The Mobile Paradigm

Vocabulary Use Case – High level thing that a user wants to do. (register for classes) Task – Low level thing that a user wants to do. (view class description, view section times, add section to my schedule) User Experience – How does the user feel as they are accomplishing a use case. (  )

The punch line Mobile optimizes for a specific use case. Desktop generalizes for many use cases.

Why?

The bad old days Mainframe systems were built for a specific use case. A system did one thing and it did it well. But my use case isn’t covered.  – Build another system. This was expensive. 

Brilliant idea! Build web pages that encapsulate tasks Let users piece these pages together in whatever way supports their use case.

Web Pages are cheap. Pages don’t talk to each other  – Context Don’t know what pages I need.  – Links and aliases. Because pages have to fit into multiple use cases, they contain stuff I don’t care about for my use case (lower signal:noise). 

Mobile UX Limitations Small screen Course/sloppy input Less user attention Combine these with low signal:noise. 

Mobile Push reusability down to the web service layer. Go back to optimizing for use cases. If your use case fits, high signal:noise. If your use case doesn’t, life sucks.  – Build another UI.

$1M? Is SOA enough of a game changer, that we can afford to build a UI tailored to each use case?

My Bet With Web Services in place: – UI’s are cheap. – If the community builds them, they’re free.

Takeaways The currently compromised desktop UX completely breaks down on mobile. We have to get back to use case centric design. The current concepts of Discoverability, Linking, Aliasing, and Context were designed when desktop was the only environment, and to deal with the compromise. We have to rethink them now that we have multiple environments, and we’re designing for use cases again.