MomoLondon: Tablets Come of Age

The B&N NOOK Developer Workshop was followed by a panel session. I found the discussion interesting in confirming my experience of tablets being used in a completely different way to laptops or smart phones. The hardware format is ideal for families and children to share the device, and apps and services that make use of this multi-user perspective are faring well. The conversation was peppered with stats from both Marek and Hesham (of MEX and comScore)

• Chair: Marek Pawlowski @marekpawlowski — Founder & Organiser, MEX
• Stuart Dredge @stuartdredge — Freelance Journalist
  • writes various apps columns, including apps playground kids apps review site and the Guardian apps blog
• Hesham Al-Jehani — Product Manager, Mobile, comScore
• Ben Scott Robinson @bcsr — Creative Director, We Love Mobile
• Claudia Romanini — Director, Developer Relations, Barnes & Noble

Why tablets? User stories

• BSR: Ben’s mum (70+) was not comfortable with touch-screen phones — the interface was too small for her. An iPad was much more comfortable — she was much happier to play with it
• CR: is a mum of a 7yo. This year she asked for a tablet for Xmas… As a parent CR was nervous, but has been happy since Nook is focussed on reading. Nook feels safe.
  • most time is shared with parent, but as getting older and able to read by herself, more time by herself
• SD: collaborative shopping for presents — on the tablet on the sofa
  • every night we have half an hour of iPad time
  • Peppa Me Books: peppa pig but you can re-record all the voices
  • kids insist that someone joins in with them
• HAJ: has an 18 mth old daughter - she finds it and sits on dad’s lap and says “entertain me!”
  • watches “In the night garden” videos
  • mother also engages much more with tablet
• MP: 21% of US tablet use is lying horizontally in bed (considerably higher than smartphones)
  • more acceptable in a family context…

Is the original Kindle a tablet? e-Ink versus colour display?

• Audience member reading more due to Kindle
• CR: Nook Colour positioned as a reader’s tablet
  • Android transformed into a reading experience
  • consumers want an undisturbed, dedicated reading experience
  • reading long-form novels (don’t want to be bothered charging)
  • colour device allows people to read magazines
• HAJ: 92% of tablet usage is over wifi
  • indicated sedentary (stationary) usage
  • 75% of Android access over 3G compared to 70% of iOS access on WiFi
  • perhaps indicates iOS users are data-hungry
  • peak around 12pm where PC traffic eclipses everything else
  • around the evening (9-11pm) tablet traffic takes over
  • weight of the iPad is an issue when lying down
  • people are complaining about neck & shoulder injuries from iPad use…
• BSR: still stuck with finger on glass; thinner and lighter screens will be welcome
  • Morris Lessmore won an Oscar — being taken seriously but a long way to go

Content types: what’s working well?

• CR: B&N customers are predominantly “moms” aged 25-45
  • B&N stores have Nook tables
  • in the US target audience doesn’t really buy apps
  • approaches device from a content perspective
  • children & education are key categories (and under-developed in Android world)
  • 1/3rd apps in B&N catalogue are children’s apps (other 2/3rds split between games and lifestyle)

Where’s the web on tablets?

Dan Appelquist @torgo

• BSR: for news, no reason why you can’t create these experiences through HTML
• MP: disney started to take their apps in a different direction from content — see AppMAtes
• SD: HTML5 being used for content, possibly wrapped in native container for discovery & sales
• CR: magazines

Why limit tablet to magazines? Extend to movies? Compete or complement current entertainment?

• CR: entry point is digital books, but certainly buying other entertainment products
  • especially for Nook Tablet
  • think it complements & extends entertainment experience
  • entertainment content is huge for our customers
• BSR: tablets are the saviour of TV ads — intent to purchase, etc
  • tablets used in conjunction with TV (see zeebox et al)
  • radio is still a growing medium, despite the introduction of the TV and the internet
• MP: 30% of tablet usage in US is in front of TV (cf. 20% of smartphone usage)
  • people watch longer form videos on tablets than on their computers

When are we going to see some genuine competition for the iPad?

• HAJ: market segment dominated by Apple
  • 40m iPads sold in 2011, 15m in last quarter
  • 40m installed based in US
  • took 7 years for smartphones to reach 40m in US market; iPads took 2 years…
  • if there was no iPad we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about tablets
  • iPad dominates revenue, number of units (over 70%), usage (90%)
  • Kindle Fire has already sold 10m units in US
  • Apple’s share of market will shrink in 2013/14
  • tablets will eclipse PCs in the next few years
  • areas where Apple is weak: more PC-style — USB, filesystem
• CR: have sold millions of Nooks
  • many customers can’t afford an iPad
  • Nook Colour is $169 and prices go up, but still less than an iPad
• Audience: Dell have abandoned Android but have said they can see a place for themselves with a Windows 8 tablet

What about pens instead of fingers?

