Mobile Designers and Empathy

July 6th, 2009

Mobile users are often on the move while interacting with their devices. By definition, their environments change almost constantly and often introduce unforeseen obstacles. Mobile conditions can place limits on many user attributes: focus, input precision, network connectivity, available time, personal space, and patience. Yet mobile devices are becoming as robust and powerful as laptops, inspiring tons of new, high-end functionality. The challenge is to reconcile the two factors, creating a helpful user experience that uses the new tech to the benefit of the largest number of users and the detriment of none.

User-centered designers face some interesting questions: How do you design an interface that allows someone to find directions or call a cab while carrying bags of groceries home from the market? How can an interface accommodate limited agility, gloved hands, a jostling subway train, or fat fingers? How do you let users subtly compose, edit, and erase email messages while in a long, boring meeting? (Hint: shake-to-edit or shake-to-delete or shake-to-anything are not very friendly requirements.) How do you model user behavior when the nature of mobile use is unpredictable and endlessly diverse? How can you solve problems as unobtrusively as possible?

I hear questions like these very often these days. Designers and developers who never paid much attention to the usability of their web or desktop applications are suddenly quite concerned about the UX of their mobile applications and mobile-optimized sites. I welcome the new interest in the topic, as I’ve always been a bit UX-obsessed, but I have to wonder about the inspiration. I think I’m witnessing a new empathy for users and a shift from the assumption that users crave every complex, novel, “innovative” idea a designer can throw at them.

Progressive Enhancement to the Rescue

One of the topics covered in my iPhone book is progressive enhancement. For those unfamiliar with progressive enhancement, it is the art of providing baseline value to all users and additional value to those in favorable environments or with extra abilities. A strong, accessible functional baseline is important for all software products and interfaces because we want our products to be user-centric.

Progressive enhancement patterns are familiar to a lot of web designers. I think a lot of folks kind of fudge the topic, though. They meet their stated requirements (such as 508 compliance), but often ignore the art. They provide baseline functionality, but they make it clear it’s only baseline. They passively penalize the audience that can only meet the minimum requirements and focus all elegance, fun, and inspiration on the most capable users.

Building Empathy Through Adversity

I think the growing importance of mobile devices in our everyday lives can give a new perspective on baseline users, perhaps leading to more time spent providing amazing, elegant assistive applications and reducing the importance placed on gimmicks.

Think about it: these days, we are all mobile users. As such, we all face adverse conditions for use. Suddenly, we all understand what it’s like to have external conditions impose limitations on our abilities. We are all handicapped in one subtle way or another as we go about our day. All it takes is a taste of frustration to ignite passion for assistive interfaces.

The applications we truly appreciate in the mobile space are those that enable us to accomplish our tasks no matter what our environment. We can compose emails in the absence of a network connection–they simply send when we are back online. The better Twitter clients and RSS readers store data on the iPhone to provide some value when users aren’t online. The better interfaces allow us to perform tasks with one free finger and minimal attention. They don’t impose gestural abilities on tasks for the sake of novelty. Or, if they do, they treat the novel interaction as an enhancement, allowing us to accomplish the same goals with the tap of a button.

In interactive design, including software and web design, progressive enhancement is often treated as an annoying requirement. Designers can now tap into their own experience using mobile devices to better empathize with users who lack full control of their environment, tools, and body, leading to a new respect for baselines and a shift in attention from the secondary enhancements to the primary use cases.