Rounding up on my three part series on design, in this post I look specifically at design in the ‘mobile arena’.

Bjarne Stroustrup , the originator of C++ said, “I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.”

Like the old times when there were monopoly on landline phones and we had only few choices available through carriers, the current state of design in mobile devices is dismal. The services are pathetic, and there is little incentive to improve because the customers are normally shackled with the two year contracts. But in this new Mobile 2.0 era, all of this is bound to change.

Here is a concept design for Google phone. When you are carrying the full internet in your pocket, it better be a delight to handle it. It is a much bigger challenge to get the usability right on the smaller devices with tiny screens. Yankee Group predicts that ‘a culture clash of epic proportions is shaping the boundaries and business models of the Anywhere Internet’. Identifying the correct needs of the customer, coming up with brand new business ideas and thinking will just be parts of the big puzzle. Even after you have a solid foundation of fulfilling a genuine customer need and a ‘reasonable’ business model, the design of the mobile device and its user-interface will decide who wins or loses. The same holds for services - it will not be enough to have something put together, but to come up with truly innovative approaches that make it easier for the customer to make his/her choices. With ubiquitous connectivity and services for anything and everything, the user should be able to intuitively understand, handle, navigate and productively use his/her mobile device/service.

Most of the players understand the importance of this and are racing to come up with all sorts of solutions. For instance, Samsung is relying on optical sensors to provide joystick control and ‘Smart Lighting’ for the user. Motorola is giving a big push to Personalization, so that devices actually learn and adapt according to the individual’s usage patterns. It sees three key models to enhance user experiences with mobile and fixed communications devices: user interaction, content and service personalization. DoCoMo is betting on an ‘All-in-One’ gizmo. In a shrinking global playground, where sales in Asia will rise faster than in America or Europe, cultural issues and milieu come to the fore. One needs to understand the global user. As Motorola’s Padmashree Warrior has pointed out, to many across the globe, the mobile phone will be the very first computer they will come in contact with. This means, that the need to pause, study, think, feel and then design is more crucial than ever before. And those who do, will win handsomely.

In a previous post, I said we need things to be simple. Let me elaborate.We need to get past the usual rhetoric. “Simplicity at any cost” is not the answer. Likewise, do not get carried away by just the headline “Simplicity is highly overrated” . It is important to separate the wheat from chaff. It is a fact that the majority of websites have bad design. It is true that many things out there are so poorly conceived, that not only are they useless, but they even lead to severe reactions. In a mad rush to beat the competition, anything ships, even with feature-bloat. To make things worse, human-stupidity adds another dimension to this discussion.

As technology progresses, we definitely get more done. The information sources proliferate, calling for better handling. This is where the design can be a boon or a bane. Let’s face it, our gadgets are going to have more and more features crammed into them. Doing more naturally increases the complexity that goes into a product. But does it have to be dumped on the end-user? Don Norman, the Guru of Workable Technology has put it aptly: “Beauty and brains, pleasure and usability — they should go hand in hand.”

As we move forward, it is imperative to learn from the mistakes of bad designs. Tom Kelley of IDEO has said, “Don’t let your cloud of features blur the simplest, common use of your product.” The ’simplest, common use of your product’ could vary by market segment. Learn to separate the real need from perceived need. That could mean that one size does not fit all. Adopt a User Centered Design. To come up with a successful product, you have to get the whole ecosystem right. When only 13% of Americans believe technology products in general are easy to use, it is a direct reflection of the failure to be simple.

Further Reading:

A dated but relevant article on Digital-Web
Business Innovation Insider
Another slightly old post on the same topic
An interesting site with lots of resources
A post on Innovation Blog

In a previous post, I talked about giving simplicity the focus. There are, of course a number of references elsewhere on this topic. John Seely Brown has done a lot of work on this. In his book Bringing Design to Software, he eloquently says, “Context and content work together efficiently as an ensemble, sharing the burden of communication. If the relationship between the two is honored, their interaction can make potentially complex practices of communication, interpretation, and response much easier for designers and users alike. This relationship is the essence of keeping things simple.”

And here, both Sergey and Schmidt of Google talk about the need to emphasize on simplicity.

I have been looking at the predictions made by all the pundits out there about what the 2007 crystal ball foretells. All the predictions can be summarized in one word: “more”. “More” of everything: features, technologies, widgets, buzzwords, alphabet-soups and of course, complexity.

We live an age of fragmented attention. We increasingly multitask. Too many time-slices that end us up in a zombie-state (or, what Thomas Friedman calls “continuous partial attention“). Take a look at a typical webpage. There’s just too much information and there are too many distractions. If it is a page you visit regularly, you unconsciously learn to filter it out. Some day, when you ‘wake up’ and take a hard look at the same page, you are confounded by the amount of weeds it always carried. Each time you visited that page in the past, your brain was working hard putting those blinders in your eyes so that you managed to ignore the junk. And, when you visit a completely new webpage, you are overwhelmed to jimjams. Sadly, all the buzz ahead is about making things more quicker, responsive, faster transitions, video, more information, … you get the drift.

Shouldn’t we design what the consumer actually needs? Is there a way to stop feature bloat? iPod comes to mind. Isn’t it time to let simple take over again? I join the small, but rising clamor things simple. With the new mobile devices (eek, on the those tiny screens), you will be always connected, searching, surfing, watching and recording video, conferencing, gazing at advertisements, navigating, listening to music, checking stocks, ordering groceries, monitoring your health, … ending up doing lesser and lesser with more and more.

Is there a lesson to be learned from the design of Apple iPod and iPhone?

Further Reading:

Marissa Mayer expounds on: The beauty of simplicity
Extreme Programming is a fan of simplicity
David Kelley’s podcast on being simple and brilliant at IDEO
Check out what Paula Scher has to say about simplicity