David Wood @dw2

• HAJ: welcome development that pens are making a comeback
  • writing your signature
• SD: crayola did an app and sold a big fat crayon with it
  • felt like it was getting the wrong end of the stick…
  • other than signing things, what’s the killer app for a stylus
• HAJ: scribbling notes?
• SD: but I much prefer to type!
• BSR: David Hockney using an iPad to paint (often using Brushes for iPad)
  • using styli (bits of wood at different sizes)
• MP: actually capacitative touch screens are worse at figuring out handwriting than resistive screens
  • seeing new stylus development to fix this

post-PC?

• SD: for some older people who never got used to PCs, tablets are a way in
• CR: not there yet, but using tablet more and more for non-PC things
  • still using laptop for email (prefer keyboard)
• MP: more comfortable taking a tablet into the kitchen
  • what kinds of things make things move from one device to another?
  • tends to be security and reliability concerns that shift people up in size & established reputation

keyboard + tablet form factor?

• CR: on-screen keyboards not good enough
• BSR: problem is carrying keyboard around
  • fold it up — back to a laptop!
• HAJ: ASUS Tranformer is a great idea
• SD: iMac is already a giant tablet with a wireless keyboard…
  • voice is coming soon…
• MP: keyboard starts becoming important when people spend more time creating rather than consuming
  • tends to be a 90/10 split at the moment…

tablets tend to get shared a lot more than phones…

• board games — multiple users at once
• BSR: looking at things then passing it over and sharing it
• SD: split screen iPad app — Pinterest for her, reddit for him!
• CR: see a lot of Nooks shared in the family
  • reading can be a personal experience
  • sharing a reading tablet could be odd
  • but in a family it’s a common thing
• SD: would be good to have a locked down mode
  • no in-app purchases,
• HAJ: screen lock — avoiding kids pressing home button to exit the app
• SD: Famigo Sandbox: android app that sets permitted app list & behaviour

what tablet would you be using in 3 years?

• CR: focus on content rather than the device
  • would love to see content become transparent — shouldn’t matter if it’s a book or a magazine or an app
• BSR: would like a piece of paper!
  • get away from the “finger on glass”
  • need 3D & haptics for a more tactile experience
• HAJ: windows 8 tablet — dragging & dropping content to and from PC
  • Nokia tablet?
• SD: don’t want skeuomorphs of what went before
  • no d-pads on the screen, or page turning

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Upcoming Events

• next Mobile Monday London: Demo Night! — 2nd April
• MEX 2012 — 9th & 10th May
• Over The Air — 1st & 2nd June at Bletchley Park

MomoLondon: Living in a Multi-Platform World

Another Mobile Monday on fragmentation of platforms, but this time hosted by a big company just about to launch yet another platform… The Microsoft reps seemed to come on a little strong tonight. So much so that I started to tune out when it was their turn to talk.

Nick Lansley from Tesco.com was a new face at Mobile Monday — and had some good things to say. He seems to have his head screwed on right about where to take Tesco.com in the face of multiple platforms and a wide spread of consumers (it’s the API, stoopid).

Tom Hume of Future Platforms also gave some interesting insights — I like his idea of using an AdWords campaign to figure out the target platforms for a new product. It’s always better to measure than to guess — and the internet lets you measure everything.

Alex Reeve - Director of Mobile Business Group, MSFT UK

• it’s fair to say that MS have had their challenges in the mobile industry
• they’re fully aware of that and they’re aware that “a new dawn is coming”
• mobile is enormously important to MS
• Windows 7 coming this side of Xmas
  • integrating contact details & social connections
  • options to show thing separately or together
  • keeping pictures together (including Facebook, etc)
  • “people want Internet Explorer on their phone”
  • do they really? don’t they just want Facebook/Yahoo/BBC, etc
  • fully-editable Word documents
  • email works the same as Outlook
  • I hope not… that would be horrible
  • “Zune is mainly a product in the US only”

Panel session

Panel (and their phones):

• Chair: Marek Pawlowski
  • this is no longer just about mobile — platforms to support now extend to TVs, games consoles, etc…
  • nearly all devices can do voice
  • most can do SMS, and a lot have browsers and Java
  • Q1 this year about 18% of mobile sales were smartphones
  • 11% of market by end of this year will be smartphones
  • 3/4 of developers use an Android or an iPhone as their primary device…
• Oded Ran - Windows Phone in the UK
  • Windows Phone - HDT HD2
• Tom Hume - MD of Future Platforms
  • Nexus One
• Nick Lansley - Head of R&D at Tesco.com
  • iPhone, Nexus One (which crashes 3 times a day)
• Jerry Ennis: CEO at Flirtomatic
  • #1 mobile social network in UK, if not in Europe, according to Comscore
  • though I guess it’s dwarfed by Facebook & twitter, which are social networks that people access on mobile…
  • iPhone
• Ilio Uvarov - lead UX practice at RG/A London
  • clients such as Nike, Nokia
  • iPhone

Which mobile platform would you develop for first and why?

