Recent posts in my Mobiles Category

The Next Web have announced they are stopping production of their Android magazine edition. Commenters are unhappy. But the post announcing the change raises some big questions about the economics of publishing editions aimed at the Android market.

Yesterday I gave a talk in Lyon at WAN-IFRA’s ‘Les Victoires de la Presse’ event. Here is the essay version of a talk which looked at how user research and a focus on simplicity can help the news industry build better products for the tablet market.

At news:rewired today I spoke as part of a panel talking about the importance of “user experience” for digital publishers. Here is the essay version of the talk.

At Online Information I was moderating a session that featured Daniel Gunnarsson from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts of Architecture, Design and Conservation. He was talking about a photo database of Danish architecture available on the web at Arkitekturbilleder.dk. Daniel described it as a “feel good” story, but also admitted that when he had pitched to do the talk, he had been expecting to talk about a product that had launched, not about how one had failed to launch on time. We’ve all been there. Here are my notes from the session.

Alexandra Hardiman is Director of Mobile Products at The New York Times, and at the Tablet and App summit in Frankfurt she talked us through the paper’s mobile products and strategy. I was delighted to hear lots of talk of it being user-centred. Here are my notes.

Kate Collins is Managing Director, Emerging Platforms & Products at Star Media Group in Canada, and at the Tablet and App summit she was presenting a case study of some innovative work they’ve done in collaboration with advertisers, exploring how advertising might work in the future in the tablet edition of the Toronto Star. Here are my notes.

On Twitter I described Stephen Pinches talk as a “masterclass in making good call after good call and really using user data.” With typical modesty, he replied that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Nevertheless, as Group Product Manager for Mobile & Emerging Platforms at the Financial Times, Stephen has steered the FT into the uncharted waters of breaking free from the iTunes store and going down the HTML5 web-app route. Here are my notes.

Having opened the event with what Patrick Smith described as “an impassioned plea for iterative, responsive and nimble development run by small teams within big media firms”, my talk was followed by two case studies of pretty traditional approaches to digital magazine publishing from Stern and Condé Nast. I’ve already blogged my notes from those two sessions. Stijn Schuermans brought a welcome change of pace and an outside perspective to the problems assailing media companies in the digital publishing space.

Condé Nast were represented at the Tablet & App summit by the duo of GQ publisher Jamie Bill and Jamie Jouning. The two Jamies were showcasing the work the company had done to move into tablet publishing in a fairly short space of time. Here are my notes.

This is an essay version of a talk I gave at the Tablet & App Summit at the World Publishing Expo in Frankfurt, October 2012.

You might have seen lots of people on Twitter lavishing praise on the web display of Pitchfork’s Bat For Lashes feature today. But not me.

This is an essay version of the talk I gave at EuroIA 2012 in Rome, looking at responsive design and touchscreen devices have changed the approach I take to my IA work.

One of the few sessions at EuroIA I saw that actually had footage of using testing was a cases tudy of building a discount coupon app for the iPhone in Switzerland. Here are my notes on Hermann Hofstetter & Gregor Urech’s talk.

This is a version of the talk I gave today at Mobile Media Strategies 2012

I’ve been doing quite a bit of thinking about, and designing, mobile and tablet UIs. So here goes with one of those awkward blog posts where I essentially point at stuff I did elsewhere, and direct you to events I’m talking at...

On Monday night I spoke at the inaugural meeting of Hacks/Hackers Canterbury. Here is an essay version of my talk.

Last week we had the latest London IA evening, featuring a packed programme with an IA Summit theme, as Tim Caynes and Johanna Kollmann reprised their talks from New Orleans, and Giles Colborne provided an overview of the event. Here are my notes from Tim Caynes’ talk about designing the mobile wallet.

At this week’s Hacks/Hackers London meet-up, the first talk of the evening was about black cab application Hailo, presented by Russell Hall and George Berkowski. Here are my notes.

It has been a busy couple of weeks on the Guardian Beta site. Over the last few days we’ve launched or started testing several new products. Here are some of the details.

This week ITV News relaunched with a site that made a radical break with the one they had before, and which frees itself from a lot of the baggage that usually comes when designing a news site. It certainly still has some rough edges, but it is a fascinating approach.

Here are my notes from Hacks/Hackers London meet-up where Steve Pinches from the FT gave a very open and frank talk about their work in the mobile space. He is product manager for that area, and was talking particularly about their move to HTML5 web apps and away from native apps.

There’s been quite a fuss around the latest set of usage figures for news websites, with comScore suggesting that Mail Online has overtaken the New York Times as the world’s leading online newspaper. The Times has taken the odd step of both disputing the figures and the relevance - saying the inclusion of thisismoney distorted the number by adding an extra million or so. Spokesperson Eileen Murphy added: “a quick review of our site versus the Daily Mail should indicate quite clearly that they are not in our competitive set.” The grey lady doth protest too much, methinks

John-Henry Barac is someone I have worked closely with at the Guardian on projects like our iPhone and other mobile apps, and he has written several thoughtful essays about the app and touchscreen user experience on his blog, so I was really looking forward to hearing him talk at UX People. He was discussing his personal journey from print design to “literally pushing pixels” through the touch-screen interface. Here are my notes from the session.

