Mobile Screenshots

Another in my series of "things you all should know, but I keep having to explain how I do it." If you design, specify, manage, develop or test, for mobile you have to take screenshots. Maybe a lot. Most of us do not have the SDK installed or when the need pops up we're not tethered to a computer anyway. We need to be able to take a screenshot easily, at a moment's notice.

To get the screenshot:

Android 4.0 and higher

The official key combination is Power and Volume Down. Hold them both, and after a brief pause the screen flashes.

A few devices use their own. The Galaxy S3, at least, uses Power + Home. Why, I do not know.

Images are stored in a folder alongside all the other photos you take with the device, so can be found in the Gallery.

Older Android

Most of these have no specific key combination. It's not built into the OS, but a few OEMs did provide the functionality. Google your phone name plus "Screenshot" and see if anything comes up.

The best way I've found to get screenshots off these devices is No Root ScreenshotIt. You'll install an app, and also need to put a tiny application on a desktop computer (at least Windows and Mac). The only tedious part here is that when you power cycle the device you will need to re-enable the screenshot function by plugging into the desktop and running the app. Especially if testing, your phone may crash, so you'll need this capability with you, so it doesn't work well for some corporate users who cannot install desktop apps. I prefer this app to native things in some ways, as it has nice features like timed capture, so you can get stuff hard to capture otherwise.

Files are stored in a unique location, so you'll want to get a file explorer also, so you can make sure they are being taken, view them, and so on.

iOS

Just press and hold the Home/Menu button (big one on the front of the device) and the Power/Lock button (top of the device) as the same time. The screen will flash white for a moment.

Images are stored in a folder where all other photos are stored.

Blackberry OS

There is no built in screen grab utility.

The best to download seems to be Screen Grabber.

Blackberry 10

Press both the Volume Up and Volume Down keys at the same time. You'll hear a quick camera click.

To find the files, use File Manager, make sure Device is selected, then open the Camera folder.

Windows Phone

Press the Start (Windows key) and Power buttons at the same time.

Screenshots are saved in a "Screenshots" album in the Photos Hub

Bada

Press and hold the Menu and Lock keys. After a short delay, the screenshot is taken and a message indicates this.

Long ago I heard that way over 99% of all photos never got off the phone. I believe it, and think the problem is just as bad on screenshots. You have to be able to send it places, edit it, post it, and a lot of people get hung up at this point.

Android allows just browsing the file system, so if you have time and a cable that's not a terrible solution. iOS doesn't really allow direct file system browser, but you can find scripts to download only specific camera rolls to specific places on the computer.

Emailing is at best tedious. And if you screenshot an entire process -- or there's an actual or de facto corporate "no email attachments" policy -- that won't work well anyway.

The best is some cloud storage solution. There are several options for remote synch storage, but I find DropBox to work the best for this sort of thing. It can be configured to automatically upload images from various folders, but even if you have to manually select screenshots, it's not too bad.

On Android, DropBox will show up as a shareable option. Pick the images, and go. iOS makes you go from the DropBox side, but you can still pick individual files, and put them in specific places (like to segregate one client from another).

Towards a philosophy of digital interface design

Dissatisfaction with skeuomorphism leads to the question, if we're against it, what are we for?

The obvious refrain was to design in a way true to the nature of the medium. See the Good Design principles (1950) for this formally acknowledged as a key precept of, it would seem to follow, good design.

I admit I might have missed a brilliant treatise here and there, but in general I have heard responding silence on the matter of what is the nature of, say, a touchscreen mobile phone.

Certainly we can abide by the OS principles, but even that seems too tactical. Many seem to insist that there is no nature to follow — the glass is too featureless and the bounds too infinite. Impossible, I say. Nothing is without flaw out limit.

As I type this, I can see some wall tiles, clearly meant to look hands painted, and just as clearly actually screen printed reproductions. The shapes are technically there, but at insufficient fidelity, so the directionality of the strokes gives way to the reality of the halftone grid.

