Mobile is becoming an area of budding possibilities. MEX is a great conference exploring these themes. My favourite line is: “Icons are dead and the content itself is the new interface.” I couldn’t agree more.Here’s the full list:

1. Content itself will be the interface of the future

Icons are dead and the content itself is the new interface. By stripping away the confusion and clutter of traditional interface elements like menus and scroll bars we can put photos, music and video at the heart of the user experience. Read more…

2. Handsets are no longer just for the hand

The role of the mobile device is expanding beyond the hand. In fact, handsets are spending less time in our palms and instead finding a role at the centre of the room. This trend represents a major new user experience challenge and will require us to think of new ways to interact with mobile devices. Read more…

3. Fragmentation is the enemy of innovation

The structure of the mobile industry is killing application developers. There is a tidal wave of innovative content and services waiting to be unleashed if we can build a business environment which enables new companies to make money from mobile. Read more…

4. Fashion is a stronger motivator than functionality

Fashion is a stronger motivator than features. Colour, shape, texture and packaging play a bigger role in influencing mobile purchasing decisions than the specification list. The highest margins in the handset business are achieved by devices which lag the technology curve but invest in brand partnerships and a boutique retail experience. Read more…

5. The developing world is the new frontier for mobile user experience

The developing world is the new frontier for mobile user experience. It is the industry’s responsibility to deliver voice communication and internet connectivity to the disconnected in ways which are locally relevant, useable and cost-effective. Read more…

6. Search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment

Search requires a radically different approach in the mobile environment. To find the answers they are looking for in the time they have available, mobile users need access to the widest range of search techniques, yet these must be provided within a highly constrained interface. Read more…

7. Intelligent contact lists are the future centres of the user interface

Presence and IP-based messaging change the dynamics of mobile communication. The natural focal point for next generation user interfaces is an intelligent, presence-enabled contact list. Enhancing the information and services which can be shared through people-centric networks is the best way to encourage usage of voice, messaging and data. Read more…

8. Mobile payments herald the next generational shift

Mobile payment applications will lead the next major leap in wireless communications, when our interactions with machines start to outnumber our interactions with people. Using our mobile phones to pay for goods and services in the physical world requires an interaction model and user interface of breath-taking simplicity. Cash and credit cards represent a singularly impressive benchmark - only when we deliver unique benefit above and beyond these existing solutions will mobile payments explode. Read more…

9. Users as individuals: uniquely complex and contradictory

Customers cannot be defined by numbers or segments or demographics. Every user is uniquely complex and contradictory. If we are to design experiences which recognise customers as individuals, we must develop research tools and analysis techniques which allow us to live and breath the world as users see it. Read more…

10. The potential of smart voice

The industry’s love affair with all things ‘2.0′ is blinding us to the reality that customers are spending more time than ever making basic voice calls. There are a wealth of potentially valuable smart voice features, ranging from conference calling and call waiting to texting to decline calls, which are failing because of poor user experience. Read more…

In this interesting conversation with Bill Buxton, he spit out a ton of interesting thoughts on User-Experience.

We love his take on things around here, and instead of expanding on his ideas today I’ll just make one of them into a little digram to help you remember it. “Technology, Business, and Design are all equal parts orbiting the User”. We hear this all the time that our work is about people, and this reminds us that most work is about people.

Thanks for the reminder Bill, good for us to keep in mind.

With the release of the jQuery UI library, we can see the adoption of patterns across the board as a base for developing interactions:
Flex & Flash have components
Apple has Cocoa
Mozilla has XUL
Yahoo has their library
etc…
This is a great separation of information(HTML) from presentation(CSS) and behaviour(jQuery). This will allow coders, designers, and developers to collaborate, and maybe even become more like each other.
Unfortunately, though the enabling technology of jQuery has so much potential, there is no mediator between this abstraction of patterns and the potential reuse and rejig of those patterns, other than text.
What I am vying for here is a new type of interaction creator. Dreamweaver & photoshop are not cutting it. Neither are textmate or bbedit. For a few simple reasons: Read the rest of this entry »

If someone in Toronto says “I don’t have facebook”, chances are they just don’t want to add you to it. There are now 836,755 people in the Toronto, Ontario network. In 2001, the Toronto population was 2,385,400, 663,400 of which are were over 50. That means that of the 1,722,000 people under 50, 50% are on Facebook. Nevermind the fact that about 49% of people in Toronto were born outside of Canada. This means that the chances of someone you meet having facebook are about 50/50; one in every 2 people you meet has a facebook account.

