Ben Bederson
John SanGiovanni
Date: Friday, April 25
Time: 11:00 - 11:50AM

Presented by Ben Bederson (Zumobi), John SanGiovanni (Zumobi). Explore a new era of mobile UI with industry pioneer Dr. Ben Bederson. Bederson will speak on how Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research is reshaping how consumers interact with their mobile phones.

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:: Immediacy
The nature of mobile experience. One core diff between mobile and desktop.
Mobile the goal is often a 15 second encounter to get something quickly

Latency an issue. It's still far away performance-wise. People's threshhold for an hourglass is higher on a phone than a desktop.

Blackberry achives immediacy with tricklesyncing. there's no roundtrip for most likely needed data

Device Adaptability - This meant text not so long ago. All used up-down left-right experience.

2 problems - porting burden. A hurclean effort to move from one device to device
variation of device form factors. Every design decision has to run through a crazy UI construct. How does it look in w, x, w, z, a, b, c etc. It really makes you think sideways and it's only going to get worse before it gets better.

As easy as updownleftright is, most don't use the keypad as an interaction option.

Don't do device adaptation after the fact.

:: One-handed use - You often need one-hand for something else, but there are tons of two-handed use

Watched people using devices at BWI airport.

Number of hands used correlated to action walking, standing, sitting

cs.umd.edu/hcil/mobile/survey

When asked, people almost never wanted two hand devices, except when they thought they'd be typing.

Touchscreens - how bigs do targets have to be? It's the nature of your finger to cover up the target.

At about a centemeter, error rate is about half a percent. Smaller introduces a ton of errors "There's a reson there's a stylus"

:: Visual elegence - saw a decade ago, but we didn't see it on phones
psp, iphone, and others have image acceleration(?????) This takes a lot of engineering. We need to think a lot about what makes a pleasing moving image experience.

We've spent a lot of time to emphasize more effort to plug into a .. lush georgous environment. We elevated it to a core guiding principal that these things have to be elegent.

Users need to be in control. (Pet peeve when it doesn't work. ) Trhing to figure out an interface that the user feels like they are driving is very pleasing.

Once upon a time, you leased the phone (old rotary phone on screen) it was part of the service. That smells a lot like what happens now in mobile.

Windows mobile is the most open platform there is. ... ironic, no? You can access everything you want, but the user doesn't feel like they're in control.

Iphone is locked down, but the users feel in control. Even the new SDK is really locked down. There are continuous directions the industry is pulled into.

Giving someone total access to their space. (Pet peeve being told what my home screen is)

*** They need to be in control and connected to their social networks ... and they need to be able to exchange pieces between devices w/out ever touching a desktop ***

:: Mobile patterns of use are different than patterns of use
It's completely different than a desktop experience ...
*** it's not about stickiness, it's about bouciness, you fly in, use it and fly out***

Think about snacking. ... mobile widgets. Focused on doing one thing extremely well.

They partnered with Amazon. Tried to shoehorn it in, but wrong experience. The experience was really a collection of nine different tiles. We centered all of our user paradigm on this use of widgets.

:: Research --> Product

Was SJobs brilliant or just take all of the low-hanging fruit and put them into a product?

Apple was not brilliant in creating new technologies, they were brilliant in choosing the right technology to use in the product from what has been out there for a while.

Core innovations over the last 10 years that got integrated into the iphone

- Virtual keyboard - key size targets are secretly increased based on prediction technology
- Location Technologies
- Multi-touch - been around for 10 years
- Proximity sensor
- Zooming UI
- Large Display Effectiveness
- Accelerometer

(Prediction - Amazon's most bought object off zumobi is a pedometer. As soon as iphone lets software support that, the company selling them will be in trouble.)