This ConveyUX Conference preview was recorded by Joe Welinske of Blink.
The video can be found at http://ConveyUX.com/Previews
Joe: Hello! I’m Joe Welinske from Blink and I’m having a conversation with Steven Hoober and we’re going to talk a little bit about his involvement with the upcoming ConveyUX Conference. Hi Steven! How are you?
Steven: Terrific. How are you today?
Joe: All right, where are you talking to us from?
Steven: I’m in Mission, Kansas, which probably doesn’t mean anything to anybody. It’s just an old suburb of Kansas City. We’re almost walking distance from the City down here.
Joe: All right, great. Well, for those of you that may not be familiar with Steven, he’s been involved with mobile design for a very long time. You wrote the book, ‘Designing Mobile Interfaces’. He is a contributor to UX Magazine. In fact, I was just reading one of his posts the other day. He has his own company 4ourth Mobile and he’s going to be doing a couple of sessions at ConveyUX and so we’re going to talk with him a little bit about those.
Let’s see, first of all, your longer session is a 90-minute Workshop on Tools for Mobile UX Design. What can people expect to see and learn from that?
Steven: Well, first, a lot of [griping 00:01:10] about the current state of things based on my actual experiences. I often talk of the way that we’re all very interface centric, that we’re big on building comps in Photoshop since I work [inaudible 00:01:25] now and other things like that. I developed a lot of my opinions and experiences which will meshes nicely other people’s too. I just happen to be one of the few people out in the world that [inaudible 00:01:35] think about it based on some stuff I did years ago where I spent something like six months of 16 hour days in a room, drawing things on bits of paper and photo shopping with stuff.
I’d hope we’d pass that, but it turns out that a client I’m working on now, we’re stuck in that same comp centric world and we are running into the same problems we always had and you can’t [inaudible 00:01:56] that. Nobody thinks about interactions, nobody thinks about architectures, and nobody thinks that’s systems when you do that stuff. Mobile stuff, especially, is very good at being connected to data sources, being aware of the environment, being about the user and their data. If you start drawing pretty screens you’ll end up with a very pretty but possibly useless product or one that never actually gets launched as you notice you’ve missed huge important features of it.
When I [inaudible 00:02:25] process after I get done with the griping of the various bad ways, we’re doing stuff, I get to the solutions. A lot of them are already things we’re used to. You use the existing processes, you [Unclear 00:02:36] school, or read about them in books. You make sure to do your information architecture stage. You carry whiteboard markers with you so you never have an excuse to not draw on the whiteboard or you just [Unclear 00:02:47] exercises. You do a lot of stuff having to do with … that’s mobile specific.
You think about scale, so never put your designs up, if you can avoid it, on the screen in PowerPoint to review because a handset design or a tablet design is not 4 feet wide and it’s not reviewed from 10 feet away. You put it in people’s hands, and it’s not that hard to do that whether you’re printing it or sticking it on their phone or passing one around. You need to think about interactions, which makes it very hard to do stuff like this put it into Photoshop or in some ways even demonstrate it in lower fidelity prototyping tools.
There’s a long discussion about what the best way to do that is, but one way or the other you have to think about specifying and make sure that it gets built right, how are things transitioned from one screen to another, and what the overall path is.
Joe: You showed me that wooden frame that you have. Is that something that you use to pass around?
Steven: Yeah, so sometimes … here, I’ll [inaudible 00:03:49]. Yeah, for example, I have a whole bunch of phones and we’ll grab a few of them real quickly here. [Unclear 00:03:58] I have these, all these devices and there’s a whole pile of other ones and, yeah, the one I was showing you earlier is for a sketching mark is this little wooden phone that you can put bits of paper into. Here I’ve done it with printouts, but one of the things you can do with this is … and you don’t have to have woodworking skills, you can just get some tape and bits of … as long as you don’t mind taping things to your phone. That helps you remember to design at device scale.
You do you sketching, not on big pieces of paper, not on whiteboards, but you draw on phone size interfaces. You remember about touch and [reach 00:04:38] and so forth, which gets to my other topic, of course, too.
Joe: Your other topic at the conference, how people really hold and touch.
Steven: Right, which was really interesting. I hope I’m quoting right, if not edit me out. Josh Clark did some really clever stuff about the touch ranges, which we’re still seeing referenced with the little red, yellow, green zones based on how far your thumb moves around, which seemed very clever and good and [Unclear 00:05:05] in a lot of ways, but I ran across some … I started trying to use this and correlated to what I knew otherwise, and I ran into some issues, looked at some research and found some things that weren’t quite right, and then found a dead end where we just don’t have the knowledge. We’re summarizing, we’re guessing, and we’re using our own personal biases and behaviors too much.
A lot of my thoughts in this have been based on going out and doing my own research. [Inaudible 00:05:30] research, reviewing existing work, but one of them was watching well over a thousand people on the streets of various cities as I travel, actually carrying their phones and tapping them. I published that data and we’re able to come up with some really interesting ways that we can use that to think about how people actually do use it. I’m also hoping to do another research project. We’re working on it pretty much right now. This morning, I had phone calls with people that are ranging in, so we can expand that into tablets, which is something even less understood is how do people actually hold onto tablets, what do they do with them, where do they click, what’s easy and so forth.
We’re coming over the method that we don’t have to just guess, we don’t have to do something as simple as saying “Make sure your touch targets aren’t too close together, make sure people … you know, the old school, do you have enough contrast, the type is readable,” very basic guidelines to maybe getting to a world where we can design particular interfaces, particular [inaudible 00:06:33] is based on the needs corresponding to the location of the screen and how we expect people to actually work with them.
Joe: All right, great. Well, thanks for taking this time to give us an overview and I’ll look forward to seeing you in Seattle in February.
Steven: Great, thanks. Can’t wait to talk for a lot longer on all these topics and show you, pretty pictures and wave my arms even more about this.
Joe: All right, thanks Steven.
The post Audio transcript – ConveyUX preview interview with Steven Hoober appeared first on ConveyUX - 2014 - The Conference for What's Next in UX.
