UTUM: building the best smartphone experience [SymbianOne]
The complexity of today’s smartphones is a world away from early mobile phones. With increasing sophistication comes the risk that the user will simply get lost in all the options available to them. It is not enough to be working to prevent the interface gridlock brought about by a mountain of features. Platform developers need to show that they have processes in place to ensure that, as more feature are added, smartphones remain usable and above all enjoyable.
It is against this background that UIQ Technology has started to reveal information on UIQ Technology Usability Metrics (UTUM) the process used to gather usability information as part of the UIQ platform development process. Richard Bloor caught up with Laurent Mauvais, Interaction Architect and Mats Hellman, Head of Interaction Design to find out more.
[…] I was reading this article. Interesting development… It looks like the mobile devices are starting to have the computational resources (CPU, memory, disk space) that make the creation of complex software a reality. However, there is one huge obstacle for the development of software for mobile devices: the small dimensions of the screen and (for a while) the lack of ergonomics needed to exploit this screen efficiently. Usability will take on a new meaning when you have to interact with an user thru a 2 inch by 2 inch window… One more interesting thing about the increasing computational power of mobile devices. The re-appearance of the client-server architecture in the guise of rich-client architecture coincided with the appearance of the smart phone. It would be interesting to see that once the smart phone will be able to host a “thin” client (i.e. a browser which requires a 6 Meg download) if the rich clients will go back to sleep. Interesting to watch… […]