It’s great, but there’s one simple yet utterly important feature I see missing on too many mobile site versions: a link to the full site. While it’s right to offer the mobile optimized version as the default front door when the user’s on a mobile device, the user may still want, or need, to access the full site. In the worst case, the limited content on the mobile site hasn’t been updated with the same info as the full site. I recently had to go to a company’s site to check the address of their new office, but the mobile site still had the old address. I had been to the full site before and knew they had the new address there, but as I was using my iPad the code on the site forced me to the mobile version with no access to the full site. And this was the site of a large digital agency. So I had no way to get their new address on the go.

My other recommendations for mobile site design, in a short summary, are these:
2.    Simplicity: single column layouts work best.
3.    Small and targeted: reduce the amount of content.
4.    Functional: present the navigation so it works on a mobile device; touch UI or not.
5.    Easy: minimize text entry and scrolling.
6.    Take advantage of inbuilt functionality: e.g. GPS/location aware, maps, make calls, save contacts.

Karri Ojanen

Jonathan Kochis and the rest of the great folks at Resolution will have me there to give a presentation on Village Life, an engaging online fundraising site I helped to design and build several years ago. And through that project I will also talk a bit about gamification, the process of interaction design in general, platforms, and social interaction.

The night is open to students, entrepreneurs, digital/creative industry colleagues, and anyone interested in exploring digital media from business and technology perspectives or looking for an inspirational space to work on a project. Doors open at 6pm and I will start my presentation at 7. Welcome!

The news about this magical panda bear started an interesting conversation in the office. Seeing how Google has, for most part, had a much stronger emphasis on engineering than design in the past, building services that are highly functional without polished design, Cosmic Panda and the recent Google Apps redesign party seem like an afterthought. So does design matter? What role does it play?

Engineering drives technology. We are living through another revolution much like the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries that will have and already has had a tremendous effect on not just a few products, services, or an area of products and services, but our whole society and economic system.

The Watt steam engine which propelled the Industrial Revolution in the UK and the world wasn’t necessarily so beautiful to look at and it wasn’t built by a designer, but a Scottish mechanical engineer, James Watt. Similarly, the key functionality of Google’s products wouldn’t have been built without engineers.

However, after the first wave of new innovation (in terms of technology), companies must look for something else to differentiate their products and to keep them competitive. I’m sure Google recognizes that polished, slick interfaces and overall design weren’t a big part of their work initially, but that they’re giving it a bigger role now.

James Watt didn’t build his steam engine out of scratch, either. Rather, he came up with significant design enhancements to the Newcomen steam engine which was invented 50 years earlier. So he was a designer, too, and not just an engineer.

In the computer world, I think many would argue that Microsoft’s products and the whole PC “model” have been based on a more engineering-minded model than Apple. Apple’s now more desirable because of the design they apply. Both a PC and a Mac do the same things, essentially, like the iRiver e100 and the iPod Classic are both portable media players, but Apple’s products are (starting to) sell more because of the difference in design. Because people find them more desirable, simply better looking, or because they’re, arguably, more usable.

It’s probably this chain where technology and engineering always seem to come first and then design, which leads companies and individuals think that design can be applied after. That it’s possible to create a technologically advanced product and apply great usability to it later. But as we know, it doesn’t work – engineering and design are inseparable and you need both to make a good product truly great.

The fact that Google’s done so well with technological innovation, with engineering alone (if you believe in that thought) so far doesn’t mean that they’re the best, that they couldn’t be beaten by someone else who gets design better than they do. At its peak in 2008, Nokia dominated over 40% of the global cell phone market. And Nokia were, in many ways, a very engineering-minded, engineer-led company, with their 150 year history deeply rooted in technological innovation and engineering. At the time, their products were ahead of everyone else. Their enormous success was built on the introduction of new technology, adding one feature after another, and the highly efficient global distribution chain they had.

When Apple came along, they didn’t invent the cell phone, they didn’t invent the MP3 player, they didn’t even coin the term ‘smartphone’. They weren’t the first to introduce the use of touch screens in cell phones. But they brought in new design, and… We know the story. The smartphone became much more desirable, thanks to the new thinking, some technological but mostly design, that Apple brought to the market.

While design alone doesn’t make the wheels turn at first, it does always play a role in the success of any product, together with technology.

Karri Ojanen

I find Marc’s text connecting very closely with the message in my post from two years ago, which then turned into a couple of follow-ups. Work in interactive channels demands leadership just as any work needs leadership, and the most accurate, efficient kind of leadership comes from people who understand the importance of the functional side of design, the interactivity, the user experience, and know how to research it, define, design, and present it. It takes a whole team of engineers, writers, designers and others to create digital advertising, products, and services, but user experience and interaction designers are the ones who should be the closest to being the new creative directors.

Karri Ojanen

Most people don’t mind that. People who use computers at work daily may forget that many people, while they also encounter computerized systems on a daily basis, don’t need a computer for work. They want it for fun. They do upload content to sites like YouTube, and Flickr, they click away at their profiles on Facebook and use Twitter, but the kind of production they do on those sites doesn’t require a physical keyboard or an extra large screen. And while there are over 157 million blogs online, the average Joe or Jane who goes online doesn’t engage in serious blogging. The iPad is a casual web browser and social media tool, a video player, possible eBook reader and a casual gaming system, and that’s exactly what most people want.

