After all, we are here to celebrate our customers and their successes and to take pride in being a part of that entire story.

So, what’s new we’ve added to our portfolio?

Maybe you’ve heard about Score Alarm, world’s best mobile livescore app that allows you to track dozens of sports events in real time. We are the guys who are responsible for overall visual and user experience design of the application. And it’s available for both Android and iOS phones, so, you are not left out.

Our usability services have been selling like cupcakes – we’ve gained tremendous experience in this arena and with clients like Deutsche Telekom, VIPnet (part of Mobilkom Austria) and IBM, we are leading usability agency. Apart from performing the usability research and testing itself, we are also helping internal teams brush up on their usability research skills by helping them organize and educate small, extremely agile task-force teams that are able to recognize, solve and identify usability issues.

Our Wall of Tweets was also a major hit around the world – from region’s largest web conference Webfest.ME to the USA Presidental Elections and 1st Presidental Debate held at University of Denver.

In total, we added about a dozen of new projects and customer success stories, so go ahead, take a look and let’s get in touch – we’d love to be a part of your next digital and design success!

Sincerely,

UX passion crowd.

Conference, if I dare call it that, is divided by several themes and covers all things interactive, music, film/video plus a trade show featuring number of up and coming startups as well as established brands. It is an overkill of content and networking opportunities – rarely you are able to see people like Elon Musk, Al Gore, Tim Berners Lee or your Internet heroes and memes (like “grumpy cat” featured over at Mashable’s) hanging out together.

People are friendly and open, so even if I did not plan or RSVP to anything, I got into some swanky invite-only VIP dinners and cocktail parties. It must be the climate that makes people so warm and inviting.

Unfortunately, everything did not go so smoothly, as I learned trying to plan and see every session under the sun. On Day 1 I missed two keynotes and one session. It was just too much. My attempts at effective keynote hopping were failing miserably and I was getting really stressed out… until I just let myself go with the flow.

Instead of chasing hotshots and big names I discovered underdogs, sessions that were not overhyped but gave plenty of food for thought to attentive listeners. Like Brad Frost‘s talk about responsive design – informative, funny, and insightful.

Expanding on a regular design presentation, he connected ideas of multi-device and multi-format experiences and how they fit together over the whole spectrum of user experiences, digital and otherwise. His “Beyond Squishy: The Principles of Adaptive Design” presentation was a blast.

By far the most unusual, interesting and unconventional session I was able to see at SXSW 2013 was Ryan McMinn’s presentation  “My Punk Rock Guide to Working”. Ryan works at Microsoft (aka The Corporation) and as I started my career with Microsoft too, I wanted to see how well can “punk rock” and “corporation” work together. Punk rock, as you probably know, isn’t really a kind of thing that you can have a “guide to” – it is loud and aggressive, it comes with a political mindset and a DIY approach.

With Fugazi playing in the background and “more casual than your typical SXSW attendee casual” crowd, Ryan found a way to interpret corporate guidelines exactly as GUIDElines, not rules. His talk was not about the user experience design, information architecture and style guides, it was one of those life changing, mind-boggling, provocative SXSW moments people tend to talk about – enjoy it, I certainly have!

So, in retrospect, if you were to ask what is SXSW, I would have to tell you that it is one of the most interdisciplinary conferences combining design, development and technology together with music, movies, ecology and education. I don’t even think we should call it a conference.

In case you are planning to attend next year, learn from my mistakes. It is huge, so don’t get all wrapped up about missing the hottest keynotes, get inspired by unexpected turns of fate instead.

Like Mayor of Austin himself trying to convince me that moving to Austin might be a great idea, especially if you are into game design and game development. Maybe next year.

And you?

Models are more or less abstract representations of how things work. They are our best shots at trying to understand often complex behaviours and processes. They are our tools to help us understand them.

Bad User eXperience

In user experience design, interaction design and in human-computer interaction in general, three model types are especially important:

• Implementation models,
• Mental models, and
• Representational models.