We’ve had a lot of products launch over the last few weeks at the Guardian, including Android and Windows phone apps and our Facebook app, but none have been as high profile as our iPad launch. With a design team of Mark Porter, Andy Brockie, Barry Ainslie and John-Henry Barac, you wouldn’t expect it to be anything other than beautiful, and using it has changed the way that I consume news.

At London IA last week, Oli Shaw was reprising his EuroIA talk about serendipity. It is, he said, a lovely word on the tongue, but has been rated as one of the hardest English words to translate into another language. Here are my notes from his talk.

I’m trying to “live blog” my notes from EuroIA in Prague as quickly as I can. Here are my takeaway points from Andrea Resmini and Luca Rosati’s talk about pervasive IA in our cities, which has just finished. You’ll have to be forgiving of an above average number of typos...

This year’s EuroIA Summit kicked off with a keynote from Luke Wroblewski - whose book on web form design is one of my personal bibles. Here are my notes.

We’ve got a shiny brand new Guardian Android app in the Android market place. It is one of several product launches we’ve got planned over the next few weeks, which makes for an exciting (but busy) time. I’m particularly pleased with the Android app though as it is the first big product launch where Karen Loasby has led the UX since she joined me earlier in the year.

I suspect that most blog posts about News International this week will be on another topic, but I’ve been reviewing The Times iPhone app. Here are a few of the things I’ve noticed and liked or disliked.

Recently I was in Atlanta for the UPA conference. Here is part three of my notes from the week, featuring Amy Buckner & Pamela Walshe talking about contextual mobile research, Susan Dray talking about barriers to adopting usability techniques, and a big helping of my own technology failure.

I attended a couple of sessions at the recent Guardian Changing Media Summit in Kings Place. One of them featured a panel talking about the emerging world of apps for tablet and mobile devices. Here are my notes from the session.

A couple of weeks ago Myressa Markham came to visit me at The Guardian. She is studying Electronic Publishing at City University London and is doing a project about the impact of mobile technology on journalism. As part of it she came in to interview me.

Yesterday we unveiled a brand spanking new version of our m.guardian.co.uk mobile site. As well as a fresh look, there has been a significant change in the back-end. I blogged earlier in the week about Mike Bracken's presentation to the Gartner Symposium, where he talked about how the Open Platform saves us development costs. m.guardian is an example of just such a product, built off our content API.

There was quite a bit of reaction to my article on The Media Briefing last week: "How the shift to mobile is revolutionising online news design".

No blog post planned for today, but I have been cropping up in a couple of other places on the web if you need a daily fix of @currybet-related content...

The second session I went to on the Saturday morning at EuroIA 2010 had a focus on the mobile platform, as Johann Richard from UNIC spoke about how to "Start Your IA with Mobile". Johann gave some very clear examples of how the small screen and context of use on phones forces you to focus on the key tasks and activities the user needs to be able to achieve. With mobile use in mind, forms become simpler, navigation tauter, and the complexity of choice is reduced for the user.

At EuroIA this year, Belén Barros Pena and Bernard Tyers were presenting their approach to DIY usability testing on mobile devices. Having listed various expensive ways of doing it, and their drawbacks, the duo then MacGyver'd up a device that clamped to a phone, and filmed the screen as a user carried out the test.

Without wanting to become a single subject blog this week, I wanted to return to the topic of the BBC Trust decision not to carry out a full Public Value Test into the BBC's entry into the smartphone apps market. One thing I will give the Trust praise for is, that like the Governors before them, they make their research documents public. I've had a little time to study the report they commissioned from Mediatique, and I wanted to pick up on a few points it contained.

Last week the BBC Trust gave permission for the BBC to launch applications into the iTunes store. As someone who has worked on The Guardian's competing iPhone app, and given the fragile state of the news industry business model, I couldn't help but be disappointed that the BBC Trust did not put the proposal through a full Public Value Test.

At 'Future of web design' in London, Brad Haynes gave a session on tips for wireframing, and Sarah Parmenter delivered an excellent set of 10 tips for iPhone application design. Here are my notes from the sessions.

At #dendatameet this week, Oscar Westlund gave a presentation about news consumption on mobile phones. Here are some of my notes from his talk.

As part of their election campaign, the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat and Green parties have all launched official iPhone applications. I've reviewed and compared them.

The decision of the BBC Trust to examine whether the BBC's iPhone application plans need further regulatory oversight is the right one, and the only that could have been made.

Real-time web gives real-time feedback on Guardian iPhone app
Twitter is transforming the way that digital products are launched.