About a year ago the ABC interviewed me about being a Usability Specialist. They came and videoed me up at the usability lab I use, my home office and even speaking at a conference. It was all quite fun.
Anyway, today I accidently found a photo of myself on the ABC Science website with a link to the interview with me. You can read about my job and watch the video interview here
Technorati Tags: business, customerexperience, hci, idealinterfaces, industry, information architecture, interview, iphone, marketing, mobile, Sydney, thoughts, TV, ui, usability, video
Nokia 5800 ≠ iPhone
11 October, 2008
It seemed odd that the Nokia 5800 was being launched in a whole bunch of markets, but not key iPhone markets (e.g. US/UK), then I read this at The Register:
“While lauded as an iPhone competitor, thanks to the touch-screen interface and music-centricity, in reality the 5800 is more of a niche handset. Nokia has made clear that next year it’ll be launching a higher-end touch-driven device to better compete with Apple.”
iPhone Tech Talk in Sydney & Melbourne
10 October, 2008
Fennec Wireframes: The Mozilla Mobile Browser
9 October, 2008
A nice little insight into the design approach to Mozilla’s upcoming Fennec browser for mobile, including wireframes for the Nokia N810 interface.
Technorati Tags: customerexperience, design, hci, mobile, mozilla, software, ui, usability, wireframes
James blogs about my iPhone typing tip
9 October, 2008
I caught up with my old colleague and friend James Breeze yesterday to talk about the joys of having your own usability company, and to celebrate his birthday. He’s pretty new to the iPhone, so I gave him a tip: the important part of typing on the touchscreen is the release, not the press that most people are used to. Press as close to the right letter as possible, then look at the enlarged letter to make sure you’ve got it right, then lift. But if you don’t get it right, keep you’re finger down and slide it to the correct letter, then lift. He blogged about it here
Remember: iPhone typing is registered on the lift, not the press like most phones.
Technorati Tags: Apple, customerexperience, friends, hci, iphone, mobile, software, Sydney, ui, usability
Sometimes it’s amazing to see how developers fail to take advantage of a mobile platform and not seem to ‘get’ the benefits of the mobile device. One of the few Australian iPhone applications ‘Toyota Dealer Search’ is an example of how to miss out on the opportunities of a device like the iPhone.
You can find it in the Apple App Store (or just search for ‘Toyota’).
Let’s walk through the process:
1. Launch the ‘Dealer Search’ app (no worries)
2. Enter a postcode (easy!)
3. Look at the list of dealers
Now that’s fairly straight forward, but the problems are this:
A) You can’t click on the phone number to actually call the dealer with your iPhone. You have to write down the phone number on paper and then go to the phone application, kinda defeating the purpose of having your internet enabled device and phone in one.
B) You can’t click on the address to open it up in Google Maps to find it, or take advantage of the GPS functionality to get directions from where you are to where the dealer is.
Let me make it very clear. The application hasn’t closed the loop on the user experience and taken advantage of the very platform it has been built for. Remember, this is an iPhone application available on the App Store, not something that’s available on all mobile platforms (which still should have click-to-call at a minimum).
In fact, if instead of using the purpose built application I simply open the iPhone Safari browser and type in “Toyota Dealers Sydney” in the Google search field, I get search results including the Dealer URL, phone number and showing me a map. If I click on that map it opens in Google Maps and I can get all the details of each dealer including being able to call them, go to their website, get their address and even save them to my contacts if I need to refer to them later.
So by skipping a couple of lines of code, they’ve missed a great opportunity.
BTW: Mobile Monday Sydney is having an iPhone night on Monday 13th October, come and join us, it’s free! (Find out more at the Mobile Monday website).
Technorati Tags: Apple, business, consumerelectronics, customerexperience, design, gps, iphone, mobile, thoughts, ui, usability
