The state of mobile user interface (UI) design is pretty bad. Even the best mobile UIs tend to borrow too many conventions of interaction from the desktop, rather than creating a UI that is unique to mobile devices to keep both the context and task front and center.
So where is mobile user interface design today? What does the future hold? Most importantly, what do people want from their phones?
Recently Jason wrote an interesting piece on making his mobile phone of choice a Motorola PEBL rather than a smart phone, opting for task-based simplicity over the more geeky features and options.
But he also touched on an increasingly important topic: the state of mobile user interface design. I’m speaking of the interface you interact with to make a phone call or send a text message, as opposed to mobile web or application design, which can be a completely different animal.
Then, this report appeared from visiongain about the state of mobile device UI:
The mobile industry still lacks a standard user interface that can drive the mass-market appeal of sophisticated services and devices. If people can’t easily access the services, they won’t spend time doing so.
The poor state of mobile UI design is creating an enormous barrier to mobile devices. I can tell you that mobile is sorely missing designers. There are very talented people in the field, but far too few of them. The primary reason being that in order to get a position in mobile design, you must know the complexities of the mobile industry.
It can take as much as six months to a year to get up to speed on all the little details that you need to understand in order to tackle issues. The larger question is, should the mobile designer need to know all the details, or does that ultimately hinder the designs? (But “Where are all the mobile designers?” is another post.)
Let’s start the discussion by talking about the different types of design the common phone user encounters.
Layers of the Mobile Experience
One thing that that stands out for me as a fundamental problem in creating good mobile experiences is finding ways to get the user to traverse the many different layers of user interface required on the phone to do what they wanted to do. In order to pass successfully through each layer, they must transition and translate metaphors, navigating options in the user interface. Each layer is designed to be its own ecosystem, like the early commercial websites, selfishly trying to capture the user and prevent them from leaving.
This diagram shows the time and effort required to pass through each user interface.
Whether the user wants to reach a mobile website (the Content layer) or simply play a game (the App layer), any task must pass through the Device layer.
Each destination requires the previous layer to not only make sense, but work—something I call Exponential Points of Failure. The task becomes increasingly more difficult as the user travels through each layer.
The device UI is the first, most critical interface the user must overcome, and one of the most time-consuming. And as visiongain’s report suggests, that’s a significant barrier to moving mobile forward from cutting-edge geekiness to commonplace lifestyle appliance.
So, what problems that challenge the consumer do need to overcome?
Problem #1: A Phone Isn’t Just a Phone (or is it?)
The first problem with mobile user interface is that what the mobile phone is to the consumer is in flux. Consumers are being flooded with choices, knowing little about the features inherent in different types of phones.
To set the record straight, there are traditionally four classes of phones:
Phone—a simple phone that also includes messaging (this is likely the phone you had circa 1999–2002). These are becoming more popular for younger kids and older customers who simply want to make phone calls and nothing else.
Feature Phone—in addition to your basic phone, includes other functionality like a web browser, camera, games, etc. (This is likely the phone you have now.)
Smart Phone—a more complex Feature Phone built on a common platform. Includes some PDA-like functionality but almost always relies on the default phone keypad and not another form of input.
PDA Phone—a Treo, Blackberry, or Windows Mobile-based device typically falls into this category. Where smart phones can have PDA capabilities, they are still primarily phones. These devices, however, are PDAs first and phones second. PDA phones are designed as data entry devices, support Internet email, and are usually sold with a separate data plan. They often include a stylus, text keyboard, touch-screen, or all three.
These definitions are becoming blurred as new functionality and capabilities are added to increase consumer uptake and boost profits. The carriers are trying to cover all bases, hoping that more data services loaded on your phone will equate to higher profits (or ARPU, average revenue per user).
This profiteering leaves the subscriber with a dreadful interface, pushing them through the funnel of data charges rather than being focused on a clean and goal-centered design.
Problem #2: The U.S. is not the consumer
Next, as much as we’d like to forget, the U.S. is not the center of the mobile world. The devices we see here are usually designed for consumers in the UK or the Netherlands. (Asian phones rarely make their way to the States, with a few exceptions like the upcoming MVNO Helio)
Outside the U.S., people use mobile technology far differently than we do, often using SMS and mobile web features more than they do voice. Device UIs are designed for flexibility, to allow subscribers to use little apps and tools that we may find a little gadgety.
