I often check Twitter on my iPhone. But instead of using one of the numerous Twitter clients from the app store, I’ll just load up mobile Twitter in Safari. Why don’t I use an app?

There are problems in every option available right now. In this post I’m going to comment on three iPhone Twitter experiences: mobile Twitter (m.twitter.com), and two popular apps, Tweetsville and Twitterrific.

Mobile Twitter (m.twitter.com)

Mobile Twitter, located at m.twitter.com, is the official mobile version of Twitter.com. It works fairly well as a mobile website, but it’s not iPhone optimized. The design doesn’t follow the iPhone human interface guidelines published by Apple. A few changes would improve things for iPhone users:

1. Tappable areas should be bigger. The “Older” and “Newer” links should be at least 44 x 44 (recommended by Apple).
2. The text entry box should be bigger. Falls into the above suggestion, but I think it’s so important it deserves its own mention. A bigger entry box would benefit all mobile users (the box should be a certain percentage of the screen). Right now it looks ridiculously small on iPhone, and it’s awkward to type an update into. Editing what you’ve written is a frustrating experience. This experience is so poor that I find I use m.twitter.com to read updates, but to actually send an update to Twitter, I use SMS.
3. It’d be nice to have a character counter. It’s essential, really: Twitter users need to know how much of their 140-character budget they’ve used and how much they’ve got left.

Third-party Twitter applications for iPhone: Twitterrific and Tweetsville

I’m going to compare Tweetsville and Twitterrific, which isn’t really fair, as I’m comparing the free edition of Twitterrific with a premium app, Tweetsville. But as far as I know, the user experience is the same; except the premium version doesn’t have ads, and it has the option to toggle a light background. Twitterrific is by Iconfactory, and has a free and premium version. Tweetsville is by Ed Voas, who sold the application to Tapulous. It’s a premium app with no free version.

Appearance. I’m not a fan of Twitterrific’s default appearance. The gradient background behind every single update is just something extra the app has to load, along with the text content. I don’t think it looks nice, either. Which, of course, is the real issue here. ; )

Seriously speaking, one of the things I like about Twitter is its simplicity, both in concept and visual design. Any extra graphic embellishment takes away from the simplicity and transparency. It’s worth noting that the desktop version of Twitter doesn’t even allow users to customise a background colour (the default is white). Any Twitter app should aim to load as quickly as possible, so being spare in appearance is a good thing.

Tweetsville’s appearance is simpler. It offers two display options (bubbles or no bubbles).  I think it fits better with the appearance of core iPhone apps, in both its visual design and interaction design.

Content concentration. How many updates can you cram into a single screen and is cramming content into the screen a good thing to aim for? Content in context is something designers should definitely take into consideration. Twiterrific appears to be able to fit more updates in a single screen when compared with Tweetsville, which would have the benefit of not having to scroll as much. Given the little work involved in scrolling, and how much you need to scroll anyway, perhaps it doesn’t make much of a difference. It also depends on how many people you’re following, and how much content you need to catch up on.

Tweetsville: (1) plain, (2) speech bubbles.

User experience. Tweetsville looks better than Twitterrific. Additionally, its user experience is better: it is more user-friendly, and more compliant with Apple’s human interface guidelines for iPhone, and this is shown best on the settings screens below.

Tweetsville’s settings vs. Twitterrific’s settings.

Tweetsville’s settings fills a single screen. Twitterrific’s settings fills roughly three screens. The latter offers too many options, and not all are necessary. Is the ‘Light Background’ button totally necessary in the free edition? It mainly serves as an ad for the premium edition. How come Tweetsville gets away with so few settings options?

User control: tab bar. Another good thing about the design of Tweetsville is the presence of the tab bar. The tab bar on the bottom of the screen acts like a useful frame, giving the user more freedom over where they can move within the application.

The tab bar is a great asset. Even better is the ability to edit them (which you can do, surprise surprise, by hitting “edit” on the “more” screen). This works like the tabs in the iPhone’s iPod, which draws on an established affordance (good).

Tweetsville’s custom tab bar

Progress/status bars vs spinners. When I refresh the app I want to know how quickly I’ll be able to read new updates. So I want to see a visual indication of progress.

