A Guide for Designing Mobile Experiences
Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is ripe with opportunities to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. The Mobile Frontier will help you navigate this unfamiliar and fast-changing landscape, and inspire you to explore the possibilities that mobile technology presents.
Rachel Hinman is a researcher, designer, and recognized thought leader in the mobile user experience field. Her passions for cultural study, art, and design, coupled with the belief that people can use technology to improve the human condition, have been the driving forces in her career for more than a decade.
Currently, Rachel is a senior research scientist at the Nokia Research Center in Palo Alto, California. There she focuses on the research and design of emergent and experimental mobile interfaces and mobile experiences for emerging markets. Prior to joining Nokia, Rachel was an experience design director at Adaptive Path, and a mobile researcher and strategist for Yahoo’s mobile group. Rachel’s innate sensitivity to people and culture have enabled her to successfully lead research studies on mobile phone usage in the US, Europe, Asia and Africa.
Rachel writes and speaks frequently on the topic of mobile research and design. She is the creative force behind the 90 Mobiles in 90 Days Project, and her perspectives on mobile user experience have been featured in Interactions Magazine, BusinessWeek and Wired. She is the author of Rosenfeld Media title The Mobile Frontier.
Read MoreA must-read for anyone who cares about the future of digital media, The Mobile Frontier explains not only the technological revolution that’s upon us, but also the behavioral, cultural, and psychological changes (and opportunities) ushered in by mobile. If you’re not listening to Rachel Hinman, you’re not hooked up right.
Josh Clark, Author, Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps
In The Mobile Frontier, Rachel Hinman offers a comprehensive perspective on designing for mobile devices in support of mobile people. She draws on her decade of experience, and the results are highly readable, engaging, and—more importantly—actionable.
Jon Kolko, Director, Austin Center for Design
The “big picture thinking” you need to understand mobile computing and its astounding implications.
Luke Wroblewski, Author, Mobile First
Hinman dares us to get comfortable, calling the devices in our pockets “banks,” “health clinics,” and “movie theaters”—but not “phones.” Then she gives us the tools to build them ourselves. When everything else in mobile is shifting—the boundaries between computers and the human body, the boundaries between computers and the environment—Hinman’s book makes future possibilities clear.
Liz Danzico, Chair, MFA in Interaction Design, School of VISUAL ARTS, New York City
From tiny touchscreens to geo-located services, mobile devices have caused us to rethink how we design. If you’re looking for a primer on mobile fundamentals, look no further than The Mobile Frontier. In casual, easy-to-understand language, Rachel Hinman gives an overview of today’s mobile landscape—and tomorrow’s.
Dan Saffer, Author of Designing for Interaction
These common questions about mobile design and their short answers are taken from Rachel Hinman’s book The Mobile Frontier. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
So here’s a little fact that feels surprising: Today on our small blue planet, more people have access to cell phones than to working plumbing. Think about that. Primitive plumbing has been around for over a thousand years. Modern working plumbing has been around for at least 200 years longer than the fleeting few years since 1984 when Motorola first ripped the phone off the wall and allowed us to carry it around. Most people find plumbing useful. Apparently, many millions more find cellular phones indispensible. Whenever big parts of modern life—the Internet, video games, search engines, smartphones, iPads, social networking systems, digital wallet payment systems—are so useful that we can no longer imagine life without them, we act as if they will forever be the way they are now. This childlike instinct has its charms, but it is always wrong and particularly dangerous for designers. People who think deeply about the built world necessarily must view it as fungible, not fixed. It is the job of thoughtful designers to notice the petty annoyances that accumulate when we use even devices we love—to stand in the future and think of ways to make it more elegantly functional, less intrusive, more natural, far more compelling. In the best such cases, designers need to surprise us—by radically altering what we think is possible. To create the futures we cannot even yet imagine.
But the future is a scary place replete with endless options, endless unknowns. Of course, like everyone else, designers don’t have a crystal ball. There is a constant risk that we will make assumptions that turn out to be either too bold or too timid. Designers must rely instead on methods to think through which evolutionary and revolutionary shifts are most likely— among an infinite array of possibilities.
In The Mobile Frontier, Rachel Hinman has tackled one of the most vital issues in the future of design: How will our lives change while we are on the go? She has used her vast prior experience in working to shape the future for Nokia, then added disciplined methods to do us four vital favors:
Reveal the structures of current and coming mobile interfaces…
Just as cars have gone through several design eras (remember tailfins?), The Mobile Frontier has clarified four waves of successive strategies that make a device successively easier and more pleasant to use. Whether you are a designer or simply an enthusiast, this is a revelation. It shows how the metaphors and strategies for how to use a device evolve as there is more processing power, memory, and display capabilities available to make a device better behaved.
Uncover patterns in how we behave when we are mobile…
When you observe people deeply enough, you discover something fundamental. While there are an infinite number of things people theoretically might do with mobile devices, inevitably the real activities we choose to do can be distilled into clear patterns with a few themes and variations. The Mobile Frontier has made these clear, so that the challenge of thinking about mobility becomes vastly more interesting, more tractable, and far easier to either improve or reinvent.
