Category: User experience

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Mobile communication in the developing world – a design challenge

Neil Clavin has written the latest contribution in the ongoing series of emerging markets articles that are on a weekly basis being published Vodafone Receiver’s magazine.
In his paper for receiver Clavin argues that for better design, we must first of all understand different user needs around the world. The prime design challenges he sees are: richer communication, social tools and reconfigurable interfaces.

“Current mobile interfaces and services are not designed for the developing regions of the world – many users have problems reading and writing, some services are not relevant and native languages not always supported. Many users complete only the basic functions of dialling a number or answering an incoming call.” […]

“The current mobile experience is designed for a literate section of the world who can expect interfaces in their native language. Another section of users have problems navigating text-based interfaces and need to reinforce links with the families they have left behind.

For successful mobile experience design we must provide alternative interfaces, social tools and better native language support. The mobile experience for developing regions will be rich with audio-visual communication, genuinely useful social networks and reconfigurable interfaces.

Designing for these user needs creates better experiences also for advanced countries. Simpler audio-visual interfaces will benefit children, elderly people and users with learning difficulties. Social networks will mature from hipster hangouts into tools for achieving meaningful and progressive goals. Touchscreen devices will become cheap enough for anyone to afford and the languages of cosmopolitan populations fully supported.”

Neil Clavin is a design manager for Vodafone Group User Experience. He worked as a user experience designer for BBC New Media & Technology and as a research assistant for Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London, before joining the Vodafone User Experience Concept Development Team based in Düsseldorf, Germany. There, he leads concept design for mobile communication, information and entertainment experiences.

Read here

vivek

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My article on Adobe DevNet: Designing for mobile devices using Fireworks CS4 beta

Designing for mobile devices using Fireworks CS4 beta

My another article published on Adobe Devnet “Designing for mobile devices using Fireworks CS4 beta”. This Article is on importance of designing for mobile devices and why its so much important to think on that 🙂

“The visual elements that comprise the user experience on mobile devices are themselves becoming more important as devices become more complex and users become more adept. I believe there is a great opportunity at this time to help shape the future of user interfaces on handheld devices and promote intuitive interaction as a standard. Making something beautiful, as well as functional, will result in an application that is useful and offers a more interesting and compelling experience for consumers.”

“Put simply: small is beautiful. When interface design effortlessly fulfils the purpose of an application while also enhancing its aesthetic, there is a greater chance that the end product will be successful. Users are naturally more drawn towards an application that they view as enjoyable and engaging.”

i2fly-designing for mobile devices

From Pre planning to final application even the smallest design elements is very important to place.

I use Fireworks CS4 beta almost exclusively on every project I create for mobile devices. It is my first choice because I find it to be much more user friendly in terms of creating graphics and exporting files to a wide variety of formats. Additionally, the integration between Fireworks CS4 beta and Adobe Flash is just fantastic. This article provides real-world considerations and tips for creating assets for your mobile development projects using Fireworks CS4 beta.

You can read this article in following below links

Designing for mobile devices using Fireworks CS4

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/articles/design_mobile_devices.html
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/devices
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/fireworks/

As usual love to know your feelings. Feel free to post your comments/suggestions/views anything. Curious to know about it 🙂 .

vivek

Conversation with Raphael Grignani of Nokia Design about Homegrown

Nokia homegrown

An Intresting interview with Raphael Grignani of Nokia Design about Homegrown project. Must read to know about new design thinking on sustainability.

Rachel Hinman, mobile design strategist at Adaptive Path, has conducted an interview with Raphael Grignani of Nokia Design about “Homegrown”, a long term research project looking at how Nokia can help people make more sustainable choices.

mobile_homegrown_nokia

“With Remade, Andrew Gartrell (Homegrown project lead and Remade father) pushed design beyond skin deep aesthetics. He considered covers, key mats, and displays but also engine, connectors, and other components. We discovered that a typical mobile phone contains around 44 of the 117 elements currently known to science. Andrew’s approach was to de-construct everything and rebuild it from scratch using recycled materials and sustainable technologies — from the inside out.

mobile_homegrown_energy_saving_concept

50% of a phone’s energy demand is backlighting.

mobile_homegrown_people

Energy saving graphics “concept”

Another aspect of Homegrown that is really interesting is the work we did around prototyping. Andrew designed in CAD over 100 versions of Remade and prototyped 36 — which could be considered obsessive — but it was through that constant consideration and iteration that we were able to arrive at something that was great.

mobile_homegrown_unplugged_charger

At present, phone chargers waste 300mW of standby power when left unplugged.

