Over the years, the reaction to my job title, “mobile interaction designer,” has migrated from blank stares to significant interest in this suddenly mainstream technology. Still, only about half the time do people have any idea what that title means. And if they do, they almost always assume my job is to design 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 mo- bile changed? This is a list of the types of things we looked at to find and validate these patterns:
- Mobile smartphones
- Mobile feature phones
- Mobile network access points (aircards)
- Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) • Tablets • eReaders
- Media players
- Image viewers and digital picture frames
- Portable game systems
- Remote controls
- Handheld navigation devices (see Figure P-5)
- Portable scanners
- Cameras and other capture devices
- Printers, scanners, copiers, and mopiers (multifunction devices or MFDs) • Kiosks
- Wearable computers
- Telematics, and vehicle-mounted devices
- Industrial automation
- Portable surveying, measuring, and metering equipment
The preceding list is not exhaustive. And although the items in the list share many charac- teristics, many are not particularly mobile. Kiosks are, by definition, bolted to the ground, for example. And no one much thinks of a camera as being similar to a phone.
So our 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 else- where. The ubiquity of mobile devices 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.
We didn’t come up with this answer out of the blue or just trust our instincts. Instead, years of work, discussion, writing, and arguing led to some principles of “what is mobile.”
We like to think of the evolution of mobile telephony as having occurred in four eras:
- Voice
- Paging and Text
- Pervasive network connectivity
- General computing devices
Yes, this leaves out a lot of interesting devices that are on the longer list shown earlier. The Game Boy and GPS receivers predate by several years what most of us would call mobile phones. But mobile telephony is what changed the world and ushered in all this, so it’s a good anchor point.
If you consider a current mobile phone as being a “fourth-era” device, you find that it has the following characteristics:
Small - It’s small enough to carry with you all the time, preferably in a pocket (see Figure P-1).
Portable - Battery powered and otherwise independent of the world, so it doesn't have to be plugged in or attended to regularly.
Connected - Wirelessly. Not attached to the wall or connected only when the user makes special effort. Whenever possible, connected in multiple ways, to both voice and data networks.
Interactive - Inherently. Unlike a watch, or even most MP3 players, which are limited to display, playback and a small subset of interactions, more undirected actions can be taken, such as text entry and keyword search.
Contextually-aware - The device (or services it is attached to) uses it's ability to understand the network to which it is attached, and it's other sensors to help the user get things done, and pre-emptively gather information.
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, I'll even refer to these devices directly in the patterns.
The patterns are guidelines for implementing interaction design on these devices. So they talk about page-level components like scrollbars, display components like pop-ups, widgets like buttons, and input methods like keyboards.
But they also talk about things like the labels and lights for hardware keyboards. You might ask yourself why I do this? You can't influence it, after all. But you can. You can fail to implement correctly, and cause keyboard entry to fail. You can change scrollbar behavior, if there's a special case for your application. Increasingly, as HTML5 technologies roll out, mobile websites can take advantage of interesting interactive features.
And you might even be working on a device operating system. More likely, the GUI layer on top of an existing OS, but I have on multiple occasions. There are many, many devices, and new classes still emerging. Overlays have migrated down to the point that end users may change the basic behavior of their handset. You may have to work in this space sooner than you think.
If not, then you still need to understand why certain OS level behaviors are standard, or should not be, so you can make informed decisions about your design.
Next: What is a Pattern?
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