I came across this really interesting article on mobile typography at the Ministry of Type blog. It spells out the difference between the iPhone and the average mobile phone.

It’s also the only phone that’s been advertised purely on its UI, because that’s what the whole thing is about. The adverts for the Samsung D840 showed you the hardware buttons and how the glossy front of the phone is so reflective it can be used as a mirror, but with no showing off of the UI. The Motorola RAZR had a similar set of ads - you’re invited to gawp at the thin, sleek hardware, but you’re not shown the UI. Same for most of the Nokia ads in fact. That’s because the default UI is at best workable, at worst, hideous.

Why is most mobile UI design unusable, unresponsive, and ugly? Here’s one theory: “If the UI of these other phones was usable, responsive and beautiful, there’d be little need for themes and a big source of revenue (from advertising on the theme sites alone) would disappear.”

I’m not sure if this is a serious theory, but there might be some truth in it. Desperate to upgrade their poor interface experiences to a superior one, users purchase a new theme, hoping it’ll solve their problems. Unfortunately, themes are superficial solutions to mobile interface problems. Anyway, I don’t think this theory works, though it does highlight a problematic approach to interface design.

Manufacturers need to address the deeper problems with interface design on the mobile phone. They must focus on making software and hardware more powerful in order to accommodate users’ needs, as the mobile phone becomes a web-browsing device as well as a phone. Manufacturers will, and are, shifting from seeing a mobile phone as a mobile phone, to seeing it as a mobile internet device as well. Nokia admitted in May that they’re now competing with Apple, Microsoft and Google.

Mobile’s restrictions are frustrating both for users and for designers. One of the most frustrating things for me right now, to use one example, is working with antialiased outlines on mobile phone graphics. For those unfamiliar with the term, antialias means, in plain English, the smoothing process between the object and the background, whether font or graphic element. (Here’s a simple illustration.)

Mobile interfaces, composed of typography and graphic elements, suffer because of this lack of support for alpha antialiasing across devices. When I say mobile interfaces “suffer”, I really mean users. Lack of wide support for alpha antialiasing is just one example of the inadequacies of mobile interfaces. However, inadequacies present new, interesting challenges, both for designers working with the imposed restrictions, as well as companies spotting opportunities for improvement.

In the last few decades, thousands of products have entered our lives with the intention to make them simpler. So, why does so much modern technology confuse and trap us?

“Technology changes rapidly; people change slowly”, writes Donald Norman, in ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. Interaction with things is governed by our biology, psychology, society, and culture. Human biology and psychology do not change much with time, and society and culture change slowly. The rate of new product creation is so high that some features aren’t tested thoroughly, or aren’t tested at all.

Bad design affects the super-complex to the dead simple: for instance, bad design is a door with a raised bar across it. The door only opens if you apply pressure on the right side of the bar, but there is no visual indication of this.

And what about a phone interface with a mysterious button ‘R’? Nobody knows what the button does, but the button remains for as long as a designer can provide a reason for its existence. Likewise, bad design is a door that has a handle which suggests twisting and pulling, but slides open.

I have been toying with the idea of modern (in)conveniences for a while before I read Norman’s book. The supermarket and the washing machine were subjects of a brief post.

Bad design, I’ve since learned, is used to confuse users intentionally. Why would a designer want to do this?

The Supermarket Maze

Supermarkets are complex, distracting, confusing. They are also exotic, amorphous and evolving ecosystems of products. The products displayed in the supermarket largely sell themselves with their packaging. Graphic design is key here – how can one peanut butter stand out from another peanut butter?

To do our shopping in the twenty-first century, we no longer need to visit individual shops. Products are gathered together within a single building. We enter a shop, pick up a basket of pre-determined size, and working from a mental or physical list, walk around the shop selecting items to put in a basket, before taking the basket to the check-out. The products are checked out by a human or a machine, or perhaps both. We exit the shop.

How can we design a supermarket to make it easy to find a desired item? Thinking in terms of pure design, I would use a clear supermarket layout, with low shelves so you can see over them, and make use of clear signposting. A shopper could, with clear layout and signposting, be sent from A to B.

A businessperson, however, would think in terms of both design and profit. It’s good business to send your shopper on a longer route from A before they reach B, so they pick up more things to take to check-out. Most shoppers are sent into a maze of distraction and advertising. In other words, supermarkets are deliberately confusing.

The Space-age Washing Machine

It shouldn’t be more complicated than putting your dirty clothes in the machine, putting in the washing powder, and pressing a button. But washing machines have become needlessly complicated, with some interfaces looking like spaceship dashboards. Norman suggests this is because ‘complicated’ looking products actually hold consumer appeal. Apparent complexity, at least in Korea, suggests status. More features, Norman argues, defies simplicity. More features sell products. A more complex washing machine is more attractive than one that appears simple. How many people try to understand how products work before they buy them?

A wonderful experience should be able to overrule these poor business tactics. Driving sales via confusion and advertising exposure is far from ideal, but it seems to work – at least in some places. Apparent complexity may always sell. The iPhone and iPod Touch, though, are examples of wonderful apparent simplicity when the device itself is complex: the good design masks the complexity of the functions.