Prototyping allowed us to confront our designs — asking ourselves, “Is this the best we can do? What can we reduce? Have we found the essence? What can we make better or what can we make differently?” We questioned every bit of the concepts throughout the prototyping process. Now we can explain every bit of the design; we can rationalize every aspect of it.”

Read interview

Read press release “Nokia”

vivek

In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use

japan mobile life

An interesting short report via Wired that people in Japan feel that phone become too complex with the features they have it. Japan may be in a culture of spec sheets. Where consumers go to electronics stores to buy a cellphone, they frequently line up the specifications side by side to compare them before deciding which one to buy. Some of the famous Japanese mobile companies are NTT DoCoMo, KDDI,  SoftBank and they make 5 % of global mobile phone sales, and rest all of those sales are just domestic.

  • Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master.
  • “There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,'” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo.
  • Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.”
  • Japan has long been famous for its advanced cellphones with sci-fi features like location tracking, mobile credit card payment and live TV. These handsets have been the envy of consumers in the United States, where cell technology has trailed an estimated five years or more. But while many phones would do Captain Kirk proud, most of the features are hard to use or not used at all.
  • “Some people care about quality, but first and foremost it’s about the features,” says Nobi Hayashi, a journalist and author of Steve Jobs: The Greatest Creative Director. He estimates that the average person only uses 5 to 10 percent of the functions available on their handsets.

The most important thing for any mobile company whether it is a product or services, is to provide unique user experience to end users.”Cellphones are now a days becomes an integral part of life “People are always using them and holding them, even in the middle of a meal anytime anywhere”.

vivek

Nokia’s London design event: listen podcast from the UI design team

nokia london design event

Just found this podcast via core 77 of Nokia’s recent London design event which offering a curtainpeek at their design process, ethnographic wanderings, sustainability initiatives, and plans for the future. Nokia has over 300 designers worldwide, and ships over 1.2 million products everyday. So it’s really keen to know what their designers intake for their creative food 😀

Listen now(31min.) | iTunes

vivek

Nokia and Design, What mobile phone means to you!

nokia global phone design

Nokia Design Studio they calls “open studio.” Works really closer with local experts such as NGOs or even students, Nokia designers went into each city and set up a community based competition asking people to design their dream phone.  Results sometimes lead out some interesting concepts and sometime unusual.

“In the not so distant past, the end game of design for Nokia was the phone, Nokia’s head of design Alistair Curtis says. Now the phone is a springboard to all sorts of services, he says. Developing relevant services, he believes, means creating an open platform. Then consumers can eventually bolt on applications as needed. ”

check out this slide show for some concepts of phone model.

vivek

Unplug your mobile chargers: let’s save the world for tomorrow

unplug your mobile- lets save the world

It’s not a story or just an another post to read !! We all love our mobile devices and can’t live without it. But the simplest thing which we always forget to unplug our mobile chargers after fully charged!!!

Do you know

If 10% of the world’s mobile phone owners unplugged their phone chargers when fully charged, it would reduce energy consumption by an amount equivalent to that used by 60,000 European homes. So pull then plug and start saving energy.
Think again.

Let’s save our beautiful world for tomorrow.

Read more

vivek

Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?

Jan Chipchase

A cellphone shop in Accra, Ghana, which carries and repairs a variety of handsets.

A great article via The New York Times featuring Jan Chipchase and his work style to find about how people use their cell phones, where they keep it, understanding their behaviour in terms of usability, business and Psychology many more ways . . even a simple idea can make a product more innovative and solution providing as mobile phones are getting more personalized mere just not a functional device to talk. The premise of the work is simple – get to know your potential customers as well as possible before you make a product for them.

“This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what’s known as “human-centered design”, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers.”

Jan Chipchase at work

Chipchase talks to Accra street vendors about what an ideal phone.

Jan Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a “human-behavior researcher.” He’s also sometimes referred to as a “user anthropologist.” To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.

I really impressed with him, his thoughts to create innovation and more focussed for the people.

Read more

vivek

Mobile designers “Hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip”

hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip

A nice article on The New York Times, what mobile designers think behind the scene and workaround for “hoping to Make Phone Buyers Flip“. Forecasting what consumers will want next year, and into the future. Designing a Mobile phone is just not an easy task there are many things to see, evaluate and analyze around the people. Jotting down feelings about features  what users are looking for, share their emotions about mobile phone, understanding the psyche of consumers and why they pick one phone over another.

Even interesting designs do not necessarily spell success. The group is the first of its kind at Nokia, the world’s No. 1 seller of mobile phones, bringing together 14 designers and researchers from California and Helsinki, where the company is headquartered. Their charge is to tell Nokia’s top executives not only what consumers will want next year, but 3 to 15 years from now.

