, etc. — as well as their own responsibility to move the company’s overarching objective forward. Entrepreneurs must choose the direction, designers must think through the options, and developers must cull a functional product or service, all while giving feedback to and receiving it from their colleagues.
At least, that’s the idea. Most start-ups tend to take liberties somewhere along the way. Some start-ups begin with a novel business model, whereas others begin with a beautiful design. Still others try to test things out first with a functional prototype, even if it is a bit ugly. All of them — regardless of their initial approach — adapt their process over time in order to create a well-rounded product or service. And for this reason, most of today’s start-ups describe themselves as “agile.”
Agile start-ups, as the name implies, should be capable of changing their design, development and/or business objectives on a dime. This is much easier said than done — especially for today’s user experience designers. The user experience (UX) designers who work at agile start-ups are required to do two things exceptionally well: (1) grasp the intent of the product or service being developed, and (2) effectively communicate those good intentions to end users in a language they’ll understand. Neither of these is as straightforward as it might sound.
Ideally, designers will jumpstart their design process by carefully selecting well-reasoned entrepreneurs to work with; but what happens when the designer is altogether alien to the community he is designing for? The breakneck speed of agile start-ups makes it incredibly difficult for designers to craft appropriate messages to their audience at large. Only by understanding the processes and opinions that dominate start-ups can designers begin to reach out and make a difference for the end users of their product or service.
User-Centered Design, Sans UserDesigning with a clear idea of who the users are has never been simple. Most designers who have experience with the trial by fire known as a “lean start-up” will almost vehemently agree: because there are more than a few fires to fight, adopting a big-d Design process at start-up organizations is, simply put, exceedingly difficult. Invariably, this means that most start-up organizations devolve to the point that salability reigns supreme, or form trumps function. But whereas flexible, agile environments are very good for getting those things done, good design takes time, which makes the design process of start-ups almost universally hamstrung.
Keep the levels of UX in mind. (Image: Jon and Barb)
In short, agile, user-centered design tends to ignore the aesthetic, intangible, ambient qualities that good experiences are all about. As a consequence, budding artistic directors, brand ninjas and interaction designers have been apt to worry. Without the ability to intimately understand the audience for whom they’re designing, these team members can’t do their jobs. The logical question becomes, how can they? How can designers effectively communicate with an audience they’ve yet to meet?
The textbook definition(s) of UX design yields some clue. User-centered designers are encouraged to perform design research and then create personas as well as other deliverables. Certainly those would spotlight the factors that affect a company’s relationship with its users… right? Perhaps. While research is undoubtedly necessary to the design process, its deliverables are not.
I’ve written before that designers should bootstrap their own culture of UX within an organization. In this article, I’ll take that idea one step further: in order for a start-up to effectively communicate with its target audience, a spirit of empathy must pervade its every design decision — empathy cultivated by engaging in an ongoing, outward, user-centered conversation.
Where Has All The Empathy Gone?The task of any designer who works in a start-up environment requires empathy. The designer, perhaps more than any other team member, must empathize with stakeholders (to understand the project’s business objectives), developers (to understand its technical requirements) and, of course, users (to understand the nature of the problem they’re solving), all at once. Designing with consideration for all three parties effectively frames their strife.
Valuable though it may be, however, most start-up environments discourage empathy. Consider the number of times you’ve heard something like, “We’re targeting wealthy single males, ages 45 to 55,” or “We’re just like Amazon, but for baby boomers.” Well, that’s just great. A product description like that might initially help a team grok (a word that, ironically, means “understand by empathy”) an idea, but as far as rhetoric goes, merely saying that you know what segment you’re targeting isn’t enough.
Every e-commerce company sells products. Newcomers to the space can, and often do, learn a lot by studying the desire paths paved by industry notables (indeed, entire books are written on the subject). But let’s be clear: “I want to be Amazon” doesn’t imbue the designer with empathy. Creating something that looks and feels like Amazon will, of course, look and feel like Amazon. If that website is then marketed to a wholly different crowd, then the resulting outfit will be disingenuous — the polar opposite of empathetic.
In order to create something real, unique, of lasting value and with a look and feel of its own, members of start-up teams must vacate their cubicles.
One… Erm, Three ProcessesAdding to this perceived resistance are the various processes that drive start-up organizations at any given time. A recent blog post by Whitney Hess contrasts three specific types. It’s worth noting that all of the approaches detailed below show the exact same verbs in the exact same sequence. What’s different in each is the primary action that drives change along the way.
To cite Hess:

I see a lot of products developed using the Reactive Procedure:
I’m scratching my itch.Should I keep scratching this itch?I’ll scratch this other itch.As a designer who frequently consults with agile start-ups, I concur with Whitney’s sentiments: the reactive approach (“build it and they will come”) is far and away the most common. There is, of course, a good reason for all that action: development drives change. Start-ups act in order to build an initial prototype. Prototypes, in turn, move the company — indeed, the user feedback loop — forward.
Unfortunately, the prototypes developed by most start-ups exhibit a keen lack of consideration. Who is the prototype targeted at? 40 to 50 somethings? There are certainly a lot of them. Will those 40 to 50 somethings be able to grok it? That is, will users be able to tell what it’s “all about” from the design? Because this kind of subjectivity is incredibly nebulous, prudent start-ups rely on experienced UX designers to help them uncover the answers. It’s no wonder that Whitney and I see this in our line of work.

As a user experience designer, consultant and member of the New York tech community, I instead advocate for using the Preactive Procedure:
Who’s itchy?That itch isn’t being scratched.This is how to scratch that itch.I believe that most UX designers would agree — dare I say, empathize — with Whitney’s prescribed preactive approach. Beginning with thinking — with research — is in a user-centered designer’s blood; it helps them understand their audience and voice their messages appropriately. Further still, “preactivity” appears to be the only real way for designers to gain empathy. But most start-up environments run counter to this approach. Acting and then thinking usually leaves little room for the voice of research. Has Whitney encountered a start-up that tries to reconcile the two?
As luck would have it, she has. Whitney recently worked with an entrepreneur who marches to a different beat:
Campbell McKellar, founder of Loosecubes, is the first person to make me realize that there’s something even better than the Preactive Procedure — the Proactive Procedure.

By acting sooner, you are actually achieving more. You are creating the future instead of just predicting and accommodating for it. You are inventing a new reality, based half in what people need, and half in what you want them to have. You can observe behavior sooner and course-correct. It is the most transformative of all three procedures for both the subject and the object.
An entrepreneur at heart, I want to agree here, too. The proactive process appears to be a viable alternative to the unenviable tension between designers and developers at start-ups. But just because a group is humming along with a decision-based proactive process doesn’t mean that the organization’s designer understands its users any better. By UX standards, this process almost seems to disenfranchise them: it moves “thinking” — and here, I presume, research — all the way to the back of the bus.
In sum, it’s easy to envision scenarios at a start-up in which a given development process proves more valuable, more productive, than its alternative. Should the team think, act or decide? It depends. Regardless, as designers join start-ups, they’re very likely to find that design is secondary to the process unless, of course, their organization follows a preactive process. But for most start-ups, that’s simply not the case.
In order for an organization to learn more about its users, the design-minded members must advocate to that ef[…]