Applications

When we talk about “usable” or “intuitive” interfaces, Apple devotees and the web app crowd (myself included) tend to bias toward the first-time user….
— 37signals on the TripLog/1040 iPhone app

So true. Web sites are heavily-skewed towards winning people over on first-impression, which puts a lot of importance on perceived simplicity and attractive graphic/UI design. But it also undervalues real usability vis-a-vis accessibility and task-completion, which the app’s author (a veteran Palm developer) spent a lot of time trying to explain in the comments regarding the look-and-feel of his first iPhone application. In the end, all of his principles were valid, they just weren’t styled well, or assembled Apple-y enough for the masses.

It will definitely be interesting to see how developers moving to the iPhone from other mobile platforms weather the transition going forward.

[Edited 11-07-2007] Not sure if this reviewer is being meta, but one of the app’s first reviews on the App Store itself is “This lacks all of the UI elegance that the iPhone has come to be known for. This belongs on a Palm Pilot.”

Sometimes I’m amazed at how much Nokia “gets” being in the mobile domain, and I wonder why they haven’t made a bigger dent in the American market yet.

Take the Nokia Sports Tracker for example, which comes to us from the Nokia Research Center which just got a brilliant highlight in BusinessWeek that’s worth reading:

This option alone says a lot. Here’s how the NRC describes this application:

[This] is a GPS based activity tracker that runs on S60 smartphones. Information such as speed, distance and time are automatically stored to your training diary. To be able to use [this] application for real, you need Nokia S60 3.0 phone with Bluetooth GPS device or Nokia S60 3.0 phone with integrated GPS.

And this is just the surface of what they do. On the flip side, as Jan Chipchase, one of their exploratory human behavioral field researchers — who recently spoke at the TED conference on the mobile experience — says in the BusinessWeek article:

Let’s talk about a study we did last year on how people share objects. You can relate this to mobile phones. They’re basically designed as personal objects. But if you look at usage in Africa, increasingly the phone is shared. A family might have one. A village might have one, or someone who runs a phone kiosk in a village might have one. We’re thinking about how we could redesign the mobile phone and the communication experience to be more suitable for sharing.

These are truly smart people who really are looking to enhance the mobile experience and you gotta applaud them.

(via textually, e-series)