Our maybe that's too decorative. What about paper? Lots of designed experiences are still on paper. At it's best (I think here of intaglio and letterpress techniques) design and execution for aper meet the goals of the design while allowing the medium to , and to enhance the final work. An offset reproduction of a letterpress poster is not the same thing, as there's a physicality that moves past the flat page. Designers on paper are aware that ink sits on top and changes the paper itself by being run through the press. That ink should be applied in certain orders to achieve specific effects. We work with the process and medium, not against it. 

How do we do that with digital design, for glowing screens? I haven't worked it all out, but for starters, there is dimensionality. The display layer is behind the glass, often some distance behind it. Even on a flat device without a bezel (use any iPhone as an exemplar) the interface is not flat, but behind the interaction layer. 

And it's not perfect. Even setting aside glare and so on, the screen does not illuminate perfectly evenly. Oh, our conscious brains adjust for this and we don't notice it really, but it's there, and we subconsciously perceive it certainly. To see it, try making the screen one solid color and then take a photo of it (a screenshot won't work). The variation in brightness is not an artifact though it may be exaggerated by the camera. 

When we design perfectly flat interfaces, we're designing for flat interaction and perfectly-smooth reproduction which does not exist. Without direct evidence, I believe that this is why subtle gradients and shadows behind elements (bars, strips, buttons) work well. They emphasize the nature of the phone display – color variation and depth of interaction. 

Or maybe not. 

More to come, if and as I figure it out.

The Fanboi Effect

We've all seen some of the results. Reviews with amazingly slanted headlines, pointing out that iOS bests Android in some minor area, ignoring the rest. Cherrypicking data and comments. But no, I am not even talking about the obvious, visible effects. The problem is much more insidious and deep rooted.

Articles like this one insists The Data Doesn't Lie and discusses a recent analysis of Appstore/Play Store ratings and reviews to determine iOS has higher quality apps than Android.

For the hell of it: Ignoring Windows, Symbian and Blackberry makes the uTest guys look like iOS defenders, out to prove a specific point instead of doing a general survey. The math is not shown, so we can't do anything with it, including determine statistical relevance of the (small) margins. It's not clear the data was normalized to account for grade inflation or any other anomalous rank/review behavior, or the use of different words due to different features on each platform.

But let's say it's true. It might be. What causes that? Well, you do. And your friends who carry iPhones and design, develop or specify an iOS app first, or only. And even your decisions three years ago when you hired that vendor with the write-once tool, that insists your organization can design for iOS and they will port to other platforms.

Here's a quote that summarizes it for me from the comments:

problem is with us developers, who most of the time either directly port iOS apps or don't do unit test before pushing to Android Market.

Directly port iOS apps. I still, long into the global dominance of Android, and far after it's a critically important platform (if not clearly the dominant one) even in the US, see iOS developed first, and Android grudgingly ported over later. Often, with zero input from anything like a design team. Often with no oversight or really direct approval from the product owners.

When I say I see this, I mean at clients I work for, or slightly secondhand from clients others I know work for. Of course, it's pretty easy to observe when an app launches on iPhone, then six weeks later gets a half-assed Android version. Back to clients: I've seen the user tests. iOS design doesn't work on Android. (P.S. crappy hybrid that doesn't /quite/ look like iOS, doesn't even work on iPhones).

So, we've seen the problem with the UX of Android apps. And the problem is in many ways, us. The UX community. I don't even blame developers as much as us. I say it every time I give a presentation on this, and a lot of the time I write about any topic that covers multiple platforms. I'll say it again. Respect your users. Respect their choices. Do not assume they are being duped, they are cheap, they are stupid. The vast Clean-Design-Wing conspiracy to trample all platforms other than iOS has failed, and when you see that Android has 60% of the traffic (looking at a chart on the wall right now) then you have to believe it.

If you are sure that, say, iOS is the only important platform then absolutely build for that. But if you see the data or are otherwise required to make an Android app, or a Windows Phone app, or a Blackberry app, then make that. Design it, for real, like you mean it. Like what you say about users and their contexts is something you believe in. Not just lip service before you say "of course iPhone users are the best" in some probably quantifiable, but ultimately short-sighted, self-serving way.