Supermarkets rely on products selling themselves off the shelf. That’s interesting, if you combine this with the fact that product packaging is on its way out. Sainsbury’s in the UK is trying out the milk bag, which may eventually replace the plastic bottle. The milk bag is already popular in Canada (according to the article, 60% of fresh milk in Canada is sold in bags). Supermarkets are bending to the pressure of environmental awareness, but as the Times article points out, it’s down to whether consumers will want it.

It’s worth bearing in mind a scenario where packaging is severely limited, or where we simply no longer can afford to spend our resources on disposable packaging. Without products selling themselves with their packaging, will the current supermarket model work? If products can no longer sell themselves individually with their packaging, the model for advertising products in stock will have to change.

What makes design so compelling is how it emerges from seemingly conflicting motives: in these cases, the aims of the designer are at odds with the aims of business. Business itself is at odds with environmental pressure, availability of resources, the ideal of how they would advertise their product, and ultimately, what consumers want.

Tim Berners-Lee says the web is in its infancy. We have only just begun to see how the internet is being used to overcome distance, share information, and connect people together. The future web, Sir Tim says, will put “all the data in the world” at the fingertips of every user.

Whilst desktop and laptop computers have defined how we experience the web, I believe that the benefit of the web is best when you can use it anywhere. McGuire’s law is that the value of any product or service increases with its mobility.

So, the mobile web…

Mowser

In many ways, I think Mowser was a great idea. I also think that in many ways, Mowser missed the point. This is aknowledged by its creator, Russell Beattie, in his leaving letter, which was widely and wildly misinterpreted after it was published. Beattie’s leaving note, far from being doctor’s autopsy notes for the mobile web, is actually full of vision and hope for what the mobile web should be like.

In a way, it heralds the death of a certain kind of aenemic mobile web, and one we didn’t want in the first place. Mowser’s failure, although sad, should help to guide others working in the shaping the future of the mobile web:

It’s not the mobile web, it’s the web…?

The mobile web should exist as a term. But it should not refer to a different web. We can’t deny that how we access and use the “mobile” web is different from how we might use it at home. This does not refer just to the device that the web is viewed on; it refers also to what we use the web for.

We need to make mobile web experiences better. To do this, we need to try and identify how we use the web outside of our homes; and how this is different from how we use the web inside of our homes. E.g., we might not want to do intensive research whilst out shopping; but at home, we might meticulously research and compare reviews for a restaurant.

Despite this, we cannot, and definitely should not, separate the web we view on our laptop from the web we view on our mobile device. Tim Berners-Lee is vehemently opposed to .mobi domain names for this reason:

I’m a new student of “Experience Design”. Can you really design experiences?

One of the books I discovered in my flat a few months ago was the best-selling ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ (by Stephen Covey). The book advocates the idea of a life that is governed by “principles”, by which positive outcomes are the natural product of this way of living, and not necessarily the aim. So according to Covey, a life led by positive principles leads to positive outcomes. A similar approach can be taken towards design, in terms of experience. The idea is similar: a designer focused on human experience of the finished object, rather than “designing an object”, will produce superior work.

I’ve just started to read Bill Buxton’s ‘Sketching User Experiences’. Here’s a quotation from Buxton’s website:

Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the “things” that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have. Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.

For me this is a totally new and very exciting way of looking at design.

We live in terms of experiences. We are surrounded by objects that give us an experience. Le Corbusier’s opening line in his 1923 book, ‘Vers une architecture’ (towards a new architecture), is “a house is a machine for living in“. I think this is a good approach to architecture. A house is a machine for living in, and a house is populated by various other man-made things such as a bed, a bookcase, a bedside table, a lamp. We experience a lamp when we attempt to turn it on and off. We experience a bed when we lie on it. We experience a bookcase when we put our books in it. If we can identify the components of what makes an experience good, then experiences are designable.

Objects we choose to surround ourselves with are, on the whole, man made; and they are objects which we have selected ourselves. We select these objects because they are easy to use, cheap, practical, aesthetically-pleasing, or all of these things. In other words, we choose to surround ourselves with objects that give us a pleasant experience. A designer who designs with this experience in mind is looking at the top of the hierarchy of everything a designer should be thinking about. Design exists to give human beings a good experience, whether it’s an entire city, a map to navigate the city, a dictionary, or a clear dictionary typeface.

I think a big enemy for designers is distraction, or approaching a problem with an existing agenda or idea in mind. Role-models (i.e. famous graphic designers, artists, architects) and inspirational objects (i.e. examples of existing examples that you admire by famous graphic designers, artists, architects) can distract and obscure, rather than clarify and help. By focusing on experience, the designer has a clear canvas. Good experience is the aim, and it doesn’t matter how you reach this aim. It includes both function and aesthetics, as both are necessary for a good experience, and both are necessary for a good design.

Experience design is very relevant to mobile design, and even more so as the small screen attempts an increasingly ambitious portfolio of capabilities that the desktop/laptop computer can already do. Designing applications that provide the user with a delightful experience is one thing. Working out how to deal with the desktop-scaled web on a small screen is another. I’m looking forward to giving this more thought…