As you can probably tell, I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek with the title of this post, just for the sake of provocation. But I actually do have a theory about how to design great mobile apps. I've been floating the idea with colleagues lately, and it's been producing great results: Strongly opinionated responses, for and against!
Here it is: There are two things about mobile that are fundamentally different from web designed for the desktop / laptop, two things that are really cool about mobile. They are location awareness and constant access to your relationships. Where those two factors intersect is the sweet spot of great mobile design.
Your mobile device knows where you are. As our creative director said to me in one of his wild rants (yes you, Tim), good mobile is all about "information about your surroundings." I agree, but I'd add that your mobile device also knows who you know. It knows how to contact the people you know, it knows what they're saying, and it gives them a way to contact you. It's a portal into all your relationship channels--good mobile is also all about portable access to your people.
Good mobile design, says me, taps into one of those two unique attributes of mobile. And great mobile design taps into them both.
I also say no manifesto worth its salt lacks a Venn diagram. Therefore:
Some smart people have voiced objections to this idea, including that there are some really cool games out there for mobile that have nothing to do with location awareness or sociability. I've even been called on my recent defense of triviality in light of this argument. Fair enough. But I'm sticking to my guns.
I'm not saying everything for mobile has to fall into this framework to be worthwhile. I'm just saying great mobile design--game-changing, market-defining, indispensable design--takes full advantage of the unique benefits of mobile. Ms. Pac-Man might be pretty fun controlled by the iPhone's accelerometer, but just because it's kind of cool doesn't mean it's great design.
Here's an example that I think illustrates what I'm talking about.
Helio's "buddy beacon" feature takes advantage of both location awareness and access to the contacts list. (Disclosure: Helio is a client.) Buddy beacons represent people in your contact list, and it displays their locations on a map. You can see where your people are, and you can also see their status: Are they busy, available, on the phone, etc.
Helio has taken the instant messaging metaphors of presence and status, and extended them into a location context.
Pretty nice. There are some limitations, though: Only other Helio customers show up, and there's no seamless way to contact buddies directly through the map. In the era of open standards and touchscreen interfaces, this doesn't quite cut the mustard.
There are plenty of other easy examples. Finding nearby restaurants is cool, and seeing customers' ratings and reviews of those restaurants is even cooler. But cooler yet would be to show restaurants visited by people you know--a shared restaurant landscape of opinions, experiences, and preferences. It's not hard to imagine all kinds of extensions of relatively simple ideas: Just ask, how do we add geographic and social context to create value?
Poof! Mobile design made easy. What do you think?
Nokia has a similar application to Helio's Buddy Beacon called Nokia Chat http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/chat . The nice thing about this app is that it runs on a number of Nokia phone (s60 smartphones) and is based on XMPP/Jabber the open standard IM protocol. So if you are a Google user or use another Chat protocol based on Jabber you are good to go. It doesn't support AIM, MSN, Yahoo, though.
Posted by: Beau | January 06, 2009 at 02:20 PM