There's Not an App for That

Mobile User Experience Design for Life

Simon Robinson, Gary Marsden, Matt Jones

• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780124166998
• Topic: Informatica
• Subtopic: Interazione tra uomo e computer

There's Not an App for That will make your work stand out from the crowd. It walks you through mobile experiences, and teaches you to evaluate current UX approaches, enabling you to think outside of the screen and beyond the conventional. You'll review diverse aspects of mobile UX: the screens, the experience, how apps are used, and why they're used. You'll find special sections on "challenging your approach", as well as a series of questions you can use to critique and evaluate your own designs. Whether the authors are discussing real-world products in conjunction with suggested improvements, showcasing how existing technologies can be put together in unconventional ways, or even evaluating "far out" mobile experiences of the future, you'll find plenty of practical pointers and action items to help you in your day-to-day work.

• Provides you with new and innovative ways to think about mobile design
• Includes future mobile interfaces and interactions, complete with real-world, applied information that teaches you how today's mobile services can be improved
• Illustrates themes from existing systems and apps to show clear paths of thought and development, enabling you to better design for the future

Chapter 1

Introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces the ideas that drive the rest of the book. We argue for new approaches, using the relative lifelessness of current app designs to demonstrate how mobiles could be so much better. We outline the Problem and Opportunity chapters that we use to explore mobile interactions, and challenge you to begin right now with new thinking.

Keywords

mobile; user experience; design; apps; Narcissus

Ecstasy

Once upon a time, building a compelling, usable, useful mobile service was hard. Very hard.

The devices had small, fiddly keyboards, seemingly designed by evolved svelte beings, not the fat-thumbed, clumsy typical users. Displays were black and white, pixelated, and very small, with the classic “snake” line game being hailed as a major user-pleasing feature. The only onboard sensors, if you could call them that, were the one attached to the battery, to warn of an imminent end to talk time, and the phone’s aerial, which could determine the strength of the nearest mobile network signal.

Researchers and designers like us stared down at the materials we had to work with and sighed. While desktop and laptop computers at the time were advancing with dazzling screens, subwoofer audio, and lovely web browsers, it felt like we had traveled back in time to join the ranks of developers who struggled with programming the small displays of early photocopiers and ATM machines (remember the submarine periscope-like single-line displays?).

The austerity conditions we faced did lead to innovation as we tried to overcome the limitations with clever workarounds. Figure 1.1 is an example of this: we wanted to provide access to hundreds of phone and network service functions but avoid the frustrating madness of multiple, nested menu hierarchies given the very small screen we had to work with. The solution involved allowing users to spell out what they wanted, with the software filtering the list of possibilities dynamically. So, pressing 9 (wxyz) - 3 (def) - 2 (abc) would quickly lead to the “weather” service being accessed.

Figure 1.1 Back to the future: small screens and fiddly keyboards challenged designers like us to provide usable, let alone rich, user experiences.

Things are so different now, thanks to a combination of three factors:

▪ First, there’s the relentless progress Moore’s Law has brought, with processor speed doubling every 18 months while costs remain the same.

▪ Then, market forces brought fierce competition to pack devices with as many hardware and software innovations as possible, from eye trackers to brighter and bigger displays (Figure 1.2).

▪ And, of course, there was Steve Jobs. His genius was to inspire and provoke teams at Apple to see the richness that touch screens, app stores, and an ecology of devices and platforms could bring.

The fruits of this work were richly illustrated at an Apple tech conference in 2012, where visitors enjoyed an art installation consisting of over 100 iPads glued together (Figure 1.3). This long, shiny strand was synchronized to show the apps that were being downloaded from iTunes in real time. Like a great dark pool, the display entranced viewers, surfacing as it did the world’s appetite for apps—for everything from dieting to connecting with the Dalai Lama—as well as exposing the work of an army of developers who are daily providing new snacks.

Figure 1.2 Now things seem so much better. With services like this from Google, the device presents useful content with little or no effort on the part of the user.

Figure 1.3 iPad art installation. Visitors look on in delight watching app store downloads in real time.

Today’s smartphones seem to provide an incredible user experience. While there are lots of research papers and books about what user experience is, take a look at the user in Figure 1.4 for perhaps the best definition we can find. This shopper has waited hours to get his hands on the latest, greatest device. He just can’t hide his raw ecstasy at getting his hands on a shiningly seductive piece of the future.

Figure 1.4 Ecstasy.

What is user experience?

This book is about enhancing mobile user experience, so let’s say up front what we think user experience (UX) is about, and what makes for a good one.

Sometimes people use UX as an up-to-date way to refer to the well-established notion of usability. But UX is far more than usability. In the days of computers as workbenches or simple home appliances, the ideals of a system being efficient, effective and satisfying—key elements in conventional usability thinking—were enough. However, now that we carry and wear devices, encountering digital services at theme parks, during surgery, or 30,000 ft above the ground, innovative ways of guiding and evaluating effective design are needed.

UX thinking, then, attempts to reorientate designers towards considerations about how to impact a user’s emotional response and develop artifacts that have real meaning or value for people as they go through their everyday lives.

One group of human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers wanted to understand what “user experience” really means, so they carried out a survey of 275 UX professionals and academics. After analyzing respondents’ answers, they identified several common features in people’s definitions of what contributes to a user experience:

▪ UX is seen as a person’s response when using a device, product, service, or object through some sort of user interface.

▪ UX is dynamic, so it can change before, during, or after use; and, it is context-dependent, the experience being affected by where the artifact is being used.

▪ The UX response, of course, is also subjective, affected by the user’s background, previous experiences, and many other factors.

But what is this “response”? A good three-pronged answer is provided by Don Norman in his book Emotional Design:

▪ Firstly, it’s the response you get as soon as you encounter the object (the visceral).

▪ Secondly, its the reaction that emerges as you use it (the behavioral—akin to the usability of old).

▪ And, finally, it’s about reflection, and how it makes you see yourself in relation to others, with good UX helping you feel good about your choices and values.

Angst

So, perhaps this book should stop right here.

Clearly the future looks bright; the ingredients and recipes for highly effective mobiles are in place. Users can live a fulfilled, better, more successful life as long as they can find and install the app for the bit of their lives—at work, at home, for fun—that needs a boost; and surely there’s an app for all of that.

We don’t want to deride this marvelous and diverse work—and the sparks of genius—that have brought the mobile industry to this place. Collectively, the three of us have worked in mobile human-computer interaction and user experience for over 40 years, and we’ve been as excited as anyone else to see mobiles go from quirky, clunky, dumb devices to the magic wands billions of people carry with them everyday.

So what are we worried about?

Think back to that picture of all of those iPads arranged as a vast pool. This dark surface is a technological echo perhaps of another deep, disturbing body of water. Narcissus was a figure in Greek mythology who cared only for himself, thinking no one else was beautiful enough to be worthy of his love. (See the front cover for the way we’ve adapted the very famous image of Narcissus by Caravaggio.) To teach him a lesson, the Gods, as they tended to do at that time, came up with a hideously ingenuous and appropriate punishment. Narcissus was enticed to a dark pool and, looking down, thought he saw a wonderful wate...