• NL: probably give a different answer every couple of months
  • would like to choose most common in Tesco customer base, but that would mean a phone that’s incapable
  • started with iPhone “because I had one”
  • iPhone is a “hero device” — you get much more marketing for your buck
  • but need to balance with what devices customers are using
• JE: started believing they could use downloadable Java apps
  • but wasn’t really possible
  • target market are not using Java apps, even if their phone is capable
  • have instead gone to mobile web
  • also seeing some startling usage growth from iPhone (Flirtomatic have an iPhone app that wraps a browser)
• TH: would probably cheat and spend £50 on an Adwords marketing campaign to see who was interested…
• IU: depends on target
  • business people in NYC — Blackberry
  • teenagers in middle east — Blackberry
  • hipsters in London — iPhone

What can platform providers provide to developers to attract them?

• OR: don’t want to write once, debug across multiple hardware
  • want to make money
  • choose to piggyback on a platform launching (someone else’s marketing muscle)
• NL: iPhone and Android offer push update notifications
  • really important — bug fixes are v. important to customer experience
  • Ovi falling down massively here
  • Apple also making things difficult by making updates take up to two weeks
• JE: Flirtomatic app is just a wrapper around mobile web app
  • can’t take advantage of native aspects
  • but changes can be deployed very quickly without going through Apple

Who in the audience had a bad experience of starting out on a mobile platform?

• TouchNote: went for Nokia 3rd edition (Symbian) & Ovi store
  • just not a lucid, easy experience for customers, even in comparison to Blackberry, let alone iPhone & Android

Who’s had a good experience?

• No one put up their hands!!

Do customers really take updates?

• TH: 60-70% take updates for android
  • would imagine iPhones are about the same
  • Java apps are almost impossible to get customers to update
• NL: always offer new features with bug fixes
  • every time Tesco update the Tesco Finder app, they see 99.9% of new version by the end of that day!
• IU: have about 100 pending updates on his iPhone
  • end up not using 90% of apps that you’ve downloaded
• MP: 70% of mobile web users went to 10 major brands

MS have developer lock-in for tools, will they lock-in legally like Apple?

• Silverlight & XNA plus mobile web are main ways to market on Windows Phone 7
• Haven’t finished Ts&Cs yet

Is it sustainable to support so many platforms, or will we see consolidation?

• TH: we are seeing consolidation around the web
  • don’t feel intimidated by number of platforms, as only have to deal with those that provide an audience
  • feel locked in to Apple not by legal language, but by the audience that they provide

What can platform providers do to make a new platform attractive?

• don’t make us write the app in Silverlight — let us write it in C#
• reveal the number of apps in the store — no hype
• charge less than Android & Apple (30%)
• make it easy for customers to buy cheap things with enough money going to developers

Which platform gives the best ROI? How does mobile web compare?

• JE: make money with virtual currency (80% revenues), rest from advertising
  • how do we bill people to buy virtual currency?
  • operator billing (reverse SMS), credit card, paypal
  • still 60/40, 70/30 — not so good
  • credit card still cheapest for business
  • Apple don’t let you use in-app purchases for virtual currency…
• TH: not sure that there’s a link
  • look to introduce customers with operator billing and then convert repeat customers to credit card later
• JE: operator billing is a terrible UX — sometimes a 12-step process
  • not as bad in UK, but US can be really bad

What about emerging markets? What are platforms doing?