The spinner (circled in red) doesn’t indicate its progress visually. It just tells me it’s working. Great, but how soon will I get to see my updates?!

The browser bar (also circled in red) fills up as it downloads data. It tells me that not only is something happening, it’s completing a task, and is at least a percentage through completing it.

I really like this and would love to see an app that could show this, even if it’s not accurate. Psychologically, it eases my pain by giving me the impression that something’s getting done!

While none of these experiences are perfect, the good thing about multiple options is that the designers behind them will learn from each other’s merits and mistakes and improve iteratively. Twitterrific was one of the first clients out there for iPhone and iPod touch, and Tweetsville is a fairly recent release, so the latter had more time to learn from existing apps on the market.

I hope that Twitter will make an iPhone optimized site according to Apple’s human interface guidelines, because I’d be happy to use the website. Twitter itself is extremely lightweight, so does it really need an app? Any app should reflect the lightweight nature of Twitter, and aim to keep loading time as low as possible.

I’m back from the first Nokia Open Lab which was held between 11-13th September in Helsinki, Finland. I had a blast meeting excellent, passionate people from all over the world, many of whom I’ll no doubt stay in touch with. I left Helsinki with my head buzzing with ideas which had been catalysed by conversations with other participants throughout the workshops and parties.

Conversations were focused around location-based/aware services for mobile, future business models for music and entertainment, ways of motivating the community to assist environmental causes, and more. One idea I really liked was mentioned briefly by Micki Krimmel / Mickipedia. To paraphrase the idea loosely (I don’t want to claim accuracy after several glasses of champagne): when technology is useful and widely adopted, it is invisible. Invisibility signals adoption. We lose interest in it: it’s there, but we no longer notice it, because it’s part of the unexciting, essential fabric of everyday life. Invisible technology is the kind of stuff that’s been around for a while, like a telephone or a vending machine, that no longer seems like magic. It’s a human-invention that is so commonplace, that is so developed and evolved, that we can’t change it any further. It’s the kind of technology that nobody would hold an open lab about, but we’d really miss if taken away.

Everyone is paying attention to mobile at the moment because we’re just beginning to understand its full potential. It’s exciting, nascent, and new; and in combination with the internet, ubiquitous computing – a theme which Adam Greenfield presented on Saturday – is no longer exciting theory, but very real. Nokia Open Lab is an excellent way to stimulate conversations around this kind of technology, which is a real-world equivalent of what they are already doing on their blog, Nokia Conversations. I got to meet Charlie Schick, the guy behind the blog (and who is also, apparently, the most likely one to get fired for what they do). I think it’s great that they’re doing that.

Prior to the event, I was sent the Nokia E71 to try out. I’m going to give my impressions without writing a full-review: there are great reviews here and here. I was given a SIM card on arrival to test all the functions of the phone. I felt sheepish about also taking my iPhone with me on the trip. Despite having full access to email and internet on my E71, I often found myself resorting to my iPhone.

There are two reasons for this. First reason, (1), my mobile phone is the most personal technology I use, and it takes a while to adjust to using a different phone. It’s also a pain to set up email, Twitter, and so on on a different phone, and to adjust to an entirely different experience. So it’s unfair to compare them. But there’s also the other thought, (2), that the E71 is an inferior experience to the iPhone, and I was less frustrated using the latter.

Here are some of the frustrations I had with the Nokia E71:

• The icons on the home screen took up about 15% of the space. Too small!
• Using the internet on the E71 is frustrating.
• Some of the terminology is confusing. For example, what’s the difference between ‘Tools’, ‘Installations’, ‘Downloads’?

And some of the things I liked about the Nokia E71:

• The handset embodied elegance. It’s possibly the most physically beautiful mobile phone I’ve seen, and I really wanted to like its user experience, too.
• The tactile QWERTY keyboard.
• The notification light on the home button: a nice touch.

If there’s a Nokia phone I like most, it’s the N95. The experience is superior to the E71 – perhaps the screen orientation of the N95 (which is portrait, not landscape) has something to do with that.

