Mobile Experience Design and Usability: Meet the Experts!

The first MobX happened on November 18th in Berlin. It was positioned as the premier annual conference about small screen interaction design and usable interfaces on smart devices and was targeted to all creative minds who deal with user experience, interfaces and interactions in mobile contexts.

Well known speakers like Rod Farmer, Gabriel White (author of "Small Surfaces"), Giles Colborne (Author of "Simple and Usable"), Darryl Fedmann, Dan Saffer (author of "Designing Gestural Interfaces" & "Designing for Interaction"), Stephanie Rieger, Karen McGrane and Josh Clark (author of "Tapworthy") were all there.

A repeated message throughout the talks was that we should not design specifically for mobile. You might almost call mobile an "outdated paradigm". "It's not about designing for mobile but about designing the relationships between touchpoints".

Talks highlighted the need to move from designing UI's to designing services and from designing for mobile to designing mobility. We should no longer set out to develop mobile strategies, but multi-device experience strategies.

Not design our content based on screen size and create page layouts but focus on structured content, content syndication and API's. "The future of mobile is structured content"…that can then be displayed as appropiate on different touchpoints / platforms. "Metadata is the new art direction"

Another interesting spin on mobile was the realization that our responsibility is directly proportional to the people we effect. Which might be many when designing services for global players. So we should use our opportunity to enable change and transform people's lives through the services we design.

This was of course, music to our ears. Fjord has been talking about mobility vs mobile and service design and service design thinking for quite some time now, and people who follow us will have seen much content on this website relating to these topics, so it's great to hear this being talked about on a wide scale.

I did a presentation myself, which you can see at the end of this post, on the topic of 'Designing for Love' which is something we strive for at Fjord and is rooted in the thinking which came out of this conference. It left the audience with some, I think, very relevant questions which we tackle at Fjord everyday:

1. Through the mobile services we design: How can we connect the right people to each other and enable them to collaborate, in order to create REAL relevance and make a difference to our society, politics, environment... ?

2. People are connected all the time, but yet they feel less and less connected to the world. How can we design solutions that reconnect people to the REAL (physical) world and enhance their experience within it rather than isolating them in digital spaces?

3. How can create long term value by triggering long-lasting positive transformation through our design? How can we design services that initiate or nurture an behavioral change and help people transform?

Thanks for reading.

Nancy Birkhoelzer, Group Director, Fjord.

View mobile version of the slides