Some thoughts / takeaways from Future of Mobile

14/11/2007 by nicola.

Different opinions on designing and developing for devices - at the moment, for developers / designers it is very fragmented - lots of different devices with different browsers, from usability point, someone from Sony Ericsson saying fragmentation is great, your mobile is your personal device, so better related to what you want - but this is again completely opposite to developers trying to get applications working on all types of devices and browsers. So standards are important and now from W3C, dev.mobi and others, some concrete results.
Andrea Trasatti stressed the need for testing on devices as well as emulators.
Some key design requirements:
Consistent navigation mechanisms
No pop-ups
Do not change current window without informing users
Keep number of externally linked resources to a minimum
Design for mobile content – speed – users don’t have a lot of time
clutter free – remove obstacles, its about content, not the page
fresh – show the latest content, sexy, simple can look good
Don’t design to lowest common denominator,
remove tables,
Use JavaScript but be aware that JavaScript kills battery life. Chaals, presenting from Opera made the very important point along the lines of - a phone’s key use is to make calls, to talk and listen to people and if your battery dies because you are using an interactive, dynamic web page, how are you going to communicate for the rest of the day.

Devices too different – design to the advantages of the devices. This, like lowest common denominator is not straightforward, it makes sense to design to lowest common denominator when the world’s mobile using population has a wide variety of devices and smartphones are still at the very top end of user population. Lots of discussion around the good, bad (not much on ugly, most people seem to like the look of it :-)of the iPhone. which according to Brian Fling is the smartphone for the masses. Personally, I don’t agree that there is a phone for the masses, nor will there ever be a need for one.

Core properties:
Screen size – width & height in pixel
Markup – xhtml basic 1.0, xhtml-mp
Image formats – png, peg, gif
Stylesheets – CSS1.0, WCSS 1.0, CSS 2.1

You can test mobile web and apps, using the following
W3C Mobile OK Tests
W3C Mobile Web Best Practices checker (beta) what to test, outcome and advice
T.A.W
Ready.mobi

Context - lots of discussion throughout day on this – don’t think there is a standard approach, personal preferences the way forward. But people move around from device to device and their data needs to be accessible or move around with them. Context is not just about your GPS location finding out what is available where you are, its about what you want to be able to do or what you are looking for.

Open source is good, but if different organisations all going open source, doesn’t achieve consistent information in one source area. Again need for standards is important current issue. On open source though - great presentation from Dave, Google about Android and he managed to develop something using the Android SDK in 7 minutes and 58 seconds using Eclipse, making it look incredibly easy.More info on code.google Android is
An open source mobile phone platform that encompasses every layer of the phone stack Fully open freely available, features Linux 2.6 kernel and drivers, Java language and framework apps
Multiple processes, enable task switching – multiple apps while e.g. in a call can use other apps, applications don’t lose state. Powerful, framework in Java, software designed to work in diff hardware – 12 key, QWERTY, touch screen, accelerometer. Rich media, graphics. Modular, component design, open architecture – use gmail, mmms, flickr at same time. All apps, swapped out and customised, possible to support JVM.

Some useful links:
Mobile Monday
Mobile Ajax at W3C
Opera Labs
Betavine
New mobile stuff at W3C
Soonr

So in summary, my takeaways are - standards, I know how to code, I know I need to test it on emulators and devices and I know that I can get lots of assistance and reference from .mobi and others. I need to consider design of content but before any of these, need to think about the context of the users I am designing for. There is exciting new stuff in development - Web APIs –Drag/drop XHR, ECMAScript4 (next generation of JavaScript), SVG , Video, Widgets, Device APIs – keep users secure, users will want to use their phones to pay for stuff (didn’t hear any mention of RFID today but users are also going to want to start pointing their phones at stuff too - don’t want their connections of any kind intercepted).

Simple but attractive design, doesn’t have to be limited to colour, small icons, rich media is becoming more widely used e.g. Flashlite, and the mobile web experience can be more exciting and personal e.g mobile Ajax, but don’t forget the hardware (think Nokia and N95 - bringing out a device with amazing video capability but initially not the battery to support it).

What does this mean for mlearning - context, good design, interesting content, increased capability of applications, multi -functions and increasing mobile web use - this is an exciting time for mobile learning experimenting with both web and multimedia. Context, location, environment will influence learning objectives as well as the design. Will there be mobile PLEs where users can build their learning environment and network (think mobile social networking - currently a hot topic, an example is Nokia’s Mosh

My other takeaway is that I need more than ever to start really experimenting with mobile xhtml, mobile / wireless CSS and if possible mobie Ajax at same time in order to understand better of the conference discussion where I wasn’t fully getting the rationale behind people’s comments. Plan = Go away, experiment, share and hopefully collaborate if others interested. and get some of this done before the end of 2007 !

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