But this creates a chicken-and-egg scenario: Market demand for data services is low because device UIs are not designed around how people use mobile technology. Then device manufacturers respond to that low market demand with lowered emphasis on device UIs.
I’ve talked to a lot of people in the U.S. about how they use mobile technology. And the overwhelming response I hear to my questions about what and how they use their phone is, “I can do that with my phone?”
Until the industry wakes up to the opportunity that good mobile device UI design creates and really start to embrace user-centered design, I fear it will always stay a fringe, early-adopter market.
Problem #3: Input
An enormous challenge in mobile UI design is the physical input limitation. In most feature phones, users only have a limited 4-way D-pad or joystick, a few buttons to view choices and make selections and a numeric keypad for inputting text.
This seems incredibly limiting coming from a web design perspective where the user can literally point to their destination. But I remind myself of beautifully simple interfaces that do a lot with little more than what can be found on your common phone. Take an iPod, a GameBoy, a PlayStation or Xbox controller, a TiVo remote, a GPS device, even something as common as a microwave.
What makes all of these devices work? Each has a simple, goal-oriented approach, where the choices shown to the user are designed to accomplish a specific task or goal.
A phone’s primary purpose is making a phone call, and most do that very well. But for other tasks, it is difficult for the user to specify the desired task or information. It is incumbent on the mobile designer to anticipate what information they seek and how they will use it. (And if you thought the shortage of mobile designers was bad, mobile information architects are practically non-existent.)
I believe this is one of the key reasons why usage of non-voice features trail off as the shininess of the device wears down. While it remains easy to make phone calls, it is pretty damn hard to tell it to do anything else.
Problem #4: Output
Paired with a small screen, showing information and creating visual cues are very difficult for the mobile designer. Creating visual metaphors, way-points and let’s not forget a pleasing design in such a small area isn’t easy, but it is possible.
These last two problems combine to create what I call the Input/Output Challenge. While the challenge may seem insurmountable, it just requires a little creativity and out of the box thinking. All it takes is to understand people’s goals and usage context.
The iPod comes to mind as one of the greatest screen revelations in recent times. The iPod took the common problems associated with accessing a large database of music and solve the Input/Output Challenge by looking at the most common tasks used to attain the goal of selecting and playing music.
By embracing the goals of the user and the constraints of the device, they were able to create a user interface that redefined the market. Even at a higher price than the competition, they were able to gain market dominance.
Many point to Apple to solve the Input/Output problems of the mobile phone. Maybe they will someday, but why wait for Apple to invent new hardware when designers can begin to solve the problem on screen?
Problem #5: Mobile Devices are Hardware
Many web designers I talk to about mobile feel that the medium is not ready, given the many exceptions and inconsistencies found in mass-market phones.
Coming from the web standards perspective, it is easy to think that device and browser makers are doing something wrong, creating non-compliant browsers in the hope of financial gain, like the early web browser wars.
But this assumption is simply not the case. Standards (and standards bodies) in mobile exist and almost all devices support these standards to the letter. In fact, mobile standards have been around long before the term web standards became common vernacular.
The reality is that mobile devices are complicated pieces of electronics. Given the size, battery, frequency, market and carrier requirements, phones are often tailored to suit these constraints. We are not going to see the same consistency of desktop computers until the required technologies are small enough to fit in any form factor, making a universal technology platform more cost-effective than it is today.
To counter this, designing for mobile requires one to respect traditional HCI philosophies, built and tested around traditional hardware limitations, mixed with web design methodologies for displaying and interacting with information.
Hope for the Future?
In the coming 12–18 months we may see hope come from the second wave of MVNOs entering the playing field. Mobile Virtual Network Operators are direct-to-consumer mini-carriers that operate off of an existing carrier’s network. Virgin was the the leader in the first wave. ESPN has also launched, while Disney, Helio and 7–11(!) are still to come.
