Impressions

People are not crazy about new technologies for mobility, but they appreciate real benefits in products. Developers & designers are presently at a time where this understanding is frequesntly blurred by a haze of enthusiasm cast up by emerging new technology. However, it is vital that user needs and requirements meet the technologies at some point in the product development cycle. By time and again, it has proven that the intersection of user needs and the industry interests increasingly takes place only after product launch. With the unpredictable mobile communication culture, new solutions are utilized in ways that never even occured to their designers, who would feel a lot better if user behaviour is taken into accout before the launch.

Mobile gadgets like phones and PDAs are carried around with users wherever they go. Sometimes, they are the primary personal communication link to other people and to services. The most obvious engineering solution to ensure portability and mobility is compact size that allows more freedom. The negative impact in decreasing the size is it influenzed the size of physical user interface elements. The total surface aread of the terminal limits the number and size of buttons. The same applies to the screen. Given the limits of human vision, the amount of data that can be presented on the screen at a given time is very limited.

Desktops have web interfaces with numerous options labeled as texts, most of them long enough to resemble natural language, or by icons, thumbnail images, or all of them well-designed and organized into visual structures that link relevant topics to support the users's search strategies. The difference in designing UIs for desktop environments cersus ohone is about quantity; where desktops can accomodate more. However, the difference in quantity turns into a difference in quality. Small interfaces are essentially different from big ones.

Parallel representation, in which plenty of options are displayed simultaneously on a sizeable screen, turns into sequential representation on a small screen, where options are browsed one by one though only a few can be seen at a time. But in a desktop UI, the features are not heavily prioritized. The user will customize his UI and develop personal styles of use. Mobile gadgets are consumer goods and users are not expected to configure them, though they can short-cut some of the functions that they frequently use. The developers are responsible for making the products more user-friendly.