Greedy Mobile Interfaces
by Rachel Hinman
It’s a sad but common sight in modern society – a person walking around in the world, utterly disengaged, head buried in a mobile device – a victim of the visually greedy mobile interface.
Sure, one might argue there’s more to blame than the interface, like our growing Pavlovian response to phone calls and messages and the “always on” expectation, or our strange and ravenous human need to consume more and more information and media.
But as designers, how much control do we really have over those issues?
What we do have some semblance of control over are interfaces and it is curious that we rely so heavily on the sense of sight to guide users through technology experiences. Ask anybody with a vision impairment who uses a computer or a mobile phone, visually-driven interfaces dominate the technology landscape.
On the PC, we can get away with it. But the dominance of visually-driven interfaces become especially problematic in the mobile context. Design principles and conventions like WYSIWYG and GUI become brittle and broken on small devices. The screens are simply too small and the requirements of the mobile context too great to support interfaces that are visually demanding. Even the lauded and successful iPhone demands we disengage with the world and worship it’s visual luster during use.
The thing is, humans are actually pretty good at knowing where things are even when we can’t see them. The sound of the fire truck, the smell of the garbage, the vibration of an earthquake… our senses are tuned to innately tell us about the world around us. Unfortunately, these instincts haven’t been finely tuned with regard to our behaviors around information and technology. We rely heavily on sight.
How do we break this pattern?
Swing for the fences when thinking about senses. Leverage context, gesture, haptics and sound to convey information.
Admittedly, thinking about interfaces that engage our sense of touch, smell, and hearing can feel wonky, weird … preposterous even. It’s largely unchartered territory without the guideposts and maps of the typical, visually-driven approach to interface design.
However, it feels like letting ourselves explore the land of the senses is the only way to start to break the dominance of the greedy, visually-driven interfaces and deliver mobile experiences and interactions that - as Adam Greenfield says - dissolve into behavior.
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May 27th, 2008 at 1:28 am
Some starting points for those struggling with this issue: Dourish’s book, this (and other) posts by Matt Jones.
May 27th, 2008 at 8:38 am
[...] is not something that supports mobile use. We need to move mobile apps in the right direction and break the trend that leads to heads-down interaction, or lack of use entirely. «« interview with [...]
May 27th, 2008 at 11:32 pm
[...] adaptive path » blog » Rachel Hinman » Greedy Mobile Interfaces “…letting ourselves explore the land of the senses is the only way to start to break the dominance of the greedy, visually-driven interfaces and deliver mobile experiences and interactions that - as Adam Greenfield says - dissolve into behavior.” (tags: beingintheworld awareness engagement senses visual mobility physical interactions) [...]
May 30th, 2008 at 10:06 am
An example of how we’re taking a step backward here is Apple’s new iPhone / iPod Touch interface. With earlier iPods, you could do all the most common actions - starting or pausing, skipping to the next track, adjusting the volume, entirely by touch with one hand, without even looking at the device. With the new devices, such as the ironically named iPod “Touch”, you can’t interact by touch alone. You have to look at the screen to know where the controls are. Added to that, they’re often positioned so that it’s awkward to reach the buttons when holding the device in one hand.
So, we’ve gone from having to only use one hand, to having to have both hands, plus the eyes, engaged to do even the most simple operations…
June 20th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Rachel, I agree with you. Isn’t a great deal of the problem the sheer volume of features the interface is trying to handle? I see interfaces as portals to all the devise can do. The smaller the portal, the more intense attention (disengaging) is required of the user. There appears to be a presumption that a mobile device should do everything a computer can. Why?
I think we are paying a high price (albeit hidden one) with all of this mobile feature creep. You pointed a good one out in your article. But, there are more serious ones as well. As a cyclist, I have become increasing concerned of distractions for drivers. It only takes one diverted glance to a mobile device UI to take someone like me out for good.
July 23rd, 2008 at 7:27 am
[...] of heads-down behavior are, as I mentioned already, obvious for consumers on mobiles, and promise to get worse [...]
September 16th, 2008 at 3:30 am
[...] iPhone demands we disengage with the world and worship it’s visual luster during use. [from Rachel Hinman’s Adaptive Path [...]
October 12th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
A lot has changed in the year since this study; the release of the iPhone in June of 2007 and Google’s Android platform in November 2007 were watershed moments for the mobile Internet – improving the experience and opening up opportunities for usage that simply didn’t exist before,What has been exciting me most about mobile these days is that exact challenge… figuring out what metaphors and models to keep and what to leave behind as we try to prism Internet content through a myriad of devices, Yeah!!! send those greed bastards to us and we’ll exploit them! http://www.greedypeople.com