• OR: active in two sides, services (Hotmail, etc) & devices
  • phone becomes 1st screen
  • exploring new ways of getting hold of the phone, since Windows Phone is not targeted at emerging markets
• NL: when Tesco arrives in a market, it could be said to have “emerged” already…
  • “Tesco in a box” — all systems for a new country shipped out
• MP: discussing India with major internet brand, responsible for UX
  • because device is becoming primary, there are increasing number of smartphones
  • also multiple SIM cards for each user (up to 12!!)
  • Italians have 1.77 SIM cards per subscriber, cf. 1.4 UK & 1.3 in US

Multiple platforms outside of mobile

• IU: depends on the use-case
  • things that work nicely across channels: e.g. instapaper
  • boxee: combining web, mobile & TV (can use mobile as remote)
• NL: did ethnographic research in people’s homes as to how they shop
  • calling on phones, SMS, writing messages on paper
  • wanting to allow people to add things little and often throughout the week
  • have cheated by building an API to get other people to create apps
  • e.g. Yahoo widgets on TV: watch cooking show, and add ingredients while you watch
• TH: big fan of opening up API, but how does that work as a provider? are you worried about the customer contact being mediated via a third party?
• NL: grocery shopping is not really exciting to customers
  • would rather get great ideas in front of customers
  • customers still have to login and checkout on Tesco site

What about voice as a platform?

• TH: Google introduced voice search and changed his behaviour
• MP: need to be very careful about experience:
  • experience was significantly enhanced when interacting with an avatar
• JE: tried out a voice part of app a year or two ago
  • watched my teenage daughter who never talks to people, but uses text & facebook instead
• MP: is that an opportunity? getting people to use their unused minutes!

How do you handle that your app is living on a phone with others?

• NL: Nexus One had an app using up all his minutes when in US
  • data hogging apps rapidly become unpopular
• TH: it’s one of the important things that makes the difference between mobile and desktop
  • number one feature on the iPad is battery life

What about upcoming standards: JIL, BONDI?

• NL: if you don’t make your app the best it can possibly be for that device then don’t bother
• MP: customers have one device — they’re not bothered by fragmentation

Brief summary

• IU: kept going back to UX
  • do you want to be good enough or delightfully different
• JE: all about UX — the best possible UX is using the latest features of any platform, rather than going cross-platform
  • payment is crucial, runs across different platforms
  • needs to be improved, simplified and cheaper for business
• NL: has to be relentlessly good design for every make and model of handset
  • gives you brand consistency
• TH: root causes of fragmentation are a good thing
  • mass market (2/3rds of world’s population) and extremely fast rate of change
  • developers have to get used to it
• OR: successful developers are embracing the fact that fragmentation is here to stay
• MP: “can economise on plumbing but make sure your bathroom is pretty bling”

Announcements

• Microsoft BizSparkCamp: June 22nd 9.30-5.30
  • “they want to give you things…”
• July - MomoLondon: Marketing your mobile app
• August - MomoLondon break
• September 10th & 11th - OverTheAir 2010

Apple iPhone Tech Talk London 2009: iPhone User Interface Design Essentials

Eric Hope ehope@apple.com — User Interface Evangelist

• solve a problem
• clearly defined style
  • axes: (usage) serious / fun; (content) tool / entertainment

serious tool

• use alignment well — see address book & settings for examples
• avoid redundancy
  • if a word is showing up more than once on a screen, get rid of it
• prioritise info, esp. above the fold

games (fun entertainment)

• games should be straight in — no hierarchy
  • most games are casual — you don’t know how long the user will have
• games should be multitouch enabled — most are
  • any that aren’t are frustrating
• lowercase “i” means go back to menu/options
• give loud visual feedback

serious entertainment

• stick to standard UI elements for navigation
  • the user doesn’t want to learn new things to get to their entertainment

utilities — dead centre on the grid

• as graphically rich as possible, on a single screen
• can they be run five feet away from you in a dock?
• equate to single-use appliances

essential

• one door to one room
• want a tree, not a web
• shared things should be in a modal sheet
• clean layout:
  • focus on structural integrity — as if they were real physical objects
  • the human mind feels uncomfortable if the UI would fall over if it were physical

gorgeous application icon

• one of the most underestimated and undervalued contributions
• legible:
  • one primary silhouette — can you do it in a shadow on the wall?
  • the mind parses shapes, then colours, then words
• high quality (fidelity) art
  • store is saturated with different icons
  • initial apps had equivalent to apple, but now full colour, hi quality
  • apple don’t need to change their apps — they’re built-in
• good example:
  • ramp champ — didn’t sell well due to icon ambiguity
  • pretty and well-defined, but name and icon didn’t mean much
• “your icon is your business card”
• make sure any branding doesn’t obscure silhouette

hi fidelity UI

• tactile design:
  • no intermediary to interface (mouse, keyboard)
  • want wood, leather, aluminium — increases perceived value of app
• free yourself by starting with paper prototypes

dynamic content — most essential

• your app needs a pulse
• apps have a short shelf life on the store
  • most mac apps are serious tools
  • most iphone apps are not — they’re content consumption based
• most users read what’s in the update before they upgrade
  • don’t just “fixed bugs”
  • even if you say “fixed memory leak that affected 1% of users”
  • it’s a “love letter to your customer”

