Fresh mobile design elements, just in time for Spring!

I almost can't believe it's been almost six months since my last update. I use this file almost every day. Which maybe is why I haven't gotten around to updating. I've been working a lot, working more (freelance in my "spare" time), writing a book for O'Reilly, and editing an entirely other book. When that comes out, I'll also be sharing the file I've used to make all those illustrations. But for now, I've got a few updates all throughout the old, well-used Mobile Design Elements document itself. As always, you can grab these from the same wiki where I'm writing the book, on the Drawing Tools & Templates page, where I also put up every other template, stencil and UI guideline document or link I can find. Remember, it's a wiki, so add your own if you find one. So, like I said, there are little changes all over. Mostly in the small components. But a few highlights: I've added an iPhone 4. Keeping to the resolution scaling didn't work for the doc size, so I had to make it different. Keep in mind. Just noticed I didn't get an annunicator row into the 4... Oh well. Sure, there are lots of places that have iOS device stencils, but if you like mine, now you have one. Compared to the smartphone fanbois, not everyone has this one. A featurephone. Specifically, a convertible one with 10-key one way, and a slide out keyboard. This is in outline mode only right now, but I will probably shade it someday, and will post that as well of course. Speaking of annunciators, I am trying to not just add items, but to organize them. So, all the system status items I could think of (actually, which resulted from research for the relevant section of the book) are now ordered like a typical annunciator row, and options have been added as I encounter them. Be sure to wander around and check out the rest. Pen input bits and pieces. More unscaled handsets for illustration. Lots of little icons and other pieces. A wholly new and fairly complete keyboard section, so you don't have to draw your own for quick comps. And more. Enjoy! Now, off to more writing and drawing.

That comfort is important

“ ... The iPad bursts into life, its backlight on, the blinking “slide to unlock” label hinting at the direction of the motion it wants you to make. That rich, vibrant screen craves attention... It’s glowing rectangles all the way down: those backlit screens that suck your attention...
Perhaps the Kindle’s comfort is down to its single-use nature. After all, it knows it already has your attention – when you come to it, you pick it up with the act of reading already in mind.
That comfort is important to the Kindle’s intended purpose, though. This is a device that always seems content with itself. Just sitting there, not caring if you pick it up or not. Like a book. ”

Tom Armitage of Berg, on the difference between the iPad and the Kindle and their Asleep & Awake performance. This is Ubicomp to me.

21% of the Phones I See Are iPhones

For some time now I've been hearing "everyone I see has an iPhone" from all sorts of folks in the mobile industry. I presume it's some sort of self select error from fanbois. And sadly, it seems almost everyone in the mobile industry is an overbearing fan of the iPhone. To the point that they are constantly surprised by baseline features of pretty much any other phone when I pull one out of my box of phones. And they spend all their time with one iPhone people, marry other iPhone people, and seem to think it's a really simple world. A month ago, an example of those comments that annoyed me was:

"If you watch the phones people display in public, you really see only two in large numbers: iPhone and BlackBerry."

I am sure that can be parsed to be technically true, but I hear a lot of comments along these lines. And with a popular developer mentality of making products for yourself, then your friends, and users who matter will come as they may, I am saddened by this. I have even heard non-technical (not mobile designers or developers, I mean) folks being given crap by their non-technical friends (same definition) for having an "old scool" phone, when it does perfectly good internet, email, etc. It's just not the latest favorite smartphone.
So, I was looking around one day exactly a month ago, and realized I am looking at all sorts of phones in people's hands. So, it's that simple. I started recording them. Every handset I even sorta could identify, I recorded. The methodology I used was:

• It has to be already visible. No asking everyone in the room to pull out their phones. This gives the observed weighting that everyone seems interested in. There's some "that's what they use" thing that implies everyone else's phones are unimportant. I have actually had conversations where people dismissed sales numbers.
• I discounted my family, and all work friends. And their immediate families.
• If it's clearly a phone, it gets recorded. This makes for some vague labels on some of them. I can recognize a half dozen handsets at 100 paces. Others are "flip phone" at all but contact range. So, you'll see some oddly vague data. But this is to avoid my own bias on recognizing phones I have or use or read about all the time.
• I started to record cameras, music players, etc. It got out of hand. Just let it be known that convergence is not as far as I would have thought. A LOT of people carry other devices, and almost everyone who wants to take photos brings dedicated cameras to events they know are gonna happen. Very, very little cameraphone use at school concerts. A few Kindles observed also, but no other readers, no iPads.
• No demographics. Partly, to make it easy. I was typing these into my phone while doing other things. Partly because I don't have the capability to bother everyone to fill out a survey. I would worry about my own bias therefore, so didn't gather any.
• Yes, it's local. Kansas City and nearby areas. If you think we're all rubes, blow me. Go ahead and design for your friends in the bay area, and stop reading now.
• This is only 72 total devices. Take that as you will.