How many times have you overheard people talking about facebook? In hostels in Europe, 2 out of 3 computers was focused on Facebook. This is a phenomenon that deserves some attention, and its getting some. There have been 371 news stories in Canadian newspapers about facebook in the past month. On a more personal level, 487,314 blog entries about facebook. So we know this is something, but what does it mean for people engaged in the creation and design of experiences, and socially progressive media? Ultimately, what does a mini-feed and a superwall have to do with Humanity?

The short answer is a lot, Read the rest of this entry »

There has been recent talk of the transition or crossover from Print Design to Web Design. A common point understood by most, is that the new web designer is not one role. Many different disciplines will arise from the growing complexity of the web, many disciplines have already arisen(information visualization, editorial, motion, online-products). In the transition period(the hour glass), the question is, what skills from previous disciplines will benefit the new design, and what principles from other disciplines will now be relevant in the cross over.

To understand the principles behind design, we have compiled a list of principles from 4 different thinkers. This list will grow as we collect more principles. Even just the act of typing out each one of these prinicples has benefited us immensely, we hope you gain the same insights from them.

These books are highly recommended as an addition to your, certainly already large, library. You can find links to purchase them on the following page, and this will support us through referrals.

Principles of Design
http://thmvmnt.com/content/principles/principle.html

So I have been listening to a lot of Alan Kay’s lectures. Most notably, check out:He is really interested in making the computer more of an instrument, and less of a piece of paper. That vision is definitely one we share. Currently we are working on a lot of projects that might be able to get us a bit further to playing a computer than use it.

Also of note, is Jun Rekimoto and his experiments with glass modules. What happens when we can combine small parts together and create out own interfaces? Share these modules and everything can sync in unexpected ways.

Just as Ben Fry and Casey Reas are working on a platform for artists and designers to develop their own tools. We are working on projects which allow the emergence of activity.

An industry friend who’s been in it since the beginning pointed out recently that nobody has really figured out how to teach interaction design. She was referring mostly to web, and I can attest to this.

After running through a four year design program, and spending two years immersed in things, I still feel like a beginner at designing what most would call a great page design. Not true with the print skills.

Print designers teaching print principles have had plenty years and shoulders to stand on, and thus it may be said that I’ve been taught print well. Not so for a young designer’s interaction education.

Enter Mr. Khoi Vinh. His most recent post deconstructing the design of a complicated site with plenty of challenges is one of the most clear and informative pieces on the art of web-design I’ve ever read. How to group, divide, draw, organize, and otherwise, do the details that somewhat of a mystery to most of us who haven’t been at this very long.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is for everyone who was at our presentation:

Thank You!

If you weren’t then you can check it out, along with info about the movers program here.

Experiences are about stories right? So if we’re in the business of experience design, how about leveraging some of the long known tricks of storytellers.

The Hero’s Journey is a classic archetype found in plenty of books/movies we all know and love, as well as other thoughtless renditions that feel cliche and thin. It provides a story arc that has a deep connection to the way people like to be told a story. There is something primal and familiar about the “Monomyth”, as it is sometimes called.

What’s especially interesting for our purposes is the start: How the hero is pulled from his/her everyday world and into a world they never new existed. Similar to signing up and experiencing an immersive social networking tool for the first time?

We’re going to find out by applying some of the guidelines of the Monomyth to our signup (or should I say “cross-over”?) and initial user-experience with Hive.