I’ve received some great comments, questions, and kudos from my IA Summit and Big Design talks on Mobile Strategy, and I’ve heard from a good number of people that they’re using the presentation to make decisions about mobile strategy on their own (which is great!). I did put together a couple of quick worksheets that could help turn the presentation into a mini-workshop for anyone trying to make decisions about what to do in mobile.

The first is really just a follow-along worksheet, where you can take notes, and fill in the blanks:

Download PDF

The second is a sketch sheet, where you can start to vision out and do a little designing of your own. Sketch out a couple pages, and see if your interactions and flows make sense.

Download PDF

I added some things to remember while sketching:

• Simplify the design
• Design for touch – not mouse
• Note common mobile UI patterns
• Think about context – traveling vs. at home
• Design for speed – let them get to what they need quickly
• Rank functionality – you don’t need everything!
• Follow usage patterns – what are your users doing on mobile
• Remember location
• Don’t cram too much
• Note phone features – GPS, Camera, etc…

Hopefully this will help you or your company come to a decision on your mobile strategy.

The signage was bigger and better thanks to fastsigns being a sponsor this year.

It’s really amazing the great talent we have in the area, and this year we augmented with some great out-of-towners like: Jared Spool, Bill Scott, Chris Bernard, and Dr. Susan Weinschenk.

Stephen Anderson had us supplied with a mini-set of Mental Notes cards.

Many of the slide decks were out on Note & Point from the presentations at Big Design: Kelsey Ruger, Travis Issacs, and Joe Dyer. And a couple more presentations on the Big Design SlideShare group.

But what about the parties you ask? Yes we have those as well.

What does success look like for Big Design? A great group of people – wanting to connect, share and explore new topics.

Looking for more info about Big Design and how it went? Check out the #bigd10 hashtag, and some of the blog posts and photos that followed the conference:

My photos on Flickr

@michaelcummings flickr set

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-day-1-secret-entrance.html

http://theusabilitycorner.blogspot.com/2010/06/big-design-conference-my-timeline.html

http://worldofdevign.wordpress.com/2010/06/02/putting-on-my-bigd10-yellow-hat/

http://www.mkanderson.com/portal/archives/1797

http://derans.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-design-conference-2010-recap.html

http://www.madmacgirl.com/2010/05/30/brief-reflections-on-the-bigdesign-conference/

http://baxie404.com/2010/05/big-d-conference-day-1/

First, I went over the general trends and numbers of what’s going on in the mobile space – nothing in my opinion moves faster, or changes more frequently. It hard to keep-up, and new stats come out everyday.

To start here’s my presentation (hosted on SlideShare), you can download the PDF here, or listen to the podcast.

The first step (after learning a bit about mobile in general) is determining what type of mobile project you have:

• Mobile First
• Content
• Application or ecommerce
• Entertainment

Each of these have specific properties that will help inform your strategy. As an example, if you’re creating a Mobile First product – you’re going to need to target multiple devices, starting with one of the dominate mobile OSes: iPhone or Android. You’re going to most likely go native, as your project being mobile specific will need access to many of the phones core functionality. That, vs a content site with a well established .com – who would want to go with something like a mobile formatted website as a companion to the desktop site.

The second step is to get into the design process, which has lots of factors:

• What parts of your existing site need to go mobile? (if you have an existing site…)
• Who are your mobile users?
• What devices are they using?
• How do you design for mobile?
• What devices do you need to focus on?
• What technologies do you use?

I try to answer all these, and almost like a decision tree, you usually come out with a solid plan to move forward.

At the end of the presentation I go over a number of upcoming trends surrounding mobile. I’f you’re looking to keep up with mobile trends, I’ve created a twitter account that posts all the mobile related articles I’m currently reading: @mobilefeeds

Luke W. (www.lukew.com) attended my talk, and posted a recap - IA Summit: The Mobile Question – and boxesandarrows just posted the podcasts, you can download my presentation’s podcast here.

My slides make a bit more sense with me talking to them ;-) so I’d like to see everyone in the Dallas, TX area come see me at Big (D)esign on Saturday, May 29th – and if you’re getting ready for a mobile project, see me at the conference for some one-on-one.