add in-app purchases

• adds investment to your app
• people will come back if they’ve purchased content within your app
• even if a user only spends 99¢ on apps a week, they could spend 10 x 99¢ within a single app — increases their return on investment
• make sure that users can pick up their existing purchases when they get a new phone

animation

• e.g. springboard press and hold
• avoid continuous animation

sound

• “the forgotten frontier for iPhone development”
• 90% of non-game apps have no sound
• compulsion like a mother going to a crying baby
• e.g. mail sent sound in the background even when you’ve moved on to doing something else

polish

• standard alert is generally a bad thing
• icon for spotlight is 29x29 pixels — make sure you stand out
• don’t introduce push notifications until it’s solid
  • people will disable it and never see improvements
• support extras like copy/paste, undo/redo (generally uses shake)

app definition statement

• (your differentiator) (your solution) for (your audience)

BarCampLondon7: Supporting the masses

Tony McCrae

Experience from squadlist.co.uk — an online tool for organising rowing outings. Set up during a Guardian employee’s spare time for his own rowing club, but suddenly getting over 1000 users. He needed to support the users of the site without spending time on them.

• sort out forgotten logins
  • though have to be careful about security
  • generate nice passwords using pwgen
  • facebook isn’t permitted in some firms (so no facebook connect)
  • prompt end users to talk to someone else other than you!
• can your users be divided into groups?
  • form a relationship with one member in each group
• demo as documentation — install a full demo system with sample data and let them play
  • reset its data regularly (but make sure you tell people!)
  • Jira now has jQuery-based inline popup help
• invest in getting your domain unblocked
  • put SPF in your DNS
• even if you send from noreply@, check the volume going to it!
  • a spike may indicate something going wrong
• don’t tell everyone when changes happen
  • just senior users
• introduce new features to a smaller test group
  • enable beta group
• allow users to export their data automatically
• http://uservoice.com and http://getsatisfaction.com
  • with a forum on-site, people keep on requesting the same new features, even if you provide a roadmap
  • moving to these customer satisfaction sites means that existing feature requests no longer generate complaints!
  • instead, people vote up the existing requests
  • of course, if the requests never get monitored or picked up, you’ve still got disgruntled users
• really loud heavy users can be very powerful for good or bad
  • hire them! or at least make them happy
• gmail labs has “canned responses”
• open source core product to ensure continuity
• provide “paid for” additional capabilities

O2 Litmus launch

I went to the launch of O2 Litmus on Friday — in the form of a hack day at the O2. It was interesting to see an operator directly running a hack day. Usually they’re involved as the supporting acts in a semi-official way, like Vodafone Betavine supporting OverTheAir. The guys at O2 did a reasonable job — finding people via twitter and other events and providing solid wifi and lots of power supplies. They didn’t leave quite enough time for the hacking though, allowing too much time for O2 Litmus partners to advertise their wares in the morning.

O2 Litmus itself seems like a good proposition in business terms — the same 30/70 revenue split as the Apple App Store; a system to let developers test apps with early adopters before releasing them into the wild; and money coming through to developers just 5 weeks after purchases. O2 are also trying to support app development through their partners, providing testing and business development support.

There are a couple of pieces missing, however. One great advantage of the Apple App Store is the ease of download — one click and the app automatically downloads to your iPhone and appears in your home screen. This is much harder for general phones at large — not only do you have to make sure you’ve got the right build for your phone (a problem that Apple has avoided for now by just having one platform), but you then have to figure out your phone’s weird and wonderful download experience. Do I really want to install something that my phone tells me could be a security risk? Do I want to install it in Games or Applications? And now it’s downloaded, where did it go? (Nokia Series 60, I’m talking to you here…)

At the moment, O2 Litmus requires a separate application and description for each build, with no provision for combining builds with automatic detection, and no support for external hosting either. I suggested that they consider allowing URLs for downloads and they seemed interested — this also opens the door to web apps instead of downloadable apps. They might also consider partnering with one of the companies who make a point of providing effective provisioning systems — like Paxmodept, GetJar or even ourselves.

The other piece that is missing is direct access to the store from the phone. O2 say they will email their early adopters in a few weeks to get them involved in the web site, but even those who do will not have the ability to see what their friends are doing and download the same thing. Spreading applications virally requires immediate access to the app as and when you see someone else using it. Miss the moment and the viral effect dies. The iPhone provides the App Store on the device itself to help with this — it’s not the easiest solution but at least it’s possible. Since J2ME apps make sharing apps intentionally hard (security to stop people sharing paid-for games…), O2 need to provide some access to Litmus from their phones.

