Handful of Nothing

It has been a great conference start. The keynote by Debora Addler was a class on the essence of Design. It was great even to known that she was able as an individual to patent it. Not that I’m in for patents, but when they are used like this, just to protect a single small inventor they are really doing what they were meant for.

After that, a nice storytelling session with Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs, and I have the pleasure to meet a colleague from Nokia London, who actually designed the camera Ui. That reduced the felling of not knowing anyone around.

Then I attended an Ebay session, that it was not bad, it just didn’t fit for me. A pity but I was trying to find my guide book with my ticket for the tools session in the other room.

In the lunch time, I sat in the “Mobile and devices” table, to discuss about Symbian, Linux, Windows mobile, community innovation, reliability and more. In the table among other great people I met was Barbara Ballard, from little springs design. One of the few companies focused solely on mobile here in the US. If you want to check out her book : here

After lunch I attended the “how to manage Ux teams” and also one of the best sessions of the day about mental models, which in the begging left me a little bit skeptical about, but after a couple of minutes I could start realizing the potentials of using it.

Also a lot of other adaptive path sessions followed, and a loot of good information was gathered. Of course sometimes you get yourself thinking “This doesn’t fit for me” or “this is kind of too simple or too web related” but in the end the great thing is to realize that some of the things you think a pretty common you just forgot or doesn’t use more (Like Alan from Nokia said to me).

So I’m fully satisfied, the only thing that is killing me is that I got pretty ill in the evening and lost the cocktail night at Union state. Tried to sleep but I still felling bad. d***. Hope I’ll better tomorrow morning.

You can follow up the UX Week by twitter, flickr and of course googling for other blogs that are talking about it.

Everyone likes to makes critics, but it’s even better to see answers. I was very “sarcastic” because it’s my way of saying things, but now I was really happy to see the Widset guys answer. Saying that of course that site was made for laptops / desktop. So yesterday, a brave user like me I read the site and also found the answer that they sent me : http://get.widsets.com. My tip is just make it clear, or when detecting a mobile browser put a link on top (visit the mobile enhanced experience here)

It’s clear why the site was made for laptops : it has a nice ui for managing the Widgets, but I must be very dumb (or I’m acting as regular user, do not reading the manuals) because I suffered a little bit understanding how to really work smart in that ui. My second tip for the developers is also in the managing part : it would be nice to have a very nice, simple 1 page “how it works”. Because when one thing fails, you can miss yourself in the middle.

So I logged in, in the nice ajax log in box, got to the main page. Clicked on library. Nice, I found some of my favorite web services there and picked up “forum nokia” :

Ok, not a problem. It happens. The thing now is : how to solve this problem. I thought the obvious client = my phone. So let’s try again in the phone first? Unm, not.. maybe I can set up this in the configuration:

Unm no luck. Just my data there. Nothing about my phone. No worries. We are exploring =) Wait here it is :

there’s this “reload” button. I really think that there’s something related to the page that I’m .. but as it said about problems.. phone.. let’s click.

Nice. The sms will solve my problems!

5 minutes : no sms. maybe something went wrong. I decided to check again, maybe my number is wrong, maybe that “country” box near the number is not related to the country code, and I need to enter it manually (there’s no format indication on number box so I used the conventional). Fixed the number. Maybe it really needs the +55 code. Maybe not, but who know? let’s try again. clicked reload :

So, no luck for me right? I don’t give up! I follow the instructions and again use my phone to go to the : get.widsets.com. Tried with my N95 : certificate Expired? Hun? What? Certificate? (kidding.. I know what is this certificate, but come one…) Then I tried again, with all permissions set on the phone. Same problem. Damn. Ok, let’s change sim cards and place it on a E61 to see if happens again.

Nice it detects my phone model, begin installation, regular symbian process… downloading…Yeah, I did it. Something I didn’t understand (related to my phones) why the N95 failed with certificate issues, and the E61 was ok… and it was a java application right?

Well.. Open Applications (small icon, instead of default size) opens the Java application.
Much nicer now!

Using widsets finally! Overall : looks quite nice, very nice deep-field effects with the balls, great tooltips, very nice indeed. Now it’s time to browse the widgets and use good ones for my day to day mobile experiences =)

*this was a description of my usage to give a idea of what kind of problems happens. Of course most of this problems is related to the dumbness of the user (in the case me) but sometimes can also help designers find the problems. I did this not only myself, but then tried with a non-designer person at home. Just saying to her : You know those lovely mac widgets you use? What if you have on the phone? go to widsets.com and try it. And I observed her doing almost the same mistakes. The pain was not helping her in the middle =)

Thanks anyways guys for the fast reply. I’m happy to see that you are listening to users, even dumb ones like me.

UPDATE : I tried 2 widgets (flickr, forum nokia, and other simple rss, like the ones I’m already running) and always get this “it’s not supported by your client.” is there a way to solve? New tip: if a problem appears please place a link for “learn how to solve it” that would help a lot.

- Marcelo

Well, there I was looking at those nice things about the widsets, making fun of people only being able to develop to the iphone with widgets when I decided : Why not use some of my nice Wifi-enabled phones to install this widsets straight with them? I don’t believe Steve jobs was right when he said that until today only the “baby” internet was working on the phones, and the IPhone will bring the real internet to your pocket. I thought with myself : S60 browsers uses webkit, safari uses webkit, so I have already the same browser as the iphone, less the eye candy, but the engines are the same right?

It seems so, so in the end Iphone will meet the same complications as users of S60 have been finding on their phones. So together with proximity sensor, ilumination sensor now we have the “browser” as fake “innovations” on the iphone.

But back to my Nokia phones… problems
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s a phone problem but rather a website problem. Widsets site uses javascript and not regular forms to make a ok button change colors when it’s “ready” to be clicked. (why not use a simple disabled?) and what happens? Well, if you try to register yourself with your NICE, EDGY phone like ne N95 or E61 you just can’t do it.

Why? Because some lovely front end builder decided to use some nice Javascript, and must be that kind of “Treat me as a real developer, look I know how to use the object notations in JS” because he used all “advanced” tricks to play out with the simple button and make it unavailable to … tchananan! NOKIA PHONES! Nice, so I need to come back to my lap top to be able to install widgets on my phone. Thank you mr Javascript. Instead of showing off your skills, you should at least ask someone to tests with the biggest interested on the subject phones.

So please take your time to see the amount of show off you can find here in the JS file that actually breaks on Nokia phones. Such a pity. And Why do that? Just to have “nice” AJAX-trendy effects. Like checking the user name or sliding in a log in box. Remember people.. your target is mobile browsers.

Like we say here in Brazil : House of a blacksmith, wooden stick.

Sarcasm gone, works nicely on the Firefox, but… It takes a little bit to show feedback on the actions, and there’s no clear indication that an rpc call was made. Want to use Ajax or other trend thing? Do so, but do no forget the users.

Well, I’ve just watched and it’s simple, fast and direct to the point : j2ee sucks for web application development. Ok We already knew it but when it comes from j2EE lovers like the folks at NASA… yeah it has some impact. The argument behind it all? Fast turnaroud. I can’t agree more with that.
so, point your browser to : http://oodt.jpl.nasa.gov/better-web-app.mov and take a look at a simple “fight” between the main options for web development available today.

This is a great tool for form building. I tried the demo several times and the UI they developed is just great. So well polished that made me fell envy as I never felt before =)

For me, a Brazilian, the business model/pricing is kind of heavy but I really wish this guys a great success.

Try them out