Implementation models

An implementation model is a representation of how a system (application, service, interface etc.) actually works. It’s often described with system diagrams and pseudo code, and later translated into real code.

An implementation model answers the question “How does this work?” and is in fact a description of the way in which a developer will build the system, app or whatever. The reason why teams without user experience support often have extremely poorly designed software for users is exactly because the implementation model is reflected in every interface element.

It’s easy to design software like this, and if you see an interface with dozens of buttons on the screens, one for each implemented function, chances are you are looking at a system that was designed according to its implementation model.

Granted, we will have an (almost) perfect translation between the system functionalities and the user interface, but real users will suffer.

User interfaces designed by developers generally follow the implementation model, their user interface is mapped to the program’s functions. The problem? Real users don’t feel good using interfaces like this.

Users don’t care how the developer made the system work. They have their own ideas about what is happening when they interact with the system. Interfaces which do not respect this can be very difficult to use.

Mental models

Mental models answer the question “How do users think this works?”

Mental models have been studied for years. While they might appear to be novel, the fact is that they appeared for the first time back in 1943 in the book “The Nature of Explanation” by Kenneth Craik.

Cognitive science is especially interested in exploring and understanding mental models since they are representations of the way that users perceive external environments and realities. It’s often said that a mental model is a set of beliefs about how a system works and how people interact with that system based on their beliefs.

Those beliefs, for the average user, are not coherent and are not even remotely similar to the implementation models used by application developers. It is this gap between the developer’s logic and the users’ perception of things that leads to frustration.

This is why interfaces should be closely related to users’ expectations and beliefs about how the system will work and behave. User interfaces must represent users’ mental models and the mental model must be the one that is used as a guide when we are designing user experiences.

But, on its own, a mental model is not enough. It doesn’t help the programmer code the system or the visual designer bring it to life. For this reason we need a third model, the representation or design model.

Representation models

This model answers the question “How is this presented to the user?”

Representation models are directly related to the user interface itself, to the layer of interaction between the system and the user. It’s rarely (thankfully!) a direct representation of the implementation model, it’s more often a designer’s view of users’ expected mental models.

The wonderful thing about digital systems is that the face of the application can be quite different from what is going on inside the machine. Think about the leap from text-based computer systems to the graphical user interfaces we know today. Suddenly, instead of memorising lists of commands, all people had to do was click on a picture of what they wanted.

Designers must be closely familiar with users’ mental models to be able to craft great representation models. It will be beneficial for them to know the basics of the implementation model, at least parts of it, but it is critical to understand and map properly users’ expectations, their mental models and to create an interface that is coherent with those expectations, not with the actual implementation.

If, for example, buying something from a web shop requires a number of transactions and complex operations in the background, those should be hidden from end users. For them it is just the process of clicking on an item and adding it to the shopping cart. The designer must create a user interface that represents that mental model and that will lead to the creation of great user experience in which the system will behave exactly as users expect.

So, can I write crappy code?

So if the implementation model is hidden from the eyes of most users, does it even matter? Well, if we assume that a crappy implementation model is in fact based on bad coding practices, lack of optimization and an unstable architecture, then we can only expect a bad user experience. Because the user experience is not only about mental models and their representation, it’s also about the layer that powers the whole experience.

In a great implementation model, code is well-written, highly optimized, tested and created following a host of other good practices that help ensure a system is reliable, responsive, scalable and all the other things we need for it to be worth the money we invest in it.

While these qualities might not be the most visible, if the backend is not created with proper care users really feel it. The consequences of a bad implementation model are as damaging to the end user experience as a poor understanding of users’ mental models and as badly designed representation models.

So, write great code, but keep it hidden. Create great user interfaces which reflect users’ expectations and needs and you will have happy, satisfied and loyal customers!

This exhibition of Croatian design is the only event on this scale so far in Croatia. It covers (almost) all areas of design, and over the last 13 years it has achieved high regard among design professionals as well as the general public.

The aim of this exhibition is to affirm design as a market and a socially relevant profession. At the exhibition you can see design works by professional designers as well as student work.