One caveat: This is true in North America most of all. When I design for India or MENA or just globally, any client based or largely operating outside the US seems to be able to look at the stats, and I get tasked to design for S40 or Blackberry or Android first, and consider bada or Windows Phone for the future. Because that's what the stats say.

I should also say that I really, really try not to be a fan of any platform. My phone rings to an Android now, but because it's the most popular platform in the world. I have carried iOS, WebOS, Symbian, and probably more in the past few years. My briefcase pretty much always has a Nexus 7, an iPad 2, a Blackberry Curve, an iPhone 4, a Nokia C2, and a couple other Androids for keyboard and old OS compatibility. More devices are at home. I build to the platforms I am asked to build to, and if I had to pick a favorite platform I would say "SMS."

How offices work: buzzwords, expectations, realities

Applying for work, and being turned down because I travel or am not local already, reminds me of some of the frustrations arising from mismatches between what we all talk about as cool and trendy, what management expects and what actually happens.

Buzzwords:

Read any article, anywhere, about the new (or maybe coming) state of business and collaboration and you'd think we're all mobile workers. We work from home, we can live anywhere we want with universal connectivity, we can go for an afternoon bike ride and answer important business messages, or draw diagrams while waiting in line for their coffee. We're miles past paperless, and are all globally-connected, digitally-collaborating all the time.

I am calling these buzzwords, but they do exist here and there. I know people who have wormholes in the conference room, or where the entire office doesn't exist, and they all meet at a coffeeshop (or share space) weekly or monthly, and otherwise work from home.

Expectations:

But that's rare.

I routinely do not get jobs (or am not considered for them) as I am not a local. Air travel is cheap and plentiful, and for three years I have been traveling up to 100% for work. I'll go where you want me to, no problem. But no, the expectation for far too many organizations, is that everyone is local.

And not just in the office, but a local. Even the committment of relocation makes them antsy, for what amount to the reasons that the digital remote office make sense. It takes time, and it's a distraction. The expectation is that offices exist, everyone has a desk and issued computer and it docks in right next to the office phone and we all work together every day.

Yes, even for freelance jobs. I've seen people posting, say, a mobile IxD in London for 6 months that will not consider someone in another country because they want to meet face to face. How often? Not clear, but locals-only please.

Realities:

This is actually two different things. Two very, very different things.

Much of my favorite and most well-known work is with clients I have never met. Ever. Some are on entirely other continents. We get along very well with email, sometimes SMS, lots of Google spreadsheets, and other collaboration tools (bug trackers, task lists, etc.). I even use my normal processes of collaboration and send out partially completed files, show off halfassed prototypes others can look at on handsets, and so on.

But I usually have what I call a "day job." It's usually also the bulk of my income (not always) but is the one place that insists I be available 9-5, and generally gives me a desk which I have to be at, either more or less always, or on some other very strict schedule. Which is, just to start with, insane. I am routinely the only guy in the office, as everyone local gets to wander off for the kids' soccer game, or just decides to work from home on Friday.

In fact, I have flown to another city several thousand miles away, dressed appropriately for work and gone to my desk (or folding table in an abandoned floor), worked 5 days and never once had a meeting or important (business-related) face-to-face interaction with another human. I have also come to sit in a cube farm full of co-workers, but because there is not enough conference rooms and half the team is in another location, I spend the whole week when I do have meetings on the phone. There is no point to being in the office, except that it is expected.

For large corporate clients, I won't even get too far into collaboration tools. Google Docs and Bugzilla are not even considered. And the enterprise tools are buggy and awful, so no one uses them unless actually required to. Collaboration is email. Or the corporate IM, which only works over the corporate network, so people working from home often cannot be reached at all.

If you think this is about you, it's not. I wrote something similar as a private email over a year ago, and it keeps being true based not on any one case, but on trends with dozens of different organizations.

How to get started in UX

This is something I get asked at least once a month. Usually, by someone who isn't that far off. They are in another design field. Or development. Or used to be a web designer but had to quit. So, there's a base of knowledge.