The thing about mobile is that it’s always changing. Today as I write this on a plane with my iPad (which just came out this past weekend) i’m wondering about the iphone event apple is putting on later today and how that will effect my presentation. Hopefully not much :-) Either way, I’m ready for tomorrow and interested to hear stories from all the UX professionals at the IA Summit.

In my presentation I have a snapshot of the current mobile space (side note: whenever I try to type “c” I try to use my fingernail, which doesn’t work on a touch screen…) and then I walk through a way to help you and your team to come up with a mobile plan. A plan that’s specific to your experience, users, and technology.

Mobile has been a passion of mine for a long time. I’ve had Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, Sony, iPods, etc… And never until I tried an iPhone did someone get it right, a light and fast experience that responds like an extension of your arm.

I’m not fully a iPhone fanboy – I really like a lot of the AI (After iPhone) devices. I’ve played with Android, and Palm Pre devices – all really nice, in fact some better than the iPhone in some ways. This “age” of mobile is just exciting! I don’t think since the first GUI devices have we seen so many new human-computer interactions developed in such a short time.

As i’ve mentioned before, as technology becomes smaller and cheaper – talking, connected, interactive, disposable, video cereal boxes here we come!

If you’re here at the IA Summit, I hope you stop by to discuss mobile design and development with me!

Last week me and Stephen Thomas presented to our company’s UXC Luncheon. This is a quarterly event open to all the different User Experience groups in the company. Our topic was upcoming trends in Design and technology. This is actually the fifth time I’ve presented a presentation like this one, starting back in 2005. While some trends are still developing, there are some new and interesting things that will shape the years to come.

This year we hit on 23 different topics – ranging from the less practical interactive holograms, to something we’re enjoying today – location based gaming.

Due to the nature of many of these new technologies, we included a lot of videos this year – I tried to include a link to most of them.

So here it is – 2010 and Beyond:

Some notes – one of the biggest trends which I missed until this year was Augmented Reality and all it’s many flavors. This seemed to be one of the biggest trends coming in the next year. Once Apple releases it’s 3.1 update for the iPhone we should see a flood of these types of apps hit the app store, and quickly gain wide adoption.

Some topics like the command line, twitter, and location were back with updates for 2009. And although RFID has been around for a while, this is the first time the phrase “Internet of Things” appeared in my presentations.

We had a longer list then the 23 we got to – this took us about 1 1/2 hours to get through – we’ll save those for next time!

Please comment if you feel we left something out – or thought something shouldn’t have been included. See you next time!

Big (D)esign has come and gone. I was fortunate to be part of the planning team that put this successful (yes, I can now call it that now ;-) conference. Over the past months, I was able to see behind the scenes of the conference: event planning, sponsorship, contacting speakers, scheduling, logistics – and got to play a part in many of these activities. It was great to see people from UPA, Dallas Refresh, and IxDA (among others) come together to put this together – that and the 500+ people who ended up attending!

In the past Dallas had been home to a couple of User Experience conference, we’ve had Wemaster Jam, Design Thinking, and Forrester had a Customer Experience Forum here last year. But none of these were happening in 2009. While Dallas may not have any UX focused conferences, we have an abundance of local clubs. I really mean abundance… Depending on what you’re interested in, you could literally go to a meeting about every night.

Dallas Refresh, UPA, IxDA, DSVC, AIGA, Adobe, Microsoft, Java, Ruby, Facebook Dev Garage, Mobile Monday, iPhone Dev, Social Media Club, the list could go on and on. That’s not counting special community events, like DevHouse, HackDay, BarCamp, etc…

Dallas really does have a really good, supportive community of Designers, Developers, Usability Professionals, and many others in User Experience related fields.

If you missed Big (D)esign, here’s a quick video I put together to learn a little more:

Big (D)esign 2009 from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

And of course we had an afterparty ;-)

Big (D)esign After Party from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.

If you want even more! Here are some photo galleries on Flickr:

• My photos
• T. Scott’s sketching
• Carissa’s photos

I hope if you’re in the Dallas area, that you join in and become part of the community, join a club, attend a meeting, volunteer, share your knowledge, and continue to watch our community grow!

