Adaptive Path Blog

Next week will see all of the big players (and most of the small ones) in Barcelona. They are gathering for the Mobile World Congress conference. You can expect to see all kinds of interesting announcements from device manufacturers and carriers. It’s already rumored that a prototype running Google’s Android will be on display.

This week two early announcements caught my eye. Funambol will be showing off new push email and sync services. I really like this company because they bring what are traditionally enterprise-only services to the masses via open source development. For example, they recently announced over-the-air sync services for the iPhone via both a web-app and a native app for “jailbroken” devices. Instead of relying on Apple to give its users this service, Funambol rallied the open source community to solve the problem. Similarly, Windows Mobile users (like me) who don’t have access to Microsoft’s Exchange Server can use their sync app/service in place of the native ActiveSync. Funambol is partnering with ISP’s and carriers to bring products to users as well as developing Android apps for the next generation of devices. Like Google, they are embracing open source in order to change the marketplace of mobile and this change will only help users who are clamoring for better and more usable apps on their smartphones.

Yesterday, Opera Mobile 9.5 was previewed and all I can say is WOW. Read Write Web has a good breakdown of the new features and below is a video showing off the soon-to-be-released browser. Just like mobile Safari, this version of Opera Mobile displays real web pages and allows the user to zoom in for reading detail. Unlike the iPhone, this browser supports Flash Lite. I am also intrigued by the opportunities that offline browsing and the widget support offers. If you subscribe to the notion that a web browser will be the center of a great mobile experience, then you have see Opera as a strong player here. The feature set of this browser offers a framework to replace most every function of a mobile operating system. Additionally, they are beating the latest mobile IE (Deepfish) to the market and Firefox mobile is just getting started. Opera Mobile is a mature product now and is leading the pack for user- and developer-focused features.

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I’ll put it out there…. I think that this year we will see some terrific mobile interfaces. We’re just wrapping up CES and the second week of January and already there’s so much promise. After next week’s MacWorld expo and whatever announcements Apple has in store for the iPhone, I predict that we will be even more excited about mobile UX.

Google’s new Android operating system shows promise for bringing terrific experiences. Based on what Google has already shown us, the user experience was front and center during product design. Add to this the openness of the new platform allowing developers to build the best apps without restrictions.

Yahoo! released a new version of Go, a free download for your mobile that brings together all of the Y! services into one slick application. This app also allows developers to create widgets that plug-in to the Go framework. While the 3.0 version doesn’t yet work on my Windows Mobile device, I was really happy with it’s predecessor and this new one looks to fix my core issue: customizing functionality. Offering an application framework that will work on EVERY smartphone, instead of focusing on one carrier or device is a good move.

Microsoft is working on Windows Mobile 7. Screenshots and interaction models have been leaked, showing a bunch of great improvements. Of course, Microsoft is borrowing a bit from Apple and the iPhone with a touchscreen and accelerometer. I am a fan the WinMo operating system, having worked with HTC for a bit and used an 8525 for the last year. I think we’ll start to see some interesting multi-touch coming to mobile from the Surface UX team up in Redmond.

All three of the the big guys above are poised to bring some terrific innovations to users. What I am most excited about, however, is what smaller groups are doing right now. There’s the hackers who wanted more from their iPhone pushing Apple to release an SDK. There’s .NET, Java and Ajax developers building tons of great, small apps for their respective mobile platforms. And then there’s PointUI who said “we can create a better experience” and just did it. I have been using the PointUI Home interface replacement for Windows Mobile for a week and it’s awesome! Home is a thin app that sits on top of the standard OS interface. Many of the lessons learned from the iPhone, such as large hit targets gestures and simplicity have been incorporated. Check out this video or download the free software for yourself.

By no means do I think that the mobile space is going to be all roses. There will be the continued bickering between carriers, hand-held manufacturers, designers and users. There will still be attempts to woo customers with goofy features over tangible benefits. Nonetheless, after just a couple weeks into 2008, I think that we are in for one awesome year in mobile.