I really admire Nokia for holding this event. My view is that times are changing: Nokia must re-address their products from the point of view that they’re now considering Apple, Google, and Microsoft as their competitors. Some radical change must happen. I think they know this, too, which is why the Nokia Open Lab happened. Flying 35 bloggers/social media types from around the world to Helsinki for conversational workshops? Pretty radical, if you ask me … and symptomatic of change, forum, progress!

Just as things started getting really interesting the event was over, and I was on the plane to London on Saturday evening. If Nokia holds an event like this in the future (and I really hope they do, again, next year), I’d suggest that it be a day longer. It’d also be good to present ideas individually, in perhaps more of a BarCamp-like setup. More time, and more opportunity to focus on a topic, and more opportunities for every attendee to really add value to the event, would make it even better. So, to make it better: longer. More specialised focus on topics. More practical, tactile ways to add value.

So, thank you Nokia and WOMWorld for a fantastic few days in Finland! I’ll be putting photos on Flickr soon.

There are several things I’ve been meaning to write about. They’ve been started, but then left half-written in Google Docs. So I’ve decided to take a short break and let them sit for a while.

Last Thursday I attended my first Girl Geek Dinner which was held at Google in London. It turned out to be a fun event, and I’m very glad I went: it was great to meet other girls who are geeks. Visiting Google was also exciting. Attendees had free reign at the bar, which offers every brand of chocolate, biscuit, ice-cream, and drink you can imagine. There were also some delightful stacks of Girl Geek Dinner-branded cupcakes to celebrate their third birthday/anniversary:


(There are a few more photos of the Google dinner on Flickr.)

(I learned the next day that I shared a cupcake from the same batch as Valleywag-belle Julia Allison (wait – who?), who had visited Google cafeteria earlier that same day. Exciting stuff!)

After the dinner – for the curious, I chose salmon layered with potato, and french beans; it was pretty good, but my expectations were unfairly high – there was a talk on mobile UX design from Google user experience designer Karen Groenink. She outlined basic challenges related to mobile design, which were: restricted input/output, network latency, data costs for users, different operating systems, lack of critical mass, small keyboard, and so on. It was unexpected that the talk would be focused on mobile, and it’s really interesting to see it becoming more widely discussed (though perhaps it’s not so surprising, as Google Android is being headed in London).

A busy fortnight approaches. On Friday I’m attending dConstruct, followed by BarCamp Brighton 3 (I am preparing something that resembles a presentation in Keynote), and then Helsinki for a Nokia workshop the following weekend. Yikes. Then I’m visiting Oxford, where I will do absolutely nothing for the duration.

The other day I received an email from WOM World / Nokia inviting me to a 3-day workshop in Helsinki. The email sounded almost too good to be true, but it’s turned out to be real, and come September I’ll be off to Helsinki. Here’s part of the email:

As a quick intro, I’m from the WOM World / Nokia. We’re a Nokia-sponsored blog covering what’s being said in the social media about Nokia devices and services.

We sometimes help Nokia run events involving participants from social media, like bloggers and forum members. The latest being a new annual workshop that hopes to involve an eclectic mix of the online community in a discussion of what the future holds for everything from mobile technology to media creation. It’s a three day event in Helsinki and we’d like to invite you, flights and accommodation paid for.

It’s taking place in September between the 11th and 14th, and will be the first of its kind hosted by Nokia. We’re contacting everyone from creative’s, designers, video producers to open source software bloggers and mobile tech pioneers. There will be a number of workshops that’ll see discussion with participants, and with Nokia guys, about the future of different online arenas and mobile technology. Workshops that we hope you’d like to join in with and make yourself heard.

Like we mentioned, Nokia will cover expenses, including return flights, accommodation, food etc, we are flexible on return dates, if you’d like to come back on the 13th that’s fine. You’ll also be provided with a ‘trial pack’ that will include a Nokia device and other things for trial prior to and during the event.

From a follow-up email: “Topics will revolve around subjects including; Navigation, people and places, neighbourhood, collaboration, music and games through to working life, email and how to improve upon what we already have.”

I’ve no idea what the criteria were for invitation, but it’s definitely an amazing opportunity and I’m super-excited to be going.