- We need to embrace this new medium, be aware of its constraints and take advantage of what ts can do well, such as spatial-temporal relationships.
- The mobile context is everywhere and anywhere: it's highly dynamic, unpredictable, and full of potential disruptions.
- The three most important constraints are: device, environment, and human.
She discusses Mobile Context Design Tips, and two in particular caught my eye.
- "Enable picking up where you left off." This is, of course, good for non-mobile contexts too, but the interruptability of mobile use makes it even more important.
- "Use time as an organising principle." This is used explicitly in some things such as Facebook's timeline, but I think it can be used more widely in situations where time isn't necessarily an obvious choice for an ordering. Streams of data are becoming a more popular way of displaying data, driven largely by higher mobile use.
Hinman also discusses convergence and multi-device experiences. Since people often complete a task across multiple devices, we must design for a device ecosystem. The most common example at the moment is shopping for an item on a mobile device, but completing the purchase on a desktop device.
Chapter 5 is about Mobile UX Patterns, and is full of useful, practical, suggestions. Two that stick out for me are Content becomes the interface (which is popping up a lot these days with fully gesture-driven apps such as Clear and Rise) and Say goodbye to done (which is all about the erosion of task-based interactions in favour of: accruing value over time; exploration and discovery; using sensors to guess intent).
Hinman strongly recommends getting to a prototype early in the process, and I couldn't agree more. Being a web developer, I'm most interested in ways of getting HTML & CSS out as quickly as possible, but she discusses many more forms.
The book contains a lot more than I've mentioned here, and I highly recommend it.