As I mentioned above, the hacking competition itself was a little rushed — we only had about 3 hours to get something ready. As a result most of the entries were screenshot prototypes and sometimes not even that. I started putting together a simple J2ME version of our iPhone MyRail Lite app but NetBeans wasn’t behaving itself. Instead I made a paper prototype integrating MyRail Lite with twitter so that you can meet friends on the train and as they arrive:

Share your train journeys on twitter with myRail Lite on iPhone. Click the Tweet button on your departure, select your destination and carriage and it will send a tweet for you. Also see which train your friends are on and track them as they go.

The idea caught the attention of the judges (I imagine it was the idea rather than my sketched interface!) and I won second prize — 30 hours on DeviceAnywhere.

Here’s my full notes from the day if you want a bit more detail:

Why Litmus?

• Came to the conclusion about a year ago that O2 is quite difficult to do business with…
  • Just like the other network operators! Except O2 hasn’t had a developer program recently.
• Enabling O2 customer base to test apps and feedback
• Developers can test apps and get feedback
  • Can control how many customers can download it and test it out
• Developers can also put apps on sale directly
  • O2 take 30% cut of sales — exactly the same as the Apple App Store
• Plans to incentive customers to get involved
  • Any customer that has tested your app will get the app for free when you go commercial
  • So controlling numbers of testers is crucial
• O2 Marketing will monitor forums & feedback and launch popular apps into main customer base
• Money comes through to developers after five weeks

Litmus Tools

• O2 APIs
  • Connection Status API
  • Location API
• Supporting services:
  • DeviceAnywhere — remote device testing
  • Rackspace — hosting
  • Segala — expert testing

Mobile Social Networks — Ewan Spence

Poking from your mobile

• Involved in running Wubud — still in stealth mode
  • 100% focus on mobile, but with web client too, linking to other social networks
• itsmy.com makes money from users buying widgets
• facebook 0.3% CPM…

Mobile Developers Dilemma — Paul Golding

Slides available online

• Still has his Source O2 badge from O2’s previous developer outreach programme
• Expert member of MIDP3 group
• Chief app architect for Motorola in 90s
• What should you build?
  • Open APIs
  • Involve a community to build weight & momentum
  • Provide service & support
• Mobile UX: should exploit context
• Use microformats — if there isn’t a suitable one then invent one!
• Jitterbug — successful phone for old people in US
• Social Business Model: share ideas with frenemies
  • Share the risk
  • Exploit mashups
  • Create or be part of an ecosystem, so that even if people click out of your app, they haven’t left the ecosystem and are therefore more likely to come back
• Paul’s 9 year-old son is an iPhone developer :-)
• Growth areas:
  • Enterprise social software
  • Services to support SOHO users

Inspiring New Ways of Design and Development — Anthony Ribot

Slides available online

As usual, Anthony gave a good presentation on mobile design. The Ribot guys were on a lucky streak on Friday, winning both a Sony Ericsson C905 in the raffle and coming first in the hacking competition with a proposed mashup of dopplr and your phone address book — find out who’s in town and then call them straight away. Well done guys!

• The user-centred developer is a new type of role that should exist
  • Should develop with the user in mind
  • Not a role for every developer
• Clients from web medium come with a long list of 15 features
  • We tell them we’ll only implement the top 3 items, or even just the top 1
• Data-snacking is the most common experience on mobile
  • 30-60 seconds experience — small snippets of info
• Important to re-use the learnt behaviours of the device
  • Makes the first experience of the app that much better
• Mobile not about making things smaller!
  • Must take in context of use and figure out what the user actually wants to do
  • Cameron Moll: Mobile Web Design book
• It’s all about the subtleties
  • e.g. working around the 3G icon on Nokia devices — Opera Mini indents the page title
• Try and make the experience support reward-based design
  • e.g. Opera Mini (again) — right arrow does clever things based on context
• Dealing with diversity
  • Use statistics (e.g. admob) to work out top 5 handsets for your target audience
• Use rapid prototyping
  • The sooner you can get something tangible in your users’ hands, the better
  • Paper prototyping is good, but having something real is so much better
  • Finding that there’s less application stuff and more motion
    • Harder to describe in paper prototypes and screenshots
  • Tools available:
    • Flash (lite v3)
    • XHTML + CSS
    • Nokia Web Runtime
    • Silverlight (coming to Windows Mobile early next year, Symbian & Apple targeted too)
    • Dashcode

Partner adverts

We then had presentations from Rackspace, NAVTEQ, DeviceAnywhere, Mob4Hire and Segala.com. These were interesting in parts, but generally not much more than we could have got from flyers — a bit of a waste of time when the audience was mainly developers. We know what hosting is, thank you.