The only really serious deficiency the first iPad had was the lack of camera, which many of its competitors quickly included, and now the updated iPad 2 comes with two cameras.

Tablets won’t kill laptops, but they, like smartphones, will be much better at introducing people who don’t “need” a personal computer to casual personal computing. The touch screen interface is more intuitive, and once more applications get truly touch optimized, like the iPad version of Apple’s video editing software iMovie, we may see tablet users become somewhat more seriously productive, too.

But Apple will hardly rule the tablet scene alone. Competitors using Android Honeycomb will start gaining more popularity once they catch the attention of bigger masses, and as the tablet market matures, Intel’s Meego, HP’s TouchPad and BlackBerry’s Playbook may all be able to grab a corner of it. Apple has had a head start, its ecosystem is strong and the iPad 2 is a timely update to the original, but the company still has some way to go in refining the iOS. Android, as imperfect as it is in its own ways, has nailed a few interface issues like notifications better, while the iPad forces the user into a do-one-thing-at-a-time mode.

Karri Ojanen

• Integrated messaging suite
• Cross-device (phone <> TouchPad) notifications and interactions
• Touch to Share – Allows the user to transfer content from an HP mobile device to the Touchpad simply by tapping it. This may sound simple, but it shows that the relationship HP has created between the new tablet and their phones is better thought out than the iPhone <> iPad experience. And, with a ripple effect and everything, it looks like fun.
• Native apps social integration

In terms of building a real, vast ecosystem, luring developers, and crafting a differentiating brand for WebOS, it all still remains to be seen. Despite all the good ideas they had, Palm died, and now HP is attempting to build on their platform that didn’t manage to reach enough mindshare, either in developers’ or consumers’ minds, in the first place.

While HP may lack the brand value that Apple has, HP does have wider global reach than Apple, and more resources. Palm, on the other hand, was known for its Pilot PDAs all over the world in the end of the 90s, but by the time they were pushing out their Treo and Centro lines of phones, they were very much limited to just North America, both in terms of mindshare as well as actual sales. If HP really puts its muscle behind this and works on the brand, it can gain at least a better foothold than Palm alone did.

The real question will be, how many tablets and smartphone OS and ecosystems can co-exist in the future? With the BB Playbook, Honeycomb based devices, the HP TouchPad, iOS, and, possibly, Microsoft’s tablet OS (with a chance that Meego will still make it to tablets) coming to the market around the same time, the fight is already fierce.

Karri Ojanen

Wireframe Stencils for Keynote
Do you use Keynote to wire and prototype? Here’s a good set of over 70 hand made, scalable UI elements. Get ‘em here.

Illustrator Wireframe Toolkit
A really stylish, beautiful set of sketchy UI elements for Illustrator, including stuff for iPad and smartphone designs. Available here.

500 Storyboard Tutorials and Resources
These are on a site for film makers, which makes sense, but these are important lessons for interaction designers as well. Check it out.

Recommendations for Usability in Practice (Card Set)
A free card set including recommendations for usability in product development practice. PDF here.

Karri Ojanen

As easy as it is to agree with the message in Neil’s post – that wireframes aren’t good at defining dynamic on-page interactions, that they can be too prescriptive and that they add unnecessary drag to the design process – there’s one thing to say about wireframes and rapid prototyping that is pointed out in the one lone comment to Neil’s article: what’s the difference? Aren’t rapid prototyping, sketching and mocking up just different versions of wireframing?

Maybe the real problem with wireframes isn’t the concept of a wireframe itself, but how we we use and create wireframes?

Paper prototyping isn’t necessary called wireframing, but the elements of any paper prototype are, at least in my mind, simple wireframes, sketched on paper. Paper prototyping is often the most efficient form of rapid prototyping. Death to inefficient, static, overly prescriptive uses of wireframes, yes, but long live the quick and dirty, plain and simple, dynamic and lively wireframe as part of rapid prototypes!

Karri Ojanen

I thought that I was going to write my own recap of the conference, but with my recent move to New York, new job and everything else, I’ve simply run out of time, and since others have already posted a plethora of great recaps elsewhere (probably doing a better job than I ever would’ve), I’m just going to give links to a couple of those here:

• UX Booth’s UX Lx wrap-up
• David Malouf’s report (3 parts) at Johnny Holland Magazine

Thanks again to Bruno Figueiredo and the team for putting together an excellent conference and for having me there to speak among all the great people.

This opportunity was offered to me quite a while ago, and it took some time to make up my mind and then get all the paperwork ready. Though I was a bit sad to leave Toronto, which I had called home for almost three years, everything here feels great so far and I’m happy to have made the move. I’m still pulling things out of boxes at the same time as I’m getting up to speed at work, so it may be a couple more days/weeks until I get to update the blog again, but stay tuned – I’ve been meaning to start writing my UX Lx recap, and have a couple other ideas for posts as well.

Karri Ojanen