Anyway, this is a response I sent to a specific designer today. He's working on signage, hence the references to that, but the same would apply to almost any field. You can apply your existing knowledge to the field you want to get into. It's inherent in your mindset and career choices; if you didn't want to be a UX guy, you couldn't do this.

It's also a bit Bay Area specific, but there is probably some UX-related group in whatever town you are in.

I'd love to give you a list of books or something, but... I've been asked by a few others and have nothing good! Nothing I really like except the usual suspects in general UX stuff. I'm working on it, though.

I guess I'd say the way I stay up to date is the way you already started if I remember right, and you were at the Yahoo! event. Network. Info snack. Sign up for lots of UX blogs, and follow UX people on Twitter. You are free to steal some ideas from me. My twitter account is, AFAIK, not secret so look who I follow and grab any of them that look interesting. I do think Twitter is a good place to start as it's one of the "hypermessaging" services that posts most usefully links to articles, which you read then sign up for the RSS feed they came from.

I write for UX Matters magazine. I rather like that. There are more popular ones, but I think this tends to discuss foundational issues really well, so might get less buzz but is good to know the basics of the field. For /really/ nerdy stuff, I am a member of ACM. They are a computing society, but I also joined the SigCHI sub-group, and get the amazingly good Interactions magazine. Not cheap overall, but at least a few articles are online so look it up and see if that's interesting as well.

Oh, there are lots of good LinkedIn groups also. Just search out UX and any other keywords. They do the same as Twitter, posting questions and links to other articles you can read.

Go to events; there are a lot of good ones here in the Bay Area. Sometimes they are hosted by big organizations and have almost always have good people speaking. Sometimes, you can get fun surprises. I arrived early one time at a Cooper event and got to corner Don Norman for 20 minutes about stuff.

And, start correlating what you do every day with what you want to shift into doing. A lot of web/mobile designers like to quote articles about design of road signs, for example. I absolutely have done the same. Think about (or look up) the issues of 10-foot UI (TV) compared to a mobile. Similar, and the size is irrelevant because its about angular resolution. Distance matters. As does lighting conditions and other environmental factors. You might very well have a good grasp on the principles we all work with.

Oh, and speaking of principles, feel free to just read my book. Which I suggest partly as it's free online:
http://4ourth.com/wiki

It's mobile specific, but there's lots of ranting in the intro about principles and processes, lots of stuff in the section intros and appendices that link to other design patterns and discuss principles of psychology and physiology, and a big (poorly organized though) set of references you can look into.

All my devices, and how they are changing our behavior

A lot of you have seen the huge pile of devices that I used as examples when writing the book. Often I get the question of "which one do I actually use," which of course misses the point of even a consumer today; we use multiple devices, in different contexts.

I carry several handsets and tablets in my briefcase (or have them next to me on the desk) to try new products only available on one platform, to check out how a new design of my own works on specific devices (or every device) or just to generally gain insight into how users of some different device class or OS might experience the world.

But I've also noticed lately how many devices are around the house. Let's look:

These are all the mobile devices in my bag or pocket, carried around by the wife or daughter, or sitting in the living room waiting to be used all the time. Everything here is used at least weekly, and most of them many times a day.

And it leaves out a lot of connected devices still. There's also an older Tablet PC in the living room, the TV (okay, BD player) is connected so we can watch Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, etc. and of course there are also three laptops and a desktop mac, and two more WinTel laptops issued to me by clients. And there's a WiFi hotspot I use to connect a lot of these to the network (I lost another, so the Mini serves that purpose for my wife now).

What I have found interesting is how it's not too many devices. Instead, everyone becomes accustomed to having them. I travel a lot, and take half of these away with me regularly. I'd assumed the various tablets were just work devices and if I thought about it at all, they are a bonus when I was around. But instead the rest of the family has become accustomed to them, and misses the ability to use decent tablets as an adjunct to handsets. So I had to buy another one (the Mini) for the wife, and clean off an old junky one (the Polaroid) for the child. Who is sad she doesn't get a Nexus 7 or iPad Mini for herself.