Rackspace — Matt ???

• 2600 employees (40-50 in London)
• growing about 50% year on year
• have “positive churn” (1.5%)
• 24/7 live “fanatical” support

NAVTEQ — Tony Hand & Mimmis Olsson

• 80 new devices launched with GPS in H1 2008
• 74m GPS phone devices sold in EMEA next year
  • 55m smart phones, others feature phones
• NAVTEQ Network for Developers
  • Online developer community
  • Includes sample map data
• NAVTEQ Connections Web Portal
  • matchmaking, promotion
• 6th year of NAVTEQ Global LBS Challenge
  • 2009 prizes include cash, tool & data licenses and handsets
• O2 segments:
  • Ambitious Status Seekers
  • Frenetic Families
  • Fun Loving Socialisers

DeviceAnywhere — Leila Modarres

We use DeviceAnywhere for testing our JavaME apps (such as the National Express East Coast Timetable to Mobile) and find it very effective. I didn't take many notes on this session as I already know how it works. Go see their site if you want further details.

• Screens only turn on when the device is in use
• Will hand out 30 free hours today
  • I won them!

Mob4hire — Paul Poutanen

• Mobile developers can leverage the value of existing handsets to test for other developers
  • Earn money on mob4hire…
• Developers can use Litmus system to take advantage of 25,000 early adopter customer base on mob4hire
• Roadmap:
  • Certified testers
  • Remote emulation — competing with deviceanywhere (using LogMeIn)
  • Coder4Hire
  • Market research — localisation etc.

Segala.com — Paul Walsh

• Expert testing services

Future of Mobile 08: Tradeoffs, Strengths & Weaknesses in Platforms

Tom Hume — Future Platforms

Full slides now available from slideshare. My notes follow...

Strengths, Weakness and Trade-offs of Mobile Platforms

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: iphone j2me)

• Fragmentation got worse in 2008
  • Not that we’re short on standards — we’ve got loads and loads of them!
  • good summary graph of effort, coverage & capability:
• Distribution is linked to platform
  • Vital for getting apps
  • Just as complicated and tricky as making the build
  • e.g. advertising of SMS shortcodes in national press — get lots of responses, but very unqualified — not so many actual downloads
  • billing also adds complexity
    • PayForIt — fairly grotty user experience
    • Credit Cards on mobile — scary issues on security but makes billing easier the second time round
• Why is choice a problem?
  • Got used to making lots of versions for different devices
    • Doesn’t mean that you should do it…
  • Trutap v1 has 30 versions (SKUs)
    • High load on QA
    • Changes are difficult
  • Trutap v2 has just one version (apart from icon assets)
    • FP’s new framework makes use of UI scaling:
    • When app is installed it works out how much screen it has
    • Had to think differently when designing it
    • Explicitly designed to scale up — fluid layouts, percentage widths, etc.
• Work out where the seams are and make them more fluid
  • Switching between app & browser
  • Google Search for Symbian
    • immediate launch app that then launches browser
    • keep the user’s attention while they type in their search term
  • Using web for what it’s good at, native apps for what they’re good at
  • Can stitch together different platforms
  • On desktop, widgets are closest to this idea
• Take design seriously
  • Think about how interface will scale
  • More than pixels

miniSPA 2008

miniSPA is the little brother of the BCS Software Practise Advancement conference, held over 3½ days each spring time. Instead of 2½hr sessions with breaks in the middle, we get one day of 75min condensed versions as a taster to the main event next year. And it’s free!

Each of the sessions was interactive in its own way — some depending on the attendees to provide content, other involving them in exercises and others just inviting discussion about a particular experience that was present. I went to one of each type and they were all well presented and food for thought.

Best Practices for Finding your way into new Projects - quickly…

Marina Haase

This was a workgroup session in which we were invited to brainstorm ideas and experiences that help us understand and get involved with a new project.

First of all Marina gave us a run-down of some the ideas that had been raised in the main SPA conference earlier in the year. These are covered on the SPA wiki, but the ones that caught my attention were the following three:

1. Watch out for guru fear: the team you are joining may be apprehensive of new experts joining them — will they be told that what they are doing is wrong?
   • One way to defuse this fear might be to find areas where the existing team does things better and to mention those areas of expertise; another might be to find experts in the existing team and go to them for help
2. Prepare questions beforehand — and make sure you take time to ask them
   • It’s all too easy to get wrapped up in the work and to hurry with your integration, but taking a step back is often very useful
3. Write down things in your own way
   • Don’t just rely on existing documentation — take a notebook and write down descriptions in your own language. Writing things down can often be a better way of understanding them than just reading other people’s descriptions.