“We have the ability to clarify the needs of real people,” said Rhys Newman, who heads the team.

“Design used to be inconsequential: just make it pretty, make it sell,” said Mr. Newman, who, along with three members of his team, was interviewed at Nokia’s design center near a strip mall in downtown Calabasas, north of Los Angeles. Now, he said, “we have to think about human fundamentals.”

When asked if they felt pressure to design new phones more quickly in an increasingly competitive market, Mr. Jan Chipchase responded with a quizzical stare. “Why do you want to innovate faster?” he asked. “Are you innovating something gimmicky just to sell a product? Or is it saving the planet you are after?”

So what you think about your mobile phone, how you use it, Do share your emotions, feelings, and what you want in your phone? 🙂

vivek

Mobile Smells: NTT DoCoMo upcoming new Mobile Fragrance Communication Service

Mobile Fragrance Communication Service

You must be downloading a lot of things onto mobile phones these days, and now you can even download smells. 😀 isn’t interesting to you. This week, NTT Communications Corp. will test a mobile version of the Fragrance Communication service it offers to fixed-line customers.

Mobile users can download “fragrance playlists” from company NTT DoCoMo Inc. i-mode mobile Website. Via the phone’s infrared port, the fragrance data is sent to a special device that mixes various scents to get the odor the user selected. Users also get to watch and listen to audio/visual content associated with the smell.

NTT says it’s looking for applications that combine fragrances with ringtones, music, and horoscopes. The new mobile version offers the convenience of using mobile communication to download Fragrance Playlists, or files of recipes for specific fragrances together with visual (GIF animation) and audio (MIDI) content.

Now we can think about an application say a cooking one and receiver getting smell of what’s cooking hope to see such live experiments here. My mind is getting many ideas 😀 .

Read more

vivek

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“Nomophobia” Are you fear of being without mobile phones !

india mobile
Image source from Jcyrai

I found this very intresting while reading some blogs that Researchers have named the fear of being out of mobile phone contact called as ‘Nomophobia’.

No one want to loose loved ones and it’s a highly common fear that most of us possess. Everyone keeping in touch with friends or family using mobile devices and its something no one can forgot to keep anywhere and always carry.  Weather in job or personal we never swtich off our phones normally.

Stewart Fox-Mills, the head of telephony at the Post Office, UK commissioned the survey, noted that nomophobia affects many people. However, men (52 percent) are more likely to be mobile phone phobic as compared to women (48 percent).
Out of the 2,163 people who were questioned, more than 20 percent agreed that they never switched off their handsets, whereas 10 percent admitted that due to their job profile, they needed to be contactable all the time. While, over 55 percent people of the volunteers use their phone to be in contact with friends and family, 9 percent agreed that switching off the phone made them anxious.

I have to be honest and yes i am nomophobic 😉

Are you in the category of nomophobia?  😀

vivek

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Japan Mobile Internet Report: Carriers, Handsets, Content and Services

 japan keitai life

Just found this very intresting report which i was finding and looking since quite some time An indepth report on Japan Mobile Internet Report — Carriers, Handsets, Content and Services. A must check to see the reason behind huge popularity and stunning revenues generated by Japan’s mobile Internet ecosystem!. As the reasons behind the success and how these lessons apply to other markets are little understood outside of Japan.

Japan is arguably the world’s most advanced mobile market: 40 percent of mobile data revenues worldwide are generated here, three-quarters of the population use the mobile web, and 4-in-5 users are on 3G devices. More than $8 billion in revenues are generated from official mobile content and mobile commerce alone each year, in addition to data access and mobile advertising revenues.

These lessons from Japan can be applied to create success in other markets worldwide, and which are unique to the country and will not transfer elsewhere.

Some of the compelling service by  carriers, content providers and handset manufacturers are:

  • Mobile Search
  • Mobile Music
  • Mobile Social Networking and User-Generated Content
  • Mobile Payment and NFC Applications
  • Mobile TV
  • Location-Based Services
  • Mobile Advertising
  • Fixed-Mobile Convergence
  • Handset Catalogue

Download sample Pdf here

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vivek

Junior keitai, your child can be safe from strangers!!

[kml_flashembed movie=”http://www.youtube.com/v/cZMSSsrr12M” height=”270″ width=”350″ menu=”false” /]

Pretty old news but i still love this beautiful advertisement of Junior Keitai. Really sweet looking cute phones with great security features which can save a child’s life. 🙂

Equipped with ‘Movement Tracking System’, a device which allows parents to track the location of their children from their mobile phone or PC whenever a warning buzzer is sounded or when the child’s phone is switched off. This system also has automatic camera and phone functions, further allowing parents to confirm a child’s location through sound and images.

vivek