We had indicated on the mobile design resources page that we would be adding design recommendations and style guide information. This information would be recommendations that don’t constitute a design pattern, but nevertheless are good or best practices. And of course, the information is free and you are encouraged to add or edit content.

We just […]

Over on the mobile design resources wiki, we’re adding some new content, as well as moving some of our older essays into the public space. Specifically, check out Design Tools. Right now there is only a list of web emulators & simulators and a full design suite; please add your favorite tools.

And since I haven’t […]

This week’s Carnival of the Mobilists is pretty good. Be sure you are up to speed on Adobe freeing Flash Lite and Tomi’s talk on mobiles as the 7th mass media. As always, Tomi is bullish on SMS and I only somewhat agree.&copy Little Springs Design • See us at Design For Mobile, North America’s […]

The dotMobi Advisory Group is presenting what looks like a really useful free webinar for mobile designers and programmers. Check it out; I hope they capture the video file for later download.

Left to Your Own Devices
Building Device Aware Content – new tools to simplify the process and increase your business

Copyright Little Springs Design. See us […]

In case you haven’t noticed, Nuance is now a major player in the mobile space.

Voice control for smart devices and Embedded Voice engines for some devices
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and Call Steeringsoftware – it doesn’t have to be as badly designed as it is
They now own T9
A whole bunch of mobile messaging solutions
Voice-driven mobile search
Voice-based […]

I ran across this summary of a fascinating study that suggests that instant messaging is starting to take over from SMS among the younger crowd.

This goes along with a point I’ve been making about the different mobile markets, especially USA vs. Japan/Korea vs. Western Europe: these markets are structured differently, which results in their different […]

This is a statement I see all the time; its explicitly stated in documentation for software, but is increasingly implied for all sorts of consumer products.

Instead, I think complicated things are just complicated.

It used to be that it was okay to let the machine do the work, just push a button and behind the […]

One of my favorite niche blogs is AAS, or All About Symbian. Saturday (my birthday!) they posted this commentary on what exactly is the difference between a featurephone and a smartphone, anyway.

The commentary is more enlightening than the original post, so read all of those as well. I tend to agree with the bulk of […]

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 & […]

You never have a second chance to make a first impression.

Now that we’ve disposed of the homily, we should note that it is true. For many web sites and most mobile web sites and applications, complexity in setup process should be avoided. Get your customers to the content as quickly as possible. Get your example […]

A common pattern in any type of social networking, including mobile social networking, is to rate content or comments. Too bad it is frequently done poorly.

A star rating system must have the following components:

1
Ability to view average rating of other users
“Other users” can be all other users, users like you, or your friends. Or two […]

A common pattern in any type of social networking, including mobile social networking, is to rate content or comments. Too bad it is frequently done poorly.

A star rating system must have the following components:

1
Ability to view average rating of other users
“Other users” can be all other users, users like you, or your friends. Or two […]

I applaud the new set of MBA programs (California College of Arts, IIT, and others) focused on merging design thinking and business thinking.

There are other paths to the same practices, perhaps closer to home. You can’t do what I’m about to say in a highly structured MBA program, but if you find a program that […]

We’re putting together a listing of mobile-optimized fonts, both vector and bitmap. We’ll publish it on the wiki, but would like your help!

Please comment with resources or links or info if you have especial experience with:

Font design for mobile screens
Mobile font selection criteria
Implementing fonts for mobile web sites
Implementing fonts for mobile applications (looks like BREW […]

While I’m not thrilled with the introduction of “yet another social network”, I do see social networking and mobile social networking continuing to grow. Just in different ways.

First, there is a growing number of companies providing single application access to multiple existing social networks such as Flickr, Facebook, AIM, and so forth. To a degree, […]