We then went on to brainstorm further ideas for getting into a new project quickly. The most interesting part of this bit of the session was the brainstorming techniques themselves — we were invited to try one of three methods, though all the groups in the room chose the same one: Metaphorical Brainstorming.

I’ve never come across this before, but it’s a great idea (and good fun too!) — instead of brainstorming directly on a subject, think of a loosely parallel situation and brainstorm ideas and techniques for that instead. Once you are done, spend some time figuring out how each of your ideas might apply in your original problem domain.

The brainstorms that worked best were the ones that took a slightly unusual scenario (one further away from the original problem) and then pushed it to its extremes. These generated ideas that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise and gave the group a lot more energy in the brainstorming itself. A useful technique that I may end up using if a brainstorming team shows signs of flagging.

Sid and Nancy apply for Life Insurance: Storyboarding the Domain Model

Justin Forder

The second session I attended was a more traditional presentation, but discussion was encouraged from the start and the presentation evolved directly with the wishes of the audience, skipping some slides and focussing on others.

The topic was a new style of diagramming aiming to bring the domain model of a complex system to life. Often the domain model can get fairly big and complicated. While it is (usually) understood by the people who built it, the model can be difficult to describe to new joiners, and discussion of requirements and restrictions with the business team can be subject to misunderstandings. UML diagrams such as sequence diagrams and use case diagrams are meant to help here, but they can often be too detailed or too abstract to make sense without an existing understanding of the system.

In contrast, there are a lot of techniques used to bring the user interface to life — as this is the only way that it can be evaluated. Justin’s idea was to take one of the techniques from user interface design, storyboarding, and apply it to the back-end domain model.

A storyboard looks like a cartoon, consisting of a sequence of snapshots each showing an instant of the story and hinting at the movement within each frame. In user interface design, you would create a storyboard for a detailed, concrete scenario, with clearly defined actors trying to achieve specific goals.

Justin applied the same technique to the domain model resulting in a sequence of diagrams showing how the model is populated and how it changes as different actions occur. The final document told the story of the system in a way that lots of different people could understand; it was a powerful tool for new joiners, but also extremely useful for testers. Justin even used the same technique to help identify performance bottlenecks caused by repetitious actions.

In order to make the diagrams more complete, Justin invented some simple annotation styles which are well described in his actual presentation. This will probably make its way on the web via the SPA wiki at some point..

This storyboard is not intended to be the only documentation of the system. There are several areas, such as encapsulation and polymorphism that it does not show at all. Drawing the diagrams won’t particularly help to design the system in the first place — but it does help to exercise and illustrate an existing design.

The differences between this process and specific UML use case diagrams also raised a point about testing: it’s useful to remember the difference between use cases and scenarios when writing unit and functional tests. Scenarios have specific values and tell an end-to-end story. Use cases are more general — they often capture a lot of error cases — and are more individual.

Overall, storyboarding the model looks like a very useful tool for getting an overview of a bigger system and I will look out for opportunities to take advantage of it.

Effective Pairing

John Daniels + David Cleal

The final session I attended at miniSPA 2008 consisted of a series of exercises to evaluate the effectiveness of pairing. The exercises were intended to cover different kinds of tasks — analysis & planning, social situations, physical activities and creativity. Each activity was worked on by both pairs and individuals so that we could compare and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

The full version of the workshop allowed everybody to try all the exercises, but the cut-down version we were getting at miniSPA, only had time for each person to try out a couple of the activities. This was a great pity, as the physical exercise involved putting together a Lego model, and only two groups (not including me!) got to have a go.

I found the exercises themselves very well designed — useful source material for helping teams to understand the benefits (and sometimes drawbacks) of pairing. The planning activity in particular worked well with a pair, surprising some people who had only thought of pairing in development. At Kizoom, we try to do all our estimating and project planning with at least two people — errors caught here save not only the planning time but also the development time.

The social situation exercise was a role play of a personnel issue, with a project hampered by a troublesome guru. The group I was in found that pairing was good for the managerial side of the role play — one had time to think and a chance to moderate their feelings while the other was talking — but could be more threatening for the interviewee. On the other hand, having a one-on-one conversation meant that the conversation was more personal rather than about the issue at hand. There were some people in the session who said their companies had a policy to always have a third party in the room for personnel issues.

I really hope that the session organisers publish their exercises and the results of the questionnaires they asked us before and after each exercise (possibly here). Personally, I didn’t find my impression of pairing changed that much due to the session, but then I really like pairing already and am fortunate to work in a company that not only accepts it but recommends it as a practice.