The hope is that with MVNOs who rely on marketing services to a specific niche of consumers will adopt people-centered design in the mobile marketplace.
My personal hope is that interaction designers that broke away from traditional graphic design and forged something new on the web will start taking a serious look at mobile design. I believe it is this community that can push the medium ahead into new and exciting places.
Conclusion
As the functionality of the devices has increased, the user interface to access these powerful tools seems more bolted on then built in. In the rush to get new products to market, the devices got more and more cluttered and lack the focus that the mainstream consumer demands, in an attempt to maximize profits.
The user interface for non-voice tasks makes people feel like they are using a hammer to tighten a screw. By focusing on the tasks the common person is looking to accomplish, all excess needs to be removed.
We need to bring good design to the people so that they can discover the potential of mobile technology for themselves. We never need to define the value for them: they already know what it is. They just don’t know how to do it.
You missed the biggest barrier of all regarding mobile UI design which is development tools including prototyping tools that allow designers to create mock-ups experiments and follow those through.
The current state of mobile UI and mobile applications breaks down into one of three areas.
Native device application; here we are essentially talking Symbian UIQ (Sony), Series 60 (Nokia) and Windows Mobile native applications. These applications require highly skilled people to code and take time to build test and implement. This puts the UI designer in an even harder place than normal because all changes, even small ones can be an exponentially large amount of effort. I think its telling that a lot of people do UI mockups and prototypes using pocketpc’s when writing native applications :)
Java based applications; write once run everywhere. Oh but except for… ;) The UI designer has perhaps the ability to be more hands on but there is still a big gulf between concepting user interaction and user experience and the work of actually creating these things.
Flash/XHTML applications: Here we get to some sort of equilibrium, two technologies a lot of designers know and use. Both created with layout somewhere towards the forefront. Here mockups and experimentation is more than possible. However Flash comes on no phones that are widely available, the ones that do have flash lite 1.1 which anyone will tell you is sucky. Also it costs per device. So flash is being relegated to purely mock-ups and experiments. XHTML is everywhere though, however creating any sort of integrated experience with XHTML is not going to happen. For someone to get to your web pages they need to unlock their phone, find the web browser, start it, go to your site via a bookmark, wait for the loading and then they can start. Consider that mobile is all about switching between focuses and passive interactions and you will see the issues anyone wanting to do good interaction with mobiles isn’t so into xhtml.
So basically we have a problem where its either very expensive and problematic but possible to create good UI and good user experience with mobiles or its easy to develop but very hard to go beyond the clunky confines of xhtml browsers on mobiles.
Its not impossible to do these things, I just think from my experiences its actually easy to come up with mobile interactions that work and engage people, its just incredibly difficult to first build prototypes and then follow through to a product all the time balancing budget, time and quality unless your a very large company like Opera or even bigger like Nokia. This is why you are not seeing the sort of thing you see on the web or the mac, where people develop things for fun or because they see a niche. Everything is so tedious and brittle on the mobile, and for some reason it feels like the mobile operators and the handset manufactures want to make it this hard.
I enjoyed the article however lots of interesting things.
John, as a software engineer for mobile applications I pretty much agree. However it’s questionable if only a big team investing big money can make the (mobile) world a better place. By the way, we’re working hard towards a Windows Mobile based “platform” enabling fast prototyping and development of robust, higly responsive “native” mobile applications. Right now it still does require programming skills but it’s our declared aim to enable non-programmers building serious applications. Thanks for the encouragement.
Hi Tamberg, perhaps I should make it clear that I didnt mean only big teams with lots of money can make a difference.
My point (at least what I was trying to say) is that its currently hard for everyone and the trade offs tend to work in favour of the big teams with money purely because if there is a problem money and people can be thrown at it. For example I understand s60 API documentation is terrible and one partial solution is to pay to become a ‘pro’ developer.
Perhaps it doesnt seem like a big deal but if your a small interaction design firm or just a guy with a great idea then its not like the web where the bar for entry is hosting a domain name and a text editor.