The Exhibition of Croatian Design 1112 – Source: dizajn.hr

From my personal point of view, I believe that in Croatia there are many other designers who could have been a valuable addition to this exhibition and whose work is well worth featuring. However, the Croatian Designers’ Society, the organizers of this exhibition has said that tough selection procedures and strict rules are necessary for a national exhibition like this.

I don’t really like the exhibition design (or better to say – I think it could be much better) and I’m not quite getting what the deal is with the pallets and dirty building-site elements used in so many places these days (exhibitions, conferences, offices etc.) – except it’s cheap to set up I guess.

However, aside from this, you can find a lot of interesting works by Croatian designers which make this exhibition worth visiting. I would say that product design is definitely the shining light of the exhibition and that product design itself in Croatia over the last few years seems much more self-confident and internationally-oriented, which is definitely the way to go.

“Croatia – as it is” project – source: CAII Tumblr

For each exhibited work, printed and interactive, there is a detailed label with a description of the exhibited work so everyone can learn about the problem and the solution presented by the design. You can also find a catalogue of exhibited works in the Museum shop. It costs 180 HRK (about 24€), and if you are a collector of design exhibition catalogues I’d say this one is worth buying.

If you are located in Croatia and you are a designer in any of the above-mentioned design fields you should definitely visit this exhibition. Also, if you are on a business trip to Zagreb and you are in the design business, try to find some time and visit Museum of Arts and Crafts.

You can see the whole exhibition within one hour if you are looking just for inspiration or a basic understanding of the current Croatian design scene. Of course, if you want to take a deeper look at all the exhibited works you will need some more time for it.

There are just two more weeks to go, so hurry up and grab some design inspiration!

Those people who are following us on social media probably already noticed that during the last few weeks we’ve been to the WebFest conference in Montenegro and Geeks on a Plane’s event in Zagreb, Croatia. There we pitched our SidekickrTV idea and received some great feedback from potential customers, partners and investors. I will not speak about SidekickrTV any more in this post, so if you are interested to find more about it, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to stay updated.

Bring Mockups to Life with Real Content!

I will speak here a bit more about our experience putting *real* content inside sketches and mockups as early as possible in the development process. A lot of UX experts have already spoken about this topic, but in the world of user interface design I’m not sure that all people who are working on delivering initial design concepts and mockups are really aware of it.

Lorem ipsum looks pretty ugly, and it’s certainly not realistic. But the biggest reason why you really should stop using Lorem ipsum in your UI mockups is this: it will most probably confuse people. It is very likely that the client will ask you “Why the f*** is my website written in some sort of Latin language?”

If you are really out of luck, you may end up releasing your application or website into the public domain with some UI elements (or even whole pages) still written in Lorem ipsum. That’s a User eXperience you don’t want. (At least, you shouldn’t!)

Copywriting is interface design. Great interfaces are written. If you think every pixel, every icon, every typeface matters, then you also need to believe every letter matters.
from the book “Getting Real”

People interact primarily with the content on your website or in your application. Nobody will press that red button in your app if there is no description of what that button does.

Lorem Ipsum Conversation by elegantmisreader

I’m working in a very agile company with extremely agile processes for designing great User eXperiences for various platforms. I’m pretty much aware that the UX design process is (almost) never perfect, and that in each process of your company there is probably room for improvement.

Having that in mind, maybe you will not have real content when you start sketching wireframes or creating visual mockups and prototypes. If that’s the case, it’s still better to use “Delete” on that red button instead of “Pellentesque” – which doesn’t mean anything. The same goes for all other UI elements, as well as real content such as headings, hyperlinks, social media accounts, forms, navigation and so on. I’m just saying this, because you wouldn’t believe what these eyes saw in my design management experience.

If you don’t have real and finalized content from your client or copywriter, think of something on your own. It will definitely communicate your ideas and designs much more clearly than some lookalike Latin text. As the guys (and girls) from 37signals said: “The goal here is to get as close to the real customer experience as possible.” Lorem Ipsum is far away from that.