It is hard to analyze something that I am this close to, but I get the impression that the vision of a PADD (or... whoever it was who posited several sizes of devices long ago) is a good one. I can envision a world where MID/Tablet sized devices are cheap enough and have some multi-user setup, so they can be strewn around, can be lost and broken without worry, and can be used by anyone.

I am not there yet, but I can see this world right around the corner.

You probably don't know what a featurephone is, and that's bad

Yes, something about my brain tends to nitpick, want to take contrary positions, etc. I do have a happy side, and am pleased with many things even in the mobile UX realm. But this one here really pisses me off. I have tried to ignore it, but it's really nagging at me. And it won't stop, and a frightening number of people agree.

In summary, a writer for MIT Technology Review is undertaking an "experiment" to not use his iPhone for a while, and is writing about it. Here's a list of my issues:

• It's not an experiment – I see no hypothesis, or methodology. I don't know what he's using the featurephone for. Voice I presume. SMS I am pretty sure. MMS? Photos? What else?
• He doesn't know what a dumbphone is – He insists on calling the device he picked a "dumbphone." Yeah. That's wrong. His phone has 3G and a browser and can install apps. It's a "featurephone." Dumbphone has a meaning to people like me who care, and it means little data, no browser, no apps installable. Maybe MMS, but I wouldn't bet on it. Using "Dumbphone" to mean "not iPhone" is insulting, and misses the point.
• Featurephones do a lot – I don't know if he's not aware, but he never mentions that featurephones have browsers, use MMS, have a perfectly nice Facebook app, etc. His has a browser built in. Does he use it?
• All smartphones are iPhones – Let's quote him "I’ve been an iPhone user for a little over four years. Like many people, I found it did nothing short of transform my life, when I first started using it in the fall of 2008." Yes, I presume he's one of those who assumes there were no smartphones before this, and despite writing about it, cannot get his head around the fact there is history, or that until this year most of the smartphones in the world were Nokia S60 devices.
• Feature use is a choice – If you understand that you can Tweet and Facebook and browse the Web from a featurephone, but just don't, then why can't you just not do the same on an iPhone? There's not explanation.
• An iPad is not mobile – I have seen several folks do this. Use the iPad as your connected device, and not the handset. Sure, it's something, but it's not like you only use a typewriter, or even a laptop/desktop. They are portable. If you get a 7" tablet, you can put them in a pocket (my Nexus 7 handily fits in a jacket pocket so it goes to client meetings). How is this not just a big phone at that point?
• He is carrying an iPhone anyway – It took a bit, but he's now carrying a data-plan-free iPhone. So, the experiment failed? I have friends who haven't eaten food packaged in plastic for a year, and other people can't avoid carrying around an iPhone for three weeks?

So, why do I care? Well, because it's out there, and people are reading it. So why do you care? Well, because 61% of all living humans in the world (babies, the elderly, very poor people, prisoners) have mobiles. Most of them still have featurephones or actual dumbphones.

Let's set aside my love for things like the N95. One of the more successful smartphones ever, it had no touch and a 10-key keypad, so no iPhone fanboy would ever pay attention to it. Plus, it's old. But lately I have been using a C2 (Nokia S40) for a bit here to try something out for a project. It's pretty much current, and a tiny, non-touch featurephone. It's frighteningly usable as a primary mobile. No, I don't mean mobile phone, I mean mobile device. It has a couple browsers, and you can install others. A very good Facebook and Twitter app. Lots of other things can be downloaded. Disambiguation (you call it predictive) typing is very, very good so it's easy to text and tweet on, even with a 10-key pad.

And there are much better featurephones than this. There are touchscreens, and QWERTY keypad ones with clever music players and Flash plugin support. Or pretty much anything you want.

Being dismissive of everything that is not a smartphone (or more often, everything that is not an iPhone) is the most elitist, rich-white-male thing we can do. I never want to see anyone talk about the social benefits of mobile or greening the world through technology and then assume that everyone better get an iPhone.

And, you are missing out. Happy with a million users, or 100 million? There are BILLIONS of mobile users out there. Something like FIVE BILLION people use SMS. And you can tell me with a straight face that it's fine, we'll just wait until they all get a smartphone to target them?