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Contact D4M Follow D4M Fan D4MToday millions of people depend on Smartphone apps to get them to work, find their next meal, and stay in touch with family and friends. Apps are poised to play an even deeper role in people’s lives, in ways not yet discovered. Skilled individuals who can design applications that are usable and useful are essential for its success. Designing Smartphone Apps will help attendees take on this challenge.
The session will begin with an overview of the software and hardware that define the Smartphone user experience, with particular attention to the iPhone and Android. Having this background will enable attendees to develop innovative app solutions that harness Smartphone technologies.
Next, we’ll discuss ways to sketch and prototype app concepts, using upfront user research as a starting point. Specific prototyping approaches that we’ll delve into include paper, PowerPoint/Keynote, on-device, and video. Hands-on exercises will be provided during this part of the session.
Attention to detail will add delight to your app’s user experience and make it stand out from the competition. The last part of this session will introduce a variety of ways to make your app shine. Some of the techniques we’ll discuss include custom gestures, transitions, animations, and sound.
Help us host Chicago’s Mobile Monday meeting for September! Meet the locals and get a bonus talk from Pek Pongpaek, VP of Technology and Product Design at SpotOn Inc. Pongpaet’s expertise ranges from product design and development to user experience. Previously, Pongpaet worked at Accenture Technology Labs in the research department coming up with next generation user interfaces. At Roundarch, a technology and strategy consulting firm, Pongpaet’s work included envisioning and designing the dashboard of the future for the Tesla Model S electric car.
Designing for the iPad:
Your goal is to design exceptional user experiences for mobile devices. That’s a lot harder than it sounds! Fortunately, one of the most creative, talented and entrepreneurial designers in Chicago will be joining us to share his secrets and talk about his most recent project, Biz Quotes. Pek Ponpaet will discuss lessons learned while designing this upcoming iPad app which won the 2010 iPadDevCamp Hackathon Best Entertainment App. Whether you’re working on apps for the iPad, the slew of upcoming Android tablets, or any other mobile device, you won’t want to miss this talk!
In the past two years, the number of apps – and app stores (often multiple storefronts on an individual device) – has exploded. This explosion of apps has not seen the required enhancements to the user experience of the app stores; top 25 lists, basic categorization and keyword search are still commonplace. In the process, users have gone from “kids in a candy store,” eager to download any and all apps, to being completely overwhelmed by the selection of apps. Markus’s presentation will be a call to action on how the app store user experience needs to – and will – drastically change.
The mobile device is a novel computation tool because of its integration into our daily lives. When creating new services that take advantage of our interactions with the world and the people in it, it’s important to get early data on how that new service works in the wild. Usability evaluations or a lab study simply do not suffice. Understanding how a new concept fits into the patterns in daily life allows for a deep understanding of the value of a given concept and how it can be improved as it makes it way towards a product. This talk will share experiences from building rapid prototypes of new concepts at Motorola and the multi-week evaluations we have performed in the everyday lives of our participants.
Since the release of the iPhone SDK, a debate over the mobile web vs. native apps has raged on in the tech community.
In this session, we’ll look at when each approach makes sense and where hybrid applications fit into the mix. We’ll also look at why a comprehensive mobile strategy likely means incorporating multiple technology solutions.
As user experience designers, we conduct research to gain an understanding of what consumers need, want and desire—and we use this insight to inform the design of engaging products and services. We then test the product to make sure that it functions within consumer expectations while also achieving business objectives. But how does the user experience process translate into the consumer-brand space? And how can this process meet a brands marketing goals and objectives? What do brands need to know about mobile consumers and their behaviors to effectively engage them?
Mobile devices (and other digital touch points) continue to innovate and push the boundaries. Competition and user demand for different features and functionality mean that fragmentation is here for the foreseeable future. I will be sharing the bemoko UI development and management methodology that is helping international agencies and big brand companies to deliver device and context optimised web experiences quickly and cost-effectively. Fragmentation and device differentiation can be tamed enabling you to embrace and benefit from device evolutions.
Long viewed as Web search’s poor sister, Mobile search presents a compelling story in its own right, with it’s own experience considerations and tremendous opportunities. To help illustrate what creates a resourceful and intuitive mobile search experience, I will present the best material from my upcoming book, “Design Patterns for
Ecommerce Search: Design Secrets and Successful Strategies for Happy Customers” due out from Wiley in Spring 2011. This is a straight-forward, practical talk about mobile e-commerce search UI design, so there will be lots of examples and very few bullet points.