Last month I gave a talk here at our Customer Experience University about what I call “Emerging Interface Patterns”. Very often we get buried in day-to-day work and miss out on new experiences, new things that are going on in interaction design just pass us by. This is tragic for those who don’t take the time to stop smell the pixels ;-) Everyone should be paying attention because these new experiences are great creative stimulus for innovative ideas.

In the below presentation I try to run the gamut of what’s new in User Experience, and Interaction Design – scouting ahead for what’s changing the landscape. As someone who is passionate about these topics, I love discovering new interaction patterns, and better ways to do something that was thought adequate before. And by consuming all these new patterns, you can blend them into current projects, and even synthesize something new.

What’s going on in Game Design? What are some of the newest UI trends? How is information design contributing to the interaction design practice? How are we bringing the real world into applications? These are just some of the questions I explore below:

Download PDF

At the end of the presentation I featured the recently revealed Adaptive Path Aurora concept “browser”. I was actually mostly done with this presentation when Aurora was revealed, and thought it was the perfect closing to my presentation. Why? Because it is the product of many of these emerging patterns we see in other areas of product and interaction design. You could say the design is somewhat reminiscent of the Sugar UI in the OLPC computer, or that having things fade away into the distance is bringing the real world into the experience. The way you can quickly type in a search, or the contextual menu that pops-up to reveal more actions. These are all things we’ve seen before, just not together in this new and innovative idea.

While you could of lived in a cave for the past couple of years and had the same ideas, I theorize that by observing these trends you are “building on the shoulders of giants” and can better combine, iterate, test, and innovate.

I did want to mention a combination I’ve had in my head for awhile :-) on page 30 I have a shot of the Prius fuel consumption screen. I think by using game design and comparing this to other drivers (not just Prius, but all cars) people would instinctively want to “win” by having the best gas mileage. If we could get a mandate for all car companies to include a version of this, with a way to transmit “scores” to a central database, I think we could be off foreign oil in no time! The elevator pitch would be “It’s like Nike+ for fuel consumption” ;-)

via: http://flickr.com/photos/88262773@N00/2525850407

Last, things change fast. Since presenting this we’ve seen new patterns in Google’s Chrome browser, and Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Remember to keep up, stay informed, and absorb as much as you can.

Starting in 2005 when returning from SXSWi a coworker and I would put together a trends presentation talking about up-and-coming technologies, patterns, websites, etc… and 2008 is no different. The presentations keep getting longer and longer, as innovation keeps building on the previous year, moving faster and faster. This year my co-presenter was Dustin Askins of Travelocity, and we gave the presentation internally to our UX groups, and just this week at the Dallas UPA Chapter.

Why SXSWi? I think it’s really good for getting a pulse of what’s going on in the User Experience field. You get to meet with a wide verity of people from different practices, and hear from some of the top web professionals. An while there are many great conferences (like UIE, IA Summit, UX Week, etc…) SXSWi is consistent on it’s wide ranging topics (great for “T-Shaped” People).

When looking at trends across technology, marketing, UX, and business you start to see patterns of what the leaders in their respective groups are expecting for 2008 and beyond. Things I keep seeing rise to the top: Mobile, Open Platforms, Data Control, Mixing Virtual and Reality, Semantic Web, Interoperability, and Location Based tools (see slide 33). None of these are unexpected, I sure we’d all agree these are hot items that will effect multiple areas.

I’ve never posted these presentations before, so I have 2005, 2006, and 2007 to post along with 2008. So if you’re new to the web and User Experience, now is your chance to catch up on a couple years worth of knowledge.

So say hello to 2008:

| View | Upload your own

2007 On SlideShare

2006 On SlideShare

2005 On SlideShare

I also have most of this presentation in a podcast (I think my recorder battery went dead…), so listen in. Hopefully I will continue to keep this trend of my own, it’s always interesting to look back…

[EDIT 05/12/08]
Here’s some video from our UPA talk:

Me & Dustin speaking @ Dallas UPA from Jeremy Johnson on Vimeo.