Putting that in our scenario from two weeks ago – Vibor Cipan (our CEO) held two presentations about our SidekickrTV. Darko Čengija, our Chief Information Architect and I worked together on sketches and mockups for the product. Although some Lorem ipsum was initially spotted in the wireframes (for some of the user tweets in the Twitter feed, we still working on that too), I would say that 98% of the IA *had* real content.

Sidekickr.TV – Social Feed (click for bigger image)

Also, we collaborated remotely on this project and I’m imaging that it would never have been finished if we’d used Lorem ipsum for our sketches. I mean, we are building a real product – therefore, we need real content. It’s as simple as that.

In these mockups, I even went one step further and made up a little “real time” conversation of 7 people in the Twitter feed in a social scenario of SidekickrTV. Vibor used this as an opportunity to ask the audience “Who is a fan of Breaking Bad here?“. That was greeted with great enthusiasm by the crowd, as well as the potential investors and partners gathered. Why? Because as well as connecting with fans of the show, it clearly communicates the idea of the social feed in our TV solution – to engage people in conversation while their favourite shows are on TV.

This is not the only scenario with real content we had in our SidekickrTV presentations. We had a music scenario using Queen’s album “News Of The World”; a page showing Financial TV tags featuring Facebook shares and Mark Zuckerberg, and a football match showing live betting during a match between Real Madrid vs. Barcelona (guess who’s winning).

Sidekickr.TV – Live betting scenario (click for bigger image)

Sidekickr.TV – Music scenario (click for bigger image)

I feel this made our mockups come alive and I can’t help thinking this is one of the reasons why we’ve received a lot of positive feedback about the concept. To bring the point home, I’m imaging what Vibor’s presentation would have looked like if instead of “Breaking Bad” our mockups had featured “Lorem ipsum…”.

I guess I’ve made my point here. Use real content. As early as you can in your design and development process. It will make your process so much healthier and more fun, as well as generating some valuable ideas which can be used in the end product.

So, if like the idea and want to play around with it, head for this Web Resources Depot article – but keep it to yourselves! And of course, be sure not to put it in real user interface environments :).

Lorem ipsum has been in use in the print industry since the 1500s. It’s now 2012. And mostly, as user interface designers, we’re not really in the print industry. The rules of the game, the conditions and requirements are different.

I will finish this blogpost with something I read on SmashingMag: “Kill Lorem Ipsum before it kills your design” – and I will add just one more thing. Do it now!

• You don’t need the content to design a website @ UX Myths
• Stop using Lorem Ipsum @ NetMagazine
• Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs @ Smashing Magazine
• Just say no to Lorem Ipsum @ 37signals
• Copywriting is Interface Design @ Getting Real
• The Importance of Copywriting in Web Design @ Design Shack

GOAP Zagreb – Photo © by Marinshe (www.marinshe.com)

For the past two days, Croatia has been a special place. Some might go as far as saying that something historical has happened. That might be true, and the future will either confirm or deny that, but there are some facts…

The Geeks on a Plane crew landed in Zagreb; we met them, some of us got the chance to pitch to them, we partied with them. Some even got the invitation to 500 Startups (congrats WhoAPI crew, you rock!). But what all of us got was this attention, this moment where you could start seeing that, in fact, you can build businesses and change the world even from this part of world and be honestly inspired.

And no – no matter how hard some of you try to say that Dave or other dudes from GOAP are not such a big deal and that there is no point in the President of the Republic having them as his guests – the facts are different.

So what’s the fuss about the President greeting these guys? The fact that most of them are investing “only” 25 – 50k USD in the seed round? Or the fact that you are not the ones receiving that? Or just pure jealousy? Honestly – I don’t even care. And it doesn’t even matter. But the amount of money in the round is not the most important thing. Comparing 25k from those guys and 25k that some local guy can invest in redecorating his pub is mixing apples with oranges. But, yeah – for some cheap publicity that should work fine. Thinking twice about it… well, that might change the perspective.

