Clearly, the biggest challenge that we face in creating any successful mobile experience from a visual design perspective is the display and hierarchy of content. You’re dealing with a drastically smaller resolution so it’s painfully obvious that we can’t just re-engineer existing content and expect great results. There need to be tradeoffs. How do we begin to determine them? Mobile users have different needs and motivations than desktop users. What pieces of information will they be trying to access given the fact that they are in a mobile environment? Can we prioritize information based on the conclusions there?
By looking at what content users need and want, we can begin to pinpoint the tradeoffs necessary for a quick and rewarding experience. Take the example of picking up a friend at the airport. From your desktop you can get detailed information about the flight: How long has it been in the air? What is its altitude? How many miles has it traveled? In a mobile environment on the way to the airport, that information takes a back seat to simply knowing what time it’s landing and which terminal do you need to go to. The same priorities hold true for most types of content, and identifying what they are is the first step to design. We can fit it all, but it seems far better to fit what is needed most by users.
Check out this example from a recent project:
Full web version
Mobile version
Tags: mobile
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 10:30 am and is filed under Mobile design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.