Software Everywhere — David Beers on Mobile Computing

[Response to Carnival of the Mobilists #66]

I like those guys Steve and Rafe over at AllAboutSymbian.com. The quality of the writing on their site is very high and, not surprisingly, Rafe does a great job with this week's Carnival of the Mobilists. There were a couple posts that I'd particularly like to comment on.

M-trends on personalization

I enjoyed reading Andrew Bergland's post about the mobile phone being the new "it" fashion accessory—one that itself can be accessorized in so many ways. The only way I like to personalize my phones is with software, and since I also write that software for a living I'm naturally inclined toward the view that software is the ultimate form of personalization. Andrew convinced me of what I already really knew, but didn't want to admit to myself: except for geeks and businesspeople, it's usually going to be the outside of the phone that gets most people excited, not what's on the inside. I do think the inside matters when it comes to them falling in love over the long term, though. In Don Norman's terms, it's the visceral ("cool!") and reflective ("what it says about me") emotional responses to a personal device that most often make you buy it. But after you begin to use it, it's often the behavioral ("I like using this") response that makes you loyal. It's software more than hardware that makes for brand loyalty in mobile devices today. Look how the Treo has persisted and grown with (distressingly) little change to the form thanks to good software, while the RAZR (notorious for it's lousy UI) flamed out spectacularly once the reflective and visceral attraction wore off.

Funny that the phone software that has elicited the most visceral response in recent memory (the iPhone interface) is also among the least personalizable. Apple seems to want to imprint their image on you, not the other way around, which is fine as long as that image continues to be one people find attractive. Apple should keep the price high to retain a sense of exclusivity about the iPhone, because I don't think its usability is going to be all that good on an everyday basis.

Smart Dreaming on "contextuality" in the mobile UI

Speaking of iPhone usability, the other post I found really interesting is from a new blog that I'll definitely be adding to my regular reading: Smart Dreaming. Malcolm Lithgow has some very thoughtful analysis of "contextuality" in UI design: the importance of reminding the user how the thing they are doing in the software relates to other relevant data. The example he uses of poor contextuality is the common practice (also found in the iPhone) of forcing you to edit an appointment in a modal dialog that blocks your view of the rest of your calendar. Most mobile phones today fail miserably in this respect and I agree with Malcolm that it's a big problem. Drilling down through nested menus that all look pretty much the same is another disorienting experience that covers up both where you've been and where you might be going (if you can figure out how to get there).

There's another kind of context mistake that most smartphone UIs make, as a vestige of their PC heritage. That's the assumption that the "application" must be the arbitor of context for the mobile user. For example, if you want to send a picture to someone by email you are expected to launch an email client and if you want to send it to your PC you should go find another application to help you do that. As I've talked about before, mobile users aren't as inclined to have extended application sessions on their devices as they are at their PC. They are usually more focused on performing one of a relatively small number of tasks and doing it quickly so they can get back to whatever else they were doing. This sometimes means that the best mobile usability is had with the interface that makes the task the context rather than the application. If you're looking at an image on the phone that you might want to send somewhere you should be able to directly act upon that impulse from that screen: "send by email," "send to PC." The context that determines what you should be able to do from that screen shouldn't be the application you are in, it should be the picture itself and the things people typically want to do with pictures.

Ok, the picture example isn't the best one, because a lot of phones don't do too bad a job there, but messaging is a good example of something that's messed up badly on the mobile. The relevant context for messaging is the person you want to send the message to or the content you want to send. Any time you're looking at a contact—not just when you're in the Contacts application, but in the "from" field of an email client or in a chat window, or the call log—you should be able to click on that person's name and pop up options of all the ways to contact them right there: phone, SMS, email, carrier pigeon, etc. Likewise, if you highlight some text in a document or browser window or select a filename in a file browser you should be able to click the physical email button that most smartphones have now and have it open a new email with the selected text in the body or the file already attached. The content creates the context that makes that button click mean "new email message with this content" instead of just "forget what I was just doing and launch my email client."

This kind of contextuality requires a lot of integration between the application and the system software, much more than you have on a PC. Applications need to be able to register at the system level objects that are usually considered to be application-specific, and do this in a way that other applications that use these objects know what actions can be performed against them. Palm OS made some small but important steps away from the traditional application model that have given it an advantage in usability over the years. In my mind, though, none of the mobile OS vendors has taken the idea of contextuality seriously enough to produce really functional mobile computing interfaces.