Dave McClure at GOAP Zagreb – Photo © by Marinshe (www.marinshe.com)

I’d hope that President Josipović and other dignitaries would greet each and every investor and change the stereotypical view that investors are mean, greedy and here to take your money away and generally not welcomed. In fact, they are guys and girls who, actually, can help change things. Not just through financial investments, but through building long-lasting, strong connections – and, in my opinion, by inspiring.

I was there these days. Together with Božidar from Backway, Matija from Farmeron, Marko from Salespod, Dalibor from ONCE, Edi from WhoAPI and others. And we know what happened yesterday. For a brief moment we knew and we got the additional inspiration and encouragement that we can make the change and that we can, in fact, change the world. Sounds like a cliché? It might be. But I don’t even care. Nor should you.

You should care more about the fact that Dave McClure and the rest of the gang have come here, have been honestly impressed by the potential here and have helped this new wave of companies from Croatia and the region to find their place in the sun.

GOAP Zagreb – Photo © by Marinshe (www.marinshe.com)

It’s not about looking at Dave or anyone else as “Geek Gods” as one journalist tried to get me to comment on it – it’s about building bridges between Croatia and the region and the Valley or the USA in general. Before Skype, who’d dared to invest in Estonian IT? Hell, who even knew where Estonia was? Today, it’s completely normal. With successes like Zemanta, Toshl, Farmeron, WhoAPI, Nordeus, Wall of Tweets and others, we can hope and expect that investors will have this same feeling of safety in South East Europe. Indeed, that in Croatia (the birth place of the greatest geek of all times, Nikola Tesla) investment and finding great teams are not impossible.

So next time before you try to be “cool” or “provocative” by denying the facts and pushing your own agenda, try to think about the hundreds of us who got inspired, funded, connected or just had a great time with our guests from the USA and from all over the world. Think about what some of us will bring to this world and how we will change some things. And then ask me “What’s the big fuss about it?” It is big fuss because it IS a big thing.

Or as my friend Matija from Farmeron said yesterday: “I’m not sure everybody understands what actually happened in Zagreb yesterday…”

Croatia also prides itself on several Nobel prize winners – but all of those inventions, innovators and champions have one thing in common: they are in the past.

So, what does the future hold for Croatia?

Recently, a major trend has been emerging – many people are setting up their own companies and taking on the startup challenge. Many of us, startup founders and / or CEOs, have been working outside Croatia and gathering experience and contacts and decided to return. I spent some time living in Denmark and after my career at Microsoft there I returned to Croatia and founded UX Passion, the company that gave birth to our Wall of Tweets. And today it seems that local talent has been noticed globally.

CRANE (Croatian Business Angles Network) and INI are co-organizers of regular Startup Wednesdays. Though being local in their nature, these events have helped many startups and founders to gain recognition and visibility. Last week Seedcamp was held in Zagreb for the second time, and Seedcamp has already invested in a couple of startups from Croatia – GIScloud and Farmeron. During Seedcamp, ZIP (Zagrebački inkubator poduzetništva / Zagreb Incubator of Entrepreneurship) was announced as the first co-working space supported by, among others, the University of Zagreb. And as if all of that were not enough, GOAP (Geeks On A Plane) have responded positively to all the buzz we’ve generated on Twitter and Facebook, and a really perfect gesture came from our president Mr. Ivo Josipović who used Facebook to invite Dave McClure and rest of the GOAP crew to Zagreb in September this year.

So, it’s clear to see that there’s lot of energy, buzz and positive ideas surrounding this community. And it’s wonderful to see how many startups are working together and helping each other with ideas, advice and contacts. Also, having Netokracija (an internet business and culture web magazine) helps a lot to spread the word and ideas from all of us who are part of this New Croatian Economy.

