Over the years, the reaction to my job title "mobile interaction designer" has migrated from blank stares. Still only about half the time does anyone have any idea what I mean. And if they do, they almost always assume it's designing mobile phones, or apps for them.

Occasionally, someone asks if we also design games for the Nintendo DS, or make maps for GPS navigation, or do work for some other sort of device. Has the definition of mobile changed? This is a list of the types of things I looked at to find and validate these patterns:

I am sure a lot of others were left out. While these share many characteristics, many are not particularly mobile. Kiosks are by definition bolted to the ground, for example. And no one much thinks of a camera as similar to a phone.

So my first answer is that "mobile" is not a useful word, and that this book addresses a lot of these devices. Their design can be informed by the mobile patterns in this book and elsewhere. The ubiquity of mobiles also may mean that employing these as universal patterns is a good thing, as users may require less training when using interfaces to which they are accustomed. If you design cameras, or printers, you should be paying attention to the state of the art in mobile.

Really finding a definition

This next part might be a little boring, so if you are just interested in the patterns and not why they exist, just skip to the next section.

I like to think of the evolution of mobile telephony as being in four eras:

  1. Voice
  2. Paging and Text
  3. Pervasive network connectivity
  4. General computing devices

Yes, this leaves out a lot of interesting devices that are on the big list above. The Gameboy and GPS receivers pre-date what most of us would call mobile phones by several years. But mobile telephony is what changed the world, and ushered in all this, so it's a good anchor.

If you consider a current mobile phone as a generally "4th era" device what you find is they are:

With this many facets, it's easy to disregard any one, and still feel the device meets our needs. Strapping an iPad to a wall and calling it a kiosk simply removed the "portable" feature, so it's still a "mobile" device.

Consider the Wii, or X-Box Kinect instead. Though the display is not at all portable, they are at their core aware of user position, they change with the type of input being used, and the entire interface has been designed to support interaction via a game controller, or simply waving your arms at the screen. These meet the interactive criteria to be a "mobile" device.

Now take a Windows tablet PC. It has pen and touch input, can be quite small and portable, is networked, and has sensors. But I argue it is not mobile. It's not really connected, because it does so like a desktop, so you have to open dialogues and press buttons. It isn't usefully interactive, because you cannot use it on the go, but have to stop to use it. It's not contextually-aware, because the GPS, or camera, or accelerometers don't do much of anything by themselves.

What type of patterns we will cover

So, while this book does still focus on the classic answer, the mobile phone and especially the smartphone, similar interactions from kiosks to game stations to telematics, are also considered. In some cases, these may even be referred to in the pattern language.

When I started working in mobile full time, the word "app" was not rolling off the tongues of everyone, and the mobile web was something of an embarrassment. In 18 months, who knows what the world will bring?

So parts of this book will bore you. Web designers need to know some, but can implement very few of the patterns, though more all the time as HTML5 comes to fruition. App developers can implement more, depending on what sort of app, and what level of device integration they get. And on what platform. And there are a lot more device and OS designers than you think. I can think of around 20 eReaders alone. Touchscreen clocks, and interactive cars? There are a lot of people working on these systems, will be more tomorrow, and the lines will begin to blur soon over web, app, os. So we did not label what each pattern applies to. You will figure it out, and tomorrow it will all change.

These are patterns for interaction design on these devices. To that end, they expand to talk about buttons, accelerometers, cameras, lights and other hardware facets. But all within the context of on-screen interaction design. Or, the equivalent of "on-screen" for audio, annunciator lights, and haptics.

Likewise, these focus on behaviors that can be changed, so mostly address generalized interactive elements that can be used for applications and websites. Keyboard design, dialers and other parts of the interface that are only changeable by manufacturers or operators (or certain hacking shops) are included as well.

These are included mostly for understanding, so every designer working on their small part has an idea what the immutable components are for, and how they should work. But also because there are a lot of handsets being designed, there are a lot of operators and the growth should mean more and more room for these devices to be designed and configured in the future.

XXXXXX However, if you are used to very tactical books, about how to get the right reflection on your app icon, this might seem to miss the point. That's because it's not a book for today, but for yesterday and tomorrow.

What Operating Systems does it focus on?

I've tried to make this book OS agnostic. It covers

An important point is that a lot of the interaction associated with a mobile OS is actually about the GUI. Operators re-skin their featurephone offerings, manufacturers reskin smartphone OS's, and you can apply your own to some of these. This might be expected to expand in the future, at least for some systems

ALSO: Be sure to mention 1) OS means GUI. The modding community on Android, not to mention the ability to skin for operators, implies that very soon deeply embedded features may be under control of third-party applications. Etc.

And the OS for a web app is in many ways the Web, and the browser...

2) You can still mess this up. Some OS's allow you to override (or mis-apply) keyboard functions, scrollbars, annunciator rows and more. You need to know why these exist, and how to use them correctly in everyday application design.

Next: What is a Pattern?