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I was at Rich Web Experience last week and Yahoo’s Bill Scott presented a session on his recently unveiled prototyping library. It’s called Protoscript and he’s written a blog post as well. Both of these sources get technical fairly quickly so the implications may not be immediately obvious to non-programmers. Even though Protoscript is still very much a work in progress and there’s some distance between its current state and Bill’s vision for its future, the opportunities it opens up are are exciting.

The driving force behind this library is Bill’s opinion that “Prototyping is too hard for non-techies”. I wouldn’t make quite the same blanket statement, but I do agree that some of the most useful, effective prototyping approaches do require developer resources or developer assistance. These technical resources are not always readily available. Protoscript shifts the requirements and ultimately will allow designers with little or no actual coding expertise to rapidly prototype in an interesting way.

The Protoscript bookmarklet allows you ‘inject’ Ajax behaviors into existing web pages. That means you can start with an html mockup or a client’s existing site as a starting point and try all sorts of different approaches. Do you have a list of items somewhere on a web page? Want to see what it would be like if they were drag and drop elements? Want to see what it would look like if you could delete list elements and have them fade and disappear? Somebody asks to see what they would look like in some sort of accordion layout? Imagine being able to run through those three iterations in the space of 10 minutes. Now imagine being able to do that as a designer without a developer to help you.

Being able to get by without development resources will require the completion of the GUI interface Bill envisions but even in its current state, Protoscript could fundamentally change work flows. A designer and a developer can sit together over a common screen run through ideas in a much more lightweight way than they currently can. Or, in other words, Protoscript shifts this type of prototyping from a multi-day email interchange with the IT department to something that feels more like sketching quickly on whiteboard.

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I did an interview with Bill Scott and Karon Weber a couple weeks ago discussing the content for their upcoming session at UX Week. It should be an intriguing session and I’m looking forward to hearing more about their experience. On a selfish note, as I’m doing a session on prototyping at UX Week as well, I was interested to see how critical having a working prototype was to their process and the success they achieved with their project.

I’m a big fan of prototyping. Over the last couple of years, I’ve accumulated more and reasons for this attitude. I’ve generated wireframes, I’ve developed from wireframes and I’ve developed from large specifications documents. Increasingly, the frustrations around these approaches have caught up with me. They have felt more and more like a set of old clothes that no longer quite fit. Assuming you are fortunate enough to have a process that allows some sort of iteration and collaboration between developers and designers, trying to collaborate with designers by passing wireframes back and forth is loaded with hidden costs. I like to think I can visualize with the best of them, but often the results of IxD or IA decisions don’t really become apparent until I am actually confronted with them in an interactive fashion. Even focusing purely on development concerns, there’s an entire class of problems that you never see until you’re halfway down the road to implementation. Prototypes, by pushing some form of implementation early, can help avoid unpleasant surprises late in your product development cycle.

Fortunately, it’s getting easier and easier. As Ajax settles in and becomes more common place, and as the front end developer talent pool deepens, it becomes easier to find people that can use a library of interaction scripts to mock up much more interactive html/css/javascript than before. There are open source frameworks that allow developers to build out entire applications in a fraction of the time it use to take. While these applications may not be suitable for a public launch, they are an excellent method for exploring the problem at hand in a way that all the interested stakeholders can immediately apprehend. There are also more and more 3rd party tools designed addressing this niche with varying degrees of robustness and effectiveness.

We’re on the rising curve of this trend. There are are plenty of contexts where wireframes themselves seem to be an adventurous leap of faith. Still, this is going to be an interesting area for growth both as we get better at creating prototypes and better at using processes that can take advantage of them.

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It’s long been my belief that the perceived dichotomy between design and development, a dichotomy that is often fostered by both, exists to the detriment of both. The potential negative impact of of this dichotomy has increased as recent developments continue to challenge us. To use Ajax and RIA’s effectively requires expertise that spans both design and development. On another front entirely, as we move into the realm of service design, we enter a territory whose constraints and possibilities are unfamiliar to us.