Some other observations I made, but which were not as well recorded: Every type of phone was seen being approximately equally used for everything. SMS, email, games, video playback, internet searches. On iPhone, Android, Blackberry and every stupid little message phone. More study of this would be nice, but it's even harder to tell what people are doing. This is based on when I could tell. Oh, and fairly few people talking. Less than 10% of the observed phones were seen because someone was talking on them. I didn't record it, but more like under 5%. Very few. Mobiles are typing and looking devices now. All the data I used is available for you to mock and laugh at. Or, I guess, add to. If anyone likes this, go ahead and continue the experiment. Vector versions of the charts above can be downloaded as well. I think most of this is clear, but one definition is sort of mine alone. The Message Phone the stupendously common QWERTY device, usually with a slide-out keyboard, and some controls (usually a full 10-key pad) when closed. Sure, other devices and even many smartphones share these features, but for here, I am calling it only featurephones. Note that these are not counting as touch, since it's impossible to tell that at a glance, but some huge percentage of them are indeed touch devices as well. They often are pretty neat, with nice keyboards, good haptic feedback, perfectly good screens, multi-day battery life, etc. Note that iPhone and Android are neck and neck. And message phones slightly outsell those. Hmm... Oh, and check out that last one. Other devices outsells all others. Sure, it's a mishmash, but don't say any one thing is dominant when it's easy to make charts like this. Anyway, as far as validity, I always say that crappy, cheaply-done research that broadly backs serious, heavy research is trustworthy. Nothing here is totally surprising and much hews exactly to known sales or use ratios, so I do tend to believe it. So, what's this all mean? Simple. There are a LOT of devices out there, and people use them. Look at the data and see what is really going on. More importantly, look at real data and make sure you look at your own users, and your analytics the right way. But what if 96% of your traffic is coming from iPhone? Well, I'd be suspicious of the analytics first of all. Seriously, I've seen this way more than once. If you sell anything but iPhone apps and get that sort of traffic, then first be suspicious and make sure you are getting the right information.

Tailfins & Chrome

For several years now, I've been enjoying mobile design as an exercise in streamlined, contextually-relevant design. Sure, it's also pretty or emotive, but that's for marketing. To get people in the door, or make their first few experiences matter. And then I saw a handful of OSs last week at Design for Mobile 2010 in Chicago. Or, more importantly, I saw the reaction of the designers and developers. I saw the attendance of various sessions. And my reaction is that right now it doesn't matter how useful something is, but how cool and new and exciting it appears to be. Just look at the above image. The 1949 Ford is a technical marvel. Even the frame is innovative. This ad talks about the braking most of all, but covers all sorts of additional features. The Cadillac of the same era (the 1948, actually) is entirely show and bluster. Yes, those are tailfins, the first ones we'd see of a long line of them. Now, the '49 Ford sold great. Because it was a terrific car, really a modern car in every way. But very, very soon the whole style looked dated. And I'll note Ford never did adopt the tailfin thing, and sold just fine despite this, throughout the crazy tailfin era. I sorta think Nokia is Ford in this tale. S^3 (and the stellar hardware) is shiny enough to please anyone, gets the work done, and is rock solid. But it doesn't apply a brand name to the display. It doesn't have animated squares on the idle screen. Etc. It also does keep selling (Nokia still by a wide margin the largest smartphone seller, worldwide), but does anyone talk about it? Naw. Not really. Who got the attention at the conference last week? Windows Phone 7. Else, which is pretty cool. An Android tablet someone was carrying around for work. iPad and iPhone strategies, and Apple didn't even show up themselves. Hell, even a pre-release Android I had got grabbed for some ooh and ahh time. In case you assume I am only being cynical, I am not. I am partly disappointed and cynical, but I can work with that. What it means to me is that my ideal OS is clearly not functionally the ideal thing to bring to market. If you hired me to design a new OS, or browser interface, I would know that it has to have something totally off the wall, just to have a hook for everyone to latch onto. It also means I have some hope for the future. No, it's not that everyone buys cars today based on their specifications. But in the 1960s, people also bought VWs. And after this was the muscle car era, where specs (and the appearance of having high spec) was critical. So... things will change, and my biggest takeaway is recognizing this trend. And that the mobile market is advanced enough it has trends. Not just winners and copycats, but market-wide consumer-level trends, which are worth exploiting, or understanding so you can try to undermine them.