Key concepts for improving the Mobile User Experience

Self-organizing collections

Applications must collaborate to organize the user's data.

Automatic saving

One side effect of self-organizing collections is that the traditional open/save dialog is no longer necessary for most operations.

Hiding the Filesystem

Another side effect of self-organizing collections is that the filesystem can (and should) be completely hidden from the user. Users interact with objects (pictures, mail messages, etc) rather than files; file management is performed by applications.

Extra metadata

One of the most overlooked aspects of metadata is the origin of a particular piece of data. However users are likely to remember information about the data, such as who it came from. This information should be retained and used for organization:

By saving this extra metadata, user-friendly searches become possible:

Realtime updates

Collections should be updated in realtime, without user input:

Queries

Sometimes a user's query is best answered by an application other than the one traditionally associated with the data. For example:

This is a tedious operation using contemporary mail clients, but it's what image viewers are designed to do. Given proper metadata support by the mail program it's easy for the image viewer to display all images that came from Sean. Rather than introducing a search interface to the image viewer, 'From Contacts' could be a category of images in the image viewer. Inside would be a list of contacts who have sent me images. Naturally the list of categories would be updated dynamically, so an image sent by Annie would result in a new 'Annie' entry in the contact list.

Information sharing

All applications should expose their data and services to other applications. Examples:

Information is mutable

Users should be able to modify any information on the system. For example, users may want to edit the album cover of a particular song/album. They should be able to do this from within the image viewer. Any changes should be reflected automatically by the music player. Keep in mind users do not care about the copyright police, copyright laws are different in different parts of the world, and this is considered fair use even in the US (unless the resulting material is distributed). Some data - such as an ebook - may not have an appropriate editor.

UMEGuide/ImprovingUserExperience (last edited 2008-06-27 10:15:11 by localhost)