But let’s not fool ourselves and see everything through happy pink glasses – there are many obstacles for young entrepreneurs here in Croatia. Legislation is complex, the tax burden is one of the highest in the world (and I was living in Denmark, a country that once had the highest tax burden in the world, but we beat them), public services are slow and inefficient. Often times we are asked by government officials how the government can help us – and my answer is always the same: just don’t make the things worse – don’t try to help. In all fairness, the newly-elected government seems to be making some (slightly) positive changes and if nothing else, government officials are visiting a number of start-up and related events – but that’s just not enough. We need more effective, simplified procedures, lower costs of doing business and more flexible work and labour legislation to ensure that we’ll become and stay competitive.

In July next year Croatia will be finally joining the European Union. A huge, free and open market with numerous challenges – we, entrepreneurs from the New Croatian Economy will do our part of the job. It would be nice if the government would follow.

I’m proud to list UX Passion and Wall of Tweets among teams like Farmeron, GISCloud, WhoAPI, Once, Habbits, Shoutem, Salespod, Entrio, Spotie and many others. Great people and teams, wonderful ideas and projects with the potential to make meaningful contributions and changes globally – all this is what makes this New Croatian Economy so interesting. And hot.

Sit down and relax...

Today I’d like to share with you just some of the stuff the UX Passion team is reading. This is not a full list of all the books we have in our library, it’s a selection of some of the most popular or interesting and inspirational books we’ve collected over the past two-and-a-half years. Also, I’ve omitted those related to business development and specific technologies and just focused on those which are approaching some design, content, innovation and user experience ideas and challenges from a technologically agnostic point of view.

So, here they are in no particular order.

1. Swiss Graphic Design – The Origins and Growth of an International Style by Richard Hollis
2. Undercover User Experience Design by Cennydd Bowles and James Box
3. The Laws of Simplicity by John Maeda
4. Web Form Design by Luke Wroblewski
5. About Face 3 by Alan Cooper
6. Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
7. Card Sorting by Donna Spencer
8. A Project Guide to UX Design by Russ Unger and Carolyn Chandler
9. Change by Design by Tim Brown
10. Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson
11. Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug
12. Mental Models by Indi Young
13. Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things by Don Norman
14. Making Ideas Happen by Scott Belsky
15. Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville
16. Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke
17. Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction by Yvonne Rogers
18. Prototyping – A Practitioner’s Guide by Todd Zaki Warfel
19. Remote Research by Nate Bolt and Tony Tualthimutte
20. The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
21. The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun

Would you like to share what’s on your UX reading list? What books or authors are your definitive choices?

I’ll skip the usual story about how we started up in a garage with big dreams about taking on the world. Granted, there is a grain of truth in that! But, we have always known and felt that we are different, that we are on a mission, we’re not just here to do business. And we also knew that only with passion could we turn our dreams into reality.

Persistence and passion coupled with a great team equals success. But don’t be fooled – it still takes a lot of time, learning and, let’s be honest, some luck. You simply have to have some luck in some situations.

But, when we sit down and think about ourselves, about our mission to make meaningful changes to the world we are living in – again, it comes down to passion. The same passion that led my friends and I in late 2009 to leave our jobs and follow the vision we’ve been developing jointly ever since.

That passion gave us the courage to branch out on our own and embrace freedom. That passion has enabled us to grow and bring other passionate types on board with us. Passion keeps us dedicated to our customers and our mission, day by day.

Not so long ago, at the end of January, I received a call from a client who was testing out his new Wall of Tweets and some visual and interaction design work we’d delivered a few days previously. He was deeply moved by the possibilities he saw represented in that product, and was feeling pretty emotional.

It was one of *those moments* when you realize, even more profoundly than ever before, that with your work and with your passion you are changing other people’s lives. And you have the responsibility to keep making those changes and to keep doing your best to make the world a better place.

That is a very powerful thing and an even greater responsibility that keeps us reminding ourselves every day that we are here to touch, inspire and influence everyone around us.

But it seemed to me that mid-November might not be as demanding as usual and I really should attend an event dedicated to the area I spend most of my time working in: design for mobile devices. So, off to Berlin I went for the 2011 MobX conference.

MobX Conference: Touch too Much!