This was brought to mind again several months ago as I was listening to a presentation given by a hardware designer. In discussing how closely, or not, some hardware designers work with manufacturers he posited a dichotomy between design integrity and manufacturing priorities. My hackles rose instantly. The implication was that there was some clear and pure design vision and that anything that pushed back against it was to be avoided. Including, evidently, the real world. Clear design vision is a wonderful thing but it doesn’t mean that there are not real physical and manufacturing constraints to building products that designers should be aware of. I was disheartened but not surprised to hear a sentiment so familiar to us in the web applications world. Designers can be deeply distrustful of the developers that are actually going to make their visions and ideas real.

Here is one of the few effective keys to the design problem — the ability of the designer to recognize as many of the constraints as possible — his willingness and enthusiasm for working within these constraints. Constraints of price, of size, of strength, of balance, of surface, of time and so forth.

- Charles Eames

Developers work in an environment of constraints. There are only so many developers or a limited amount of time. The database will only fetch the data so fast. There is often amongst developers, just like designers, a strong desire to find technically elegant solutions. These elegant solutions are not reached by being willfully ignorant of the constraints or being negligent about learning what is actually possible. But, whether or not an elegant solution can be found, the ultimate metric of success for developers is “Does it work?”.

So what do we do? One simple answer is that we work more closely together. This is easier with smaller teams. Significant web applications can and are being built with fewer than 10 people involved from start to finish. Even in cases where larger teams are unavoidable, approaches that involve prototyping or some sort of iterative cycle can be useful. Aside from their other benefits, these approaches can ‘game’ the corporate structure to get the right people in the same rooms on a regular basis. With increased exposure, both developers and designers get a much better sense of each other’s expertise and concerns. With increased exposure we both get better at finding the place where the possible and the ideal come together. Most importantly, we get to align behind the realization that we are all trying to build an application that we’re proud of and we’re trying to do it together.

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I attended O’Reilly’s RailsConf last week in Portland Oregon. What a difference a year makes. There were 550 attendees at last year’s sold out conference. This year’s conference, moved to a larger venue, also sold out early with a final head count of 1600 participants. It’s a testament to the continued growth of Rails as a platform and makes it clear that Rails isn’t going to disappear. Now that at week has slipped by, looking back at the conference I’m left with several distinct thoughts.

I presented a session on Design for Developers that was standing room only, clearly indicating a trend that I’ve been pointing to for the last couple of years. Rails, other similar frameworks, Ajax and the increasing adoption of Agile inspired development practices have pushed developers to work more and more closely with designers. With Rails in particular, developers often find themselves challenged directly with design questions. This has left a real thirst in the developer community in general and the Rails community in particular for guidance and information around issues of design. There’s a real opportunity for practitioners on both sides of the developer/designer divide to help each other work more effectively and share information.

Judging by the keynotes, there seemed to be a lot of concern about whether Rails is ready for the Enterprise or not. This echoed conversations at last years RubyConf as well. Maybe I’m not reading the right blogs but curiously, this question doesn’t seem to take up as much space in the general community dialog. I don’t know if it’s even the right question. An impromptu, raised hands survey during one of the keynotes revealed approximately a third of the attendees came from a Java background. As Java developers in enterprise become increasingly interested in and enamored by Rails, it will leak into the enterprise environment whether management wants it there or not. Initially small projects will get done in Rails where there is a management blind eye. With a foothold established, it will be easier to employ Rails as an approach to larger and larger projects. JRuby and the associated ability to deploy rails apps to existing Java application servers is only going to exacerbate this trend .

And finally…Twitter Twitter Twitter. It’s clear that Twitter is going to be the poster child of Rails scaling issues both good and bad. Scaling has always been a perceived achilles heel for Rails applications and Twitter’s tremendous growth has resulted in some visible hiccups. Progress has been clear though and it’s likely that were will be solutions for most of the Rails specific performance issues in the near future.

All in all, it was a great conference and a pleasure to participate. I can’t wait until next year’s.

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