Monday - I am very excited to work today!!!

Last Friday I went to a conference Anytime, Anywhere about mobile technology. It was quite useful and I now I realized that I want to work in the Market too. Yes, I don't know what happened!! I would like to be a teacher, professor in my area and just it. On the other hand, I love to work and develop graphic interfaces, icons and information architecture. All those things are related to information design I love to study and work with.

Returning to the conference - The first Speaker was James Chaytor Sprung Studios and he presented "Designing the interface for Mobile Phones". He showed a lot of examples that his company has been developing - Icons of Orange mobiles phones, Gadgets (the ones that we have on the Windows Vista), 3.uk. He highlighted the importance to design icons easy to use. Moreover, he talked about their methodology - focus groups: users, experts and no experts. They check: how do they use information? Which are the preferences of users? What is the concept? Then, they design the concept and test the system with low fidelity design. After that, they solve mistakes before the tests with high fidelity prototype. It is important to say that usability specialist give more contribution - understanding - how user use the program. So, designers and programmers use direct (users) and indirect (experts) information.

The second speaker David Tisserand France TelecomInside Orange labs – The User-centered process in the launch of new products and services underlined usability issues (effectiviness, efficiency, satisfaction) and the value to envolve users in step of system development. He quoted some methodologies they use: heuristic analysis, task analysis, observational test. The methodology part is one of my concerns of my PHD project that is why I mentioned it. The presenter repeated the same statement all the time "First impression is very important". As almost all the audience come from usability background this conference didn't bring new approaches.

Ron Bird -Designing Interaction for Mobile Phones showed how users can interact with scroll wheel on mobile phones.

The last one was Stephen O’Connor IDEOCreating Valuable Mobile Experiences. He has worked with mobile phones for 8 years. Below some points he presented:

• We should concentrate in human behaviour for designing products and services;


• Users question themselves - What is it? Why do I need it? How does it work?


• Main factors of Interaction design - desirability, feasibility, viability;

Framework for consumers - How do users behave?

What is the difference of mobile?
- Social (communication) experience

Definitely, the last lecture was the best :)