I remember several years ago, the Nielsen Norman Group published a field usability study looking at WAP usability. They made a number of assumptions, many of which were questionable. Their assumptions yielded incorrect results. One chain of reasoning went as follows: data services in the UK are more developed than in the US, Nokia & Ericsson devices are the best designed, so we’ll look at Nokia & Ericsson mobile web access in the UK and draw our conclusions for the entire industry.

A chief complaint in the study: you had to have an uninterrupted data connection to successfully complete any task, so WAP is crap. Never mind the fact that the Phone.com/Openwave browser was explicitly and multiply designed to not have that problem.

It wasn’t really their fault. They didn’t know mobile and its ecosystem. But they damaged an industry with their research. (No, I’m not claiming they killed WAP.)

We continue to get this. A company who has done design work for a manufacturer at one point will assert “our designers know mobile.” They do, a little bit. But they don’t know how the industry has shifted, nor do they know anything outside of handsets. Device design is a different environment than application design: in the former you get to set the environment, in the latter you have to optimize for whatever environment the application finds itself in.

We’ve done web, application, and device design. When we don’t have to worry about the environment shifting underneath us, I get a little giddy. It will work exactly as we plan it? Wow! We don’t have to worry about distribution? Wow! We can rely on certain hardware and data resources to be available? Great!

The users, of course, don’t know the difference and don’t care.

Mobile interaction design is not a separate profession from interaction design. But it is a complex space, with a similar degree of complexity as health care. As I’ve focused on keeping up to date with the users, devices, technologies, platforms, and industries in mobile, my web and desktop application skills have dropped. Sure I can design a web site, but it won’t be as good as somebody who really knows the space.

Khoi Vinh has asserted the need for the new designer to be able to successfully design native to web, mobile, print, and more. I agree, to a minor degree: any of us claiming a degree of seniority need to be able to understand each of these channels, how they can interact with each other, basics of design for each, and what is an appropriate degree of consistency between them. And to have deep expertise in at least one of them.

We need to have a good understanding of what each channel can do, set the strategy for each channel, then let specialists in each channel detail out the design.

Strategy will involve how to use each channel and how to have them interact. That is one design discipline. Each channel interaction is another design discipline. All are the same profession.

Original Source: Little Springs Design