Adaptive Path Blog

2008 was truly a milestone year for mobile. In an industry that has long felt downtrodden by a multitude of technical and business constraints, wild and exciting inflection points burst like fireworks across the mobile landscape, bringing visibility to our industry and renewing our hopes.

One of the most notable shifts in 2008 was a new found enthusiasm around the topic of mobile user experience. What are the trends to watch in 2009? Here are three edges I think are worth tracking:

Sexy User Interfaces for All!
Most of us will agree that mobile user interfaces of the past were featured-laden, complex and off-putting for most users. They were lifeless, dull and failed to capture the hearts and imagination of users because they possessed no intuitive qualities. Design decisions were largely based on product design; user interface was an afterthought.

In 2008, we were introduced to glimpses of inspired mobile user interfaces on high-end devices that stood in stark contrast to their predecessors. Whether the cleverness of parallax sliding on of the Android G1 UI, the whimsical transitions of the HTC Diamond, or the “gosh that’s cool” response to applications like Koi Pond and Urban Spoon, these interfaces introduced UI design that was clever, creative and intuitive.

2009 will be the year inspired mobile UI design goes mainstream. Customers at every price point will refuse to suffer the foolishness of the rational, lifeless mobile UIs from the past. They’ll see user interface design as important as the product design. Customers will demand to see live demos of phones in stores so they can interact with the devices. Creativity and invention in UI design will triumph over the logic and consistency of the past.

As a result, we will continue to see innovation in mobile UI design. We’ll be wowed by designers who push boundaries, question assumptions, and take creative risks. They will create evocative information visualizations, push the capabilities of touch screens and gestural UI in exciting and creative ways. 2009 will be remembered as the year mobile UI became intuitive, creative… and inspired.

The emergence of interfaces that anticipate intent
As much as folks in the mobile user experience field proselytize mobile devices are fundamentally different than PCs, we admittedly borrow metaphors, organizational models and design principles from the PC to create mobile experiences. Applications as an organizing principle, task-based design, search, browsers, web pages, GUI and WYSIWYG… all models, principles and metaphors borrowed from the PC legacy and applied to the mobile user experience with limited success. These pillars of design in the PC realm become brittle and broken in the mobile context because screens are too small, the mobile context too variable, and the cognitive load too great for people to fuss about with their phones. We inherently know mobile devices are different than PCs, but figuring out how to design for those differences proves a challenge. Too often we borrow from the PC instead of invent for mobile.

Mobile designers have long emphasized the importance of context in mobile user experience, and rightly so. It’s the easiest way to communicate the fundamental difference between designing for a PC and designing for a mobile device. However, as more folks from the user experience community engage with mobile, the less the utility this term serves because it’s simply overwhelming and difficult to grok. Mobile phones are used everywhere – in bedrooms, on the bus, while walking down the street – in the bathroom, even. The mobile context is vast and highly variable so advising people to design for it not terribly helpful. However, what context can help us understand is. Context can sometimes serve as a proxy to understand user intent. If we know where someone is, we can better understand what they might be trying to achieve. Context speaks to our desire to decrypt complexity in order to better understand user intent.

The brittleness of PC metaphors on mobile devices coupled with the concept of context speaks to an emergent and important trend on the horizon – smart and intuitive interfaces that predict user intent through an understanding of relationships.

Throughout 2008 I heard thought leaders within the user experience community hint at a future where interfaces possessed these qualities. Dennis Wixon, the user research manager for Microsoft’s Surface Table, spoke at UX Week about the rise of NUI (natural user interfaces) that leverage sensors, gesture and touch found on the iPhone and Surface Table. He predicted the next wave of UIs will be organic in nature, possessing fluid, extensive and anticipatory qualities. Dennis’ prediction was echoed by Leland Rechis, of Google, at the Informatics User Experience Conference in November. Leland spoke of Google’s work on relational mobile interfaces that break the world of data down into verbs and nouns. These mobile interfaces will use an understanding of relationships and context to predict information delivery and compile intuitive options based on that data.

In 2009, we’ll see begin to see glimpses of these types of predictive mobile systems. They’ll leverage sensors, algorithms, gesture and use patterns to decrypt context in order to predict our information needs – and hopefully not in a creepy, artificial intelligence kinda way. These mobile interfaces will be less about enabling users to complete discreet tasks and more about sensing what users want and delivering intuitive options. Content will not become the interface, predictive systems that understand our relationship to the world and can predict what we want will.

The Internet will begin to shape-shift
Finally, much of my work over the last four years has focused on improving the Internet experience on mobile devices. I’ve been pleased as punch to see mobile web usage skyrocket into the stratosphere in the last 18 months. Gone are the days when users were forced to endure crippled WAP sites and carrier decks. Devices released in 2008 made way for vast improvements in Internet access through both browsers and applications that utilize micro-formatted data from the web.

At a recent talk in Adelaide, Australia, Intel ethnographer Genevieve Bell proclaimed the Internet has gone feral. It’s certainly changing but I would actually describe what is going on with the Internet these days as shape-shifting. People throughout the world are accessing the Internet through devices other than a PC, and the web is shifting and re-forming in ways that accommodate those needs.

It’s difficult to predict the shape-shifting form the Internet will take, but one thing is certain; mobile will greatly influence the evolution of the Internet. The Pew Internet & American Life Project recently released their third “future of the Internet” and predicts that mobile devices will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people in the world in 2020.

This evolution of the Internet will not be lead by handset manufacturers or carriers, despite declaring their intentions to focus on software and services. I doubt it will be lead by big Internet companies, either. Instead the people who will lead the shape-shifting of the Internet will be of the same type of people who built and grew the original Internet. In 2009, we’ll see a groundswell of ordinary people with a great idea open up SDKs and create modest little mobile web apps that revolutionize the world. Watch closely, ladies and gentlemen. Things are about to change in a very big way.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 4:48 pm and is filed under Gestural Interfaces, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Mobile, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.