Provide strategies for designing better mobile experiences…
Whenever we want to improve or reinvent a category, there are some methods that are better than others. The Mobile Frontier helps lay out active design and prototyping strategies that make the otherwise daunting task of building new interface alternatives likely to succeed instead of fail. This allows designers to proceed with courage and confidence, knowing they can reliably imagine, develop, and test alternative interfaces, in order to get the future to show up ahead of its regularly scheduled arrival.
Speculate about what will come next…
Finally, The Mobile Frontier bravely peers down a foggy windy road to guess what lies around the corner. This is a task always doomed to failure in detail, but Rachel does a brilliant job of giving us the broad outlines. This is essential for helping us get past the trap of merely filigreeing around the edges of the known, to instead imagine the breakthroughs still to come.
Collectively, these four deep insights advance the known boundaries of understanding today’s mobile devices and experiences. Thus, they help usher in the vastly new ones sure to emerge soon. Here’s why that matters: We are only three decades into one of the most important revolutions the world has ever seen. In design development terms, that is a mere blink. Just as the mobile device world has zipped past plumbing like a rocket sled would pass a slug, we simply must see ourselves at the very beginning of this revolution. With mobile devices, we are today where automobiles were when the Model T was the hottest thing on wheels. We will see vastly more change than most of us can possibly imagine. Through our mobile devices, we will find new advances in learning, security, community, interaction, understanding, commerce, communication, and exploration.
Rachel Hinman is helping us make all that come along a little sooner, a lot easier, and far more reliably. See for yourself. Better yet, join in. Get a move on. Oh, and bring your devices. Let’s make ’em more amazing.
—Larry Keeley President and Co-Founder, Doblin, Inc.
While I am listed as the author, I couldn’t have written this book without the support of many people.
First and foremost, I must thank Louis Rosenfeld for taking a chance on me. Thank you, Lou, for your support throughout the writing process and your flexibility around the design of this particular book. The user experience community is lucky to have you as an advocate.
Marta Justak—you are just an awesome human being. Whether kind, supportive feedback or come-to-Jesus tough love, you always knew just what to say to keep me moving forward. Thank you, Marta. This book wouldn’t have happened without you. I’m thankful to have had you as an editor and now as a friend.
Next, I feel a great sense of gratitude to the entire faculty of professors, instructors, staff, and students at the Institute of Design in Chicago where I received my masters in Human-Centered Design. From the legacy of Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus to the early beginnings of design planning and strategy cultivated by Jay Doblin—my experience at ID taught me the power design can have in the world. There was no professor who inspired me more than Larry Keeley. Larry, it was truly an honor to be one of your students. Thank you for writing the beautiful foreword to this book.
I often think my career in design wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for my very first design mentor, the late Gino Lee. Thanks for taking a chance on me all those years ago, Gino. You showed me the ropes of being a professional designer and started me on this path. Your wisdom and mentorship sticks with me to this day. The world is a little darker without you here.
In 2008, I met a man named Bob Ianuuci, and that meeting radically changed both my thinking about mobile user experience and the trajectory of my career. Thank you, Bob, for teaching me the importance of thinking big picture in this rapidly changing design space. I’d feel lucky to have even a measure of your vision and integrity. You are a priceless mentor and friend.
Thank you to Josh Clark, Jon Kolko, and Oliver Weidlich for being generous, honest, and constructive with your early feedback of this book. Your comments made a huge difference, and this book is much better because of them.It was a joy and pleasure to interview the experts for this book. Thanks to Julian Bleeker, Alex Rainert, Mike Kruzeniski, as well as Stephanie and Bryan Rieger for your expertise and generosity. Both this book and the world are better with your perspectives in it.
Dr. Jillian Kleiner, thank you for your patience, wisdom, and care . . . and for helping me find my way out of the bog.
Thanks in spades go to my two dear friends, Mirjana Spasojevic and Sharon Priest. You’ve saved me from drowning in the undertow of life more times than I can count. Thank you, for being cheerleaders and shoulders to cry on during this process and throughout our friendship.
John Shen and Quinn Jacobson at the Nokia Research Lab in Palo Alto are two men I will be indebted to for many years to come. They gave me, quite possibly, the most precious gift anyone can give a writer: the gift of time.
Thank you for providing a supportive environment from which to create this book. It continues to be a privilege to work for you both.
I have two friends and former colleagues to thank for the title of this book— Brian Cronin and Rachel Glaves. Your creation didn’t go to waste.
While I concede it may seem odd to thank a pet in the acknowledgements of a book, I don’t think I would have survived the 14 months it took me to complete this publication without the unconditional love and companionship of my dog buddy, Stanley. Thanks, little guy. I owe you some much needed hikes and beach frolicking.
I was fully warned that writing a book can feel like a never-ending slog. At times, it truly was. I also gladly assumed the risk of writing a book about a technology subject that’s changing faster than any technology subject before it—almost ensuring that much of what I wrote would be out of date before the book was published. I have my father, David Hinman, to thank for showing me the virtues of hard work, stepping up to risk, and following my instincts. I am glad I inherited your tenacity and optimism, Dad.
Finally, I dedicate this book to my mother, Patricia Tiffany-Hinman. When you went to college, most women had two career options: nursing or teaching. Yet you raised me to believe I could do anything. I believed you and without that belief, both my career in mobile and this book would not exist. Thank you, mom, for your unwavering support and love—and most importantly for raising me to believe a woman can do anything she sets her mind to.
—Rachel Hinman, April 23, 2012, San Francisco, California