Is “Mobile First” a good design philosophy? It certainly has its benefits. Let’s explore a bit more to figure out what it really means to us as mobile designers.
The mobile handset (and now tablet) market is becoming a tangled mess, with strong advocates for device specific applications on the one hand and strong web standards within the browser on the other. This talk will reflect a bit on the history of mobile applications, focusing on the user issues involved in this debate. This is critical as too often the debate focuses on the business needs of application development.
The mobile space has gone through, and will continue to go through profound shifts in technology and user capabilities. This talk will focus on the heterogeneous set of devices that will descend upon us all, a ‘zombie apocalypse’ of devices that will swarm upon us and upset the simple ‘one app, one device’ model that we still so quaintly adhere to today.
How users consume the web on mobile phones is evolving quickly. Mobile browsers are becoming much more capable. The distinction between browser-based sites, executable widgets, and applications is blurring. Cloud based web services already power many non-browser web experiences. In the end, most users don’t really care about the distinctions so long as the experience is compelling and valuable. Mobile designers do need to understand the distinctions, the tradeoffs, and ultimately what people want from the mobile web…replications of full experiences, little deconstructed bits, reconstituted combinations of both, or something completely different. We’ll explore different mobile web user behaviors and examine different web interaction models on a mobile phone.
Mobile phones are arguably the most complex products sold. That makes gathering requirements, specifying design, and managing execution difficult. It gets even more challenging when addressing the layered user interfaces from the manufacturers, operating systems, and operators. Learn about what goes on behind the scenes to create the user interfaces you love to hate, understand why you hate them, and see how redesigning process and documentation can create better end user experiences.
Abstract: Mobile content should be tailored for the user who utilizes a mobile site or application “on-the-go.” When it comes to mobile navigation, you want to keep it simple so the user can quickly access the most relevant information. While remaining focused on the overall goal of a mobile site or app, there are a plethora of considerations and constraints one must acknowledge when designing for mobile: limited screen real-estate, a wide range of screen sizes, hardware and platform characteristics, and more. Defining a clear goal and working within these known constraints will lead to a successful mobile experience.
By the end of 2011, half of all new handsets sold in the US & Europe will be smartphones. However, introducing sophisticated smartphone products to the wider mass-market is not without its challenges. How will the user experience be impacted as millions of new consumers interact with these complex products and services? This presentation identifies the five key pressure points chal lenging the profitability and loyalty of smartphone consumers throughout the product lifecycle, from the initial purchasing behavior of the consumer through to service discovery, set-up and support.
With smartphone taking on a larger role in the daily life of end users, more and more tasks that were traditionally accomplished on PC are being done on mobile devices. Text input is one of the weak links in this chain and is often a gating factor for driving app adoption and usage. This talk will present some real-world evidence to help us understand which text input methods are fastest and most accurate.
Today’s textbook publishers possess the greatest collection of pedagogical assets ever assembled. Borrowing from user-centered design, educational philosophy, library science, and the nascent Digital Curation movement, we are working with large textbook publishers to develop a set of ‘best practices’ when it comes to designing and developing educational experiences on mobile platforms.
We are also looking beyond their current business logic and investigating ways for publishers to distribute their valuable assets to a more global market. How can we help these large companies localize their content and interactive experiences and deliver world-class education to the world?
With mobile delivery strategies in place, can we expedite the addition of ‘social justice’ and ‘global access’ to the mission statements of textbook publishers?
The Motorola Consumer Experience Design team invites all Design4Mobile attendees to unwind over cocktails, hors d’oeuvres, entertainment and great conversation. Don’t miss this opportunity to network with Motorola mobile designers, catch up with other conference-goers and bask in the Chicago improv vibe.
This is a design discussion on the thinking and inspiration for our design language Metro, from the inspiration of transportation graphics systems to applications developed over the last 10 years at Microsoft that have resulted in a modern design that is familiar, approachable and extensible.
Symbian is a smart phone operating system found on nearly 400 million phones worldwide. The July-released Product Development Kit of Symbian^3 contains a beautiful new theme with 130 new icons and some user interface improvements to the platform.
We have been hard at work designing for Symbian^4, scheduled to be complete this August. This session explores the UI design of the platform, and gives an inside look into how the Symbian open source user experience is created and governed.
We will conduct an extended discovery session to brainstorm and discover strategies for generating the ‘World Class’ model of textbook asset design and delivery. In this session, we will formulate specific interaction design and business-logic components of the World Class model and outline the broader implications of its implementation.