| During Lotusphere 2011, Andy Schirmer on my team, did a presentation, AD504, Best Practices for Mobile User Experience Design. Jessica Peter, now on my mobile UX team, helped put it together. This presentation was a result of their work in 2010 on formulating a user experience strategy for mobile, much like we had done for the desktop, using One UI. Andy led a team of designers and user researchers to come up with background research on the mobile industry and trends (at the time), Lotus and IBM products, tools, toolkits, strategy, and being heavily influenced by the work of Jeff Pierce in IBM Research (Almaden). A cross-IBM Software Group also contributed to the discussion. In addition they formed these design principles along with an associated checklist. Part of what we were trying to do is to come up with a common understanding of user motivations and use cases for the mobile space, which for this purpose, is focused on smartphones rather than tablets or laptops, which could also be mobile. Here is my summary of Andy's talk - pretend that I'm live blogging it a month later! :) You might want to review my last post on the mobile strategy since these are intertwined. What are Design Principles? Design Principles, in general, help organize our thoughts around a certain topic. They provide guidance as we determine use cases and encourage design from the user's point of view. In addition, design principles can keep us focused on the most important aspects of achieving a particular design goal. These principles stay above the native vs. web vs. hybrid debates that often go along with a mobile discussion. How you apply these principles is a different topic altogether. There is a good article in the Design@IBM site that discusses more general design principles. |
The Mobile UX Design Principles
The team came up with many, many use cases and examples of how mobile usage is different and unique compared to a desktop experience. They boiled it down to these nine statements. I think they cover all the possibilities that we could come up with. At this point, I need to remind you that other good principles of UX design apply as well. For example, understanding your users, what their goals are for the app you are building, what are the primary task flows, what are the platform conventions, and validating the designs along the way. I'll just point out a couple of things about each of these principles, even though there was a lot more in the presentation.
1. Support the social and personal nature of mobile use. People use the phone to stay in touch with their networks - personal and business. Their phone is often their own; more and more companies are not subsidizing the smartphone purchase, so people expect you to respect their personal stuff, even when it is used for business. Mobile users will give up business use rather than hurt their personal use of the mobile device.
2. Facilitate quick attention and brief interaction. This one is key! The great thing about a device is the instant-on nature and easy access to information. Your app needs to take advantage of this. Optimize around the most important information and tasks for the person to do in a small window of time. People often look at their phones between meetings, waiting for a subway (or any queue), in those spare 5 minutes before you get on the plane, etc. Help mobile users make small decisions quickly—support triage techniques, for example, easily deleting or foldering email messages.
3. Accommodate interruption and changing context. For example, you are commenting on something or responding to a tweet and the phone rings. Your app needs to put the user back in the place they were before the call.
4. Provide for carrying out actions across multiple devices. Sometimes you might want to start a task on the mobile device but finish it on a bigger screen. For example, you might upload a photo to your blog, but save all the commentary for later when you can get to a real keyboard. I often mark an interesting tweet as a favorite, so I can find it again when I have more reading real estate.
5. Emphasize primary tasks and reduce user interface. Another one of the pillars, I'd say. While it matters on the desktop, it really matters on a smaller device, when #1-4 above are factors. Reduce the functionality offered, get to the point, and get out! :) This principle means you must understand what the user goals are when they are using your app. And it better be clear what to do because that is the expectation; when was the last time you used "Help" in a mobile app? This one will deserve it's own blog post when we are ready to share details of the apps we're doing.
6. Accommodate device input weaknesses and strengths. You're not going to right a huge blog post like this one on a smartphone, but you might do something like upload a photo you've taken. Be smart about defaults in forms and pre-filling information; provide the appropriate controls for input via a touch interface. Take advantage of the unique inputs like voice and camera recording.
7. Exploit unique mobile device hardware capabilities. This one has to do with using, as appropriate, the things that the device is good at - location, camera, acceleration, orientation. For example, is there a way to use the location to provide meaningful content to the person on the device?
8. Be mindful of mobile environment and device constraints. Do you need to handle occasional or variable connectedness? How does your app affect battery life? How big is it? Are you relying on a feature that might not be in all operating systems? All of these factors can and will have an effect on the usage and perception of the app.
9. Follow platform and device guidelines appropriately. Another one that directly effects us. People choose their phones for a reason - they like the user experience, features, apps of that device. Therefore, expectations are that the apps on the device follow the conventions of the platform. This is what makes it challenging to build native apps across different device platforms. Mobile web apps are a different story; I think you can get away with a single design point. That is the approach IBM has taken with iNotes and Connections mobile, for example. In any case, it is good practice to strive for simplicity (clarity, some say) and predictability.
Remember, you are only a click away from "Uninstall", so following these principles will help make your users happy and your app successful.
Chris Reckling
IBM Lotus Mobile UX
Chris Reckling | 3 March 2011 09:15:00 AM ET | | Comments (0)