Day 1

Note to self: if we ever organise a conference with a workshop on one day and the sessions on another, don’t put them in separate venues. The workshop was almost thirty minutes late because more than half of the attendees went to the wrong venue.

The half day workshop I had chosen was Brainstorming and Design Principles, held by Dan Saffer. My only complaint is that it should have lasted at least one day. Dan had so much material to cover; everything was so quick that we only touched the surface. So I can’t say I really learned many new things.

However, there’s another side to every workshop – the people. I did meet some interesting people, including a local who very kindly took us to experience a Berliner Currywurst for lunch after the workshop.

And there I was – half way through the whole thing and it turns out the highlight of my day was lunch. The next day would have to really impress me in order for this whole trip to meet my expectations. And as it turned out the next day, it did.

Day 2

The conference was held in an old Berlin theatre called Heimathafen Neukölln. We were all sitting around tables, having drinks and enjoying the sessions.
I’m going to point out the ones I enjoyed the most.

Gabriel White, Founder and Principal of Small Surfaces, was talking about how to design compelling experiences that span many devices. They are developing new concepts of how to better connect various devices that we are juggling with every day. The user experience of working with a single device is getting better and better, but the experience of multitasking on a number of different devices simultaneously is still a pain point. Now, image if you could simply make the two devices touch each other and data from one device is transferred into another. No sync issues, no timeout. Just like you pour water from one glass into another. That’s what he was showing us. And these things are the future.

Giles Colborne from cxpartners in the UK was talking about managing attention and distraction in mobile UIs. Well, managing attention at least, because I think distractions are really a part of our daily work. You know, while I was writing this blog post, I received almost a dozen e-mails (I actually read two of them, I must admit), and three of my contacts appeared online on Skype. And that’s just part of the entire story. Technology is distracting us all the time. Giles mentioned an alarming statistic: when the Blackberry Messenger service went offline for three days in October 2011, Dubai police reported a 20% drop in road accidents, while Abu Dhabi police noted a 40% reduction in traffic accidents. Apart from matters of life and death, if only we could isolate ourselves for a few hours, our efficiency in that period would skyrocket. But we cannot be entirely absolved of blame on the inefficiency front. We’re allowing those devices to distract us…

…and that’s where Josh Clark is jumping in with his claim that Mobile Context is a Myth. People today still tend to “clearly” distinguish mobile devices from other computers, but reality is a bit different. We are using our mobile devices much more than we think. “Around 60% of smartphone users admit to carrying their devices to the toilet, and the other 40% are lying”, says Josh Clark. So, imagine if you’re on a train, working on your laptop. Isn’t that laptop a mobile device? What if you’re on your couch just browsing the web on your tablet. Is that a mobile device? Mobile doesn’t mean rushed. Mobile content doesn’t mean less content. Mobile doesn’t mean less complex (and complex is not the same as complicated). And there’s no such thing as mobile web (at least there shouldn’t be).

There was an interesting presentation from Karen McGrane, Managing Partner at Bond Art + Science. It is still hard to convince people in the publishing business not to prepare content for a specific platform, whichever it is, but to mark it with metadata and let the platform recognise and render it.

Last but not least, Oliver Reichenstein announced a completely ppt-free session, which the audience warmly applauded. It was a very interesting story about his journey of becoming an information architect. Basically, it started when he told his working class parents that he wanted to go to college (“back then equal to saying: I’m gay“, says Oliver) to study philosophy (“back then equal to saying: I want a sex change“), and led him finally to Japan.

Mobile Experience Design & Usability Conference

And where’s the “other side” in this, the people? They’re there, don’t worry. It was a very friendly and open atmosphere. People really want to get to know each other and this is a great way to find out what others are doing in my field – Information Architecture and Interaction Design. Everyone had a story and was willing to share it. And I had my story to share – UX Passion.

In the end, what was the MobX Conference in Berlin? A dozen perspective-changing sessions heard, dozens of new and interesting people met… all in all, a very interesting experience. I hope I’ll be there again next year.