By Vasyl Mylko, R&D Director, SoftServe


1st Fact: Shift to touch screen

iPhone revolutionized touch screens in 2007. As they declared, they reinvented the phone. Apple was a visionary, everybody else now are followers. What do we have so far? All market players including large phone makers such as Nokia, Samsung, HTC etc. and large online service providers such as Google, Microsoft and BlackBerry have released touch screen phones. Some phones are monolithic, having touch surface only; while others are transformers (sliders with separate physical keyboard). All products are still single side touchable, which is predefined by hardware design.

New approaches have emerged – teasing. Windows Phone 7 uses bounce and wave effects to dynamically show the pieces of invisible content, and truncation of content to tease you statically. Natural user action that follows is a pan on the same big surface to the teased content.

Could you avoid touch UX shift in mobility? No, it happened already so we need to accept it. Is it good? Yes, it is a mobile UX evolution. Although there may be issues for certain type of personas (seniors 65+), and this must be considered by UX and IxD designers. The transition from non-touch to touch phones might have a slower learning curve; hence efficiency and effectiveness of new phones could be under the question in some cases.

2nd Fact: Default mobile screens, yuck!

You might be surprised by such a statement, so here are the reasons and details. User experience laws are observed and established. One of them is related to the user choice, and the speed of making a mental choice. Another is related to the physical selection, after the mental choice is made.

The more alternatives we have – the more time we need to make a mental choice. In correspondence to the mobile phones, the more icons we see on the screen – the more we need to think and decide. It’s Hick’s law. The smaller the item size is – the more time it takes to navigate and hit the item. The longer the distance to the item is - the more time does it takes to navigate and hit the item. Relative to the mobiles, if we see small icons on the screen, then it will take more time to select one of them. It is Fitts’s law. Those effects have peak strength during the first time with the phone, then we automate items, receive perceived memory and get used to the device.

The situation with default screens is interesting. iPhone and 5th Symbian have average conformance to those laws. Windows Phone 7 has better conformance, while Google Nexus One seems a UX failure and is likely to be updated soon with new model. But also, it is known that the Windows Phone 7 screen has not been optimized for high information resolution. Hence, we are looking forward to new phones from Microsoft and Google.

3rd Fact: QWERTY is alive

The Piano-style keyboard layout was introduced in 1867. Jams happened. In 1878, the QWERTY keyboard was introduced to avoid jams on old type-writers. QWERTY was artificially made slower than piano-style keys and therefore the alternate, Dvorak layout was proposed in 1936, which is faster than QWERTY.

In 2010, we use electric and digital keys, and we are still with QWERTY. 132 years later.

The manner of typing has changed on mobile phones. We type with several fingers or a stylus instead of our hands, like on full size keyboard. The conclusion is that the entering of the alpha-numerical data must evolve further, towards more efficient human-device interaction. Probably the most efficient mobile key layout is not a Dvorak either, but something brand new.

4th Fact: Precious space is wasted

“Above all else show the data” Tufte, 1983.

This principle has become critical to mobile applications usability. Mobile devices are characterized by the small screen size. This means that visual representation of data is much more important than for Web or Desktop. The observation and analysis shows that even iconic products have flaws. This link contains an iPhone review by Edward Tufte, renowned master of the information representation. There are issues with toolbars and status bars, wasting 10% of the screen, thick boarders between the items, forcing items to have a smaller size, etc.

There is a valuable argument why the standard iPhone weather application displays information inefficiently. The user is forced to do a lot of scrolling, the amount of information is small and its usefulness is under question. The table below shows the comparison of the inefficient (on the left) vs. efficient (on the right) data representation.

The same mobile screen can show more useful data by improving the Data-Ink ratio, and by applying active UX design. The “Right” snapshot confirms feasibility of showing significantly larger amounts of information without overwhelming the user. It could contain a several day forecast for event better value.

The second important aspect of SoftServe application is active UX; the application instantly shows information, without waiting for the user to interact (scroll, navigate, click). SoftServe delivered a weather app for the Google Phone in 2008, details are available here.

Can mobile screens carry such rich information? Yes. Can users consume such rich information? Yes, because the human eye transmits data at the rate of 10,000,000 bits per second! Poor word visualization is several kilobytes per second. Hence, 10,000x improvement is possible in visualization. See ‘How much the eye tells the brain’ report.

Mobile vendors use different approaches to the screen space utilization and IxD. Windows Phone 7 comes with extra clicks on its standard applications (e.g. Picture Gallery), when instead of viewing picture space, you have to click on a menu on an extra screen. Microsoft’s use of deep hierarchies might originate from the Desktop Windows era. iPhone does not have that administrative debris and is considered easier to use.

5th Fact: RIA changes the game

Mobile RIA is a next big thing, and simultaneously is a significant problem. Software technologies compatibility issues for Windows Mobile originated by RIA. MS-to-MS compatibility was always good; it was one of the Microsoft’s strengths. Now old orphaned Windows Mobile is not compatible with newly introduced Windows Phone 7 because of new development models based on Silverlight and XNA technologies. Another sample is Adobe’s struggle to put Flash onto the iPhone. Flash on the iPhone is impossible now, almost officially. Adobe’s fight has been lost. Flash for the iPhone is abandoned, as Mike Chambers, Flash product manager published on his blog. Mobile RIA wars will continue. There is HTML5 coming to all front-ends, there is JavaFX and there are even new mobile platforms, like new Samsung Bada and Intel-Nokia MeeGo.

Mobile RIA wars will definitely continue and it means multiple technologies, different standards, and no ‘one size fits all’ solution for mobility. This is a good forecast for software houses.

About the Author

Vasyl Mylko, is the Research & Development Director at SoftServe , a leading global provider of proven high quality software development, testing and consulting services. Vasyl specializes in the projects with elements of novelty and technological uncertainty. He is responsible for R&D service offerings and management of the R&D unit. His areas of expertise include multi-paradigm analysis and design, software architectures, software optimization, user experience, usability, multimedia and dynamic teaming. Vasyl influenced Microsoft Silverlight technology improvement.