Mobile stuff is hard for everyone but money always greases the wheels :)
I agree, it would be easier to come up with better mobile experiences if UI prototyping tools were available.
development of the mobile UI lacks standardization which the post browser-war era ushered in. since the UI forms a big part of their USP, it’s in the manufacturer’s best interest to make things more animated and ‘jazzed up’ with each new model. it’s not surprising to frequently see the same functions being classified differently across models and brands.
presenting web applications in mobile browsers has its own set of challenges. completing form fields (the backbone of most web applications) becomes a complex task if you can’t use a mouse/tab key to switch between fields. there are usually 2 different text input modes, one for alphabets and one for numbers/special characters. a user will typically need to switch between both just to enter their email@address.com. although text completetion tools like T9 (www.t9.com) are changing this, the list of impediments just grows when you consider the fact that most people use these devices while walking, driving, etc (it’s a mobile!).
a lot of designers have begun listing mobile design as one of the services they provide, so i’m sure we’ll soon have a zeldman-like samurai to make the mobilespace a better world to develop in :)
I worked in mobile UI design for about 3 years at a company called Nascent Form before it folded about a year ago.
My forte was the graphics side and understanding usability from a graphic design perspective contributing to concepts for interface possibilities etc. Everything visual - you can see some small examples on my site.
The idea was that we could try and make information more accessible, easier and fun to use than standard UIs on phones. The most interesting project we worked on was a phone for people who had very little physical motor control and couldn’t ordinarily type a phone number into a mobile never mind texting a large message. It was designed specifically for people with paralysis. We were working with O2 on this particular number, and was very successful in trial.
There are tons of possibilities with this field - but the people who need convincing are the people with the money - the network operators and the mobile phone manufacturers. I find that designers will try to do their best with what they have but is people aren’t gonna lay done some hard cash for this advancements we’ll be constantly stuck in the rut of shoe-horning desktop OS features into tiny screen retail space.
Check out www.nextdevice.co.uk - these guys are looking into this problem too, in fact the guys who set this up are ex Nascent Form - great chaps.
Great post Brian. I think you summed up the problem nicely.
The good news is that more people are taking an interest in mobile design. If you check out the student projects from Berkeley’s School of Information, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago Institue of Design, etc, it seems like mobile is the hottest specialty in the grad schools right now.
The bad news continues to be the mobile carriers. Having examined the carriers from inside and out I’m pretty sure that they don’t have the users’ best interests in mind. Carriers can also be blamed for bad device interfaces, since they make the device purchasing decisions increasingly specify the functionality.
Sadly, there’s been no indication that MVNO’s can change things and make money. And if one does start to change things, we can guess what the carriers will do…
I’ve never understood why phone designers have not come up with the most obvious solution - a touch screen phone that can have several interfaces displayed depending on the function.
I have a Treo with touchscreen and a Razr. The Treo is way too big partly because of the unnecessary keyboard and the Razr just has a lousy interface.
Why can’t I have a phone like the Razr that opens to two touchscreens - one for display and one for input. That way when I’m using it as a phone it can display input numbers and when I’m using it to text message it displays alpha input. (not that I would ever text message - what exactly is the point in taking 10 times as long to communicate in garbled shorthand when I’m holding a phone?)
The input display could be mapped to anything - different languages, game controls, customized, whatever.
This would allow the phone hardware to become seperate from the display software and would make the phone infinitely more usable.
Dear Sir ,
I got 1 question have to ask :
1.Can you tell me Mobile phone , television , camera and PDA their shortcomings and suggesting how the usability and interface design might lead to a better design ?
I hope sir can reply my question as soon as possible.
Thank you
It’s interesting that you mention bad UI design as a huge barrier to data services being used by US consumers while you also mention that this doesn’t stop people in other countries from using them heavily. Perhaps, the problem is not in the UI? Perhaps, it’s the fact that Americans don’t take the time to learn how to use their devices properly. I’m not sure why that is. It’s either lack or curiosity, laziness or worse. When I was in Spain I saw folks in their late 40’s and even 50’s text, send photos and even do video chat on their phones. How many US consumers of their age have any idea how to do any of this? Half the people here don’t know how to check text messages or voice mail. And not because it’s difficult to do.
Indeed, very true article to state of mobile computing.
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