Roundup of Recent Appearances

Photo by Drew McLellan

I've had the pleasure of sharing my ideas about mobile experience design with a bunch of fascinating people lately, either at conferences or one-on-one. Here's a quick roundup of what I've been talking about and where you can find the traces of those conversations:

Buttons Are a Hack / Teaching Touch

Touch is leading us to a future with less and less chrome, possibly even none at all, as gestures replace familiar buttons, menus, and tabs. This presentation addressed why beloved buttons are weak replacements for manipulating content directly. I shared some practical principles for designing mobile interfaces that are both more fun and more intuitive. But hang on; if there are no visible controls, how do users figure out how to use the darn thing? I explained how to teach users new interfaces and gesture vocabularies by making it effortless to discover invisible gestures. I discussed the power of animation, the examples of game design, and techniques to build native and web apps according to the new rules of touchscreen design.

Luke Wroblewski posted his notes from this talk at An Event Apart in Atlanta, as did Evan Mullins.
PDF of the presentation slides from this talk at Web 2.0 Expo, with accompanying notes of my comments
Archive of the virtual seminar I gave for UIE to discuss these ideas ($149)


Busting Mobile Myths

The mythical mobile user who's always distracted and in a rush doesn't always, or even usually, exist. Yet too often we design for that context, creating mobile apps and websites as lite versions of desktop counterparts. Instead, mobile apps should almost always do MORE than their desktop counterparts. In this talk, I explain the difficult craft of designing simple interfaces for complex mobile apps, sharing techniques for future-friendly mobile efforts and, along the way, debunking several stubborn mobile myths.

Video of this talk from Do It with Drupal:
PDF of the presentation slides from this talk
Notes by Luke Wroblewski
Notes by The Next Web from Future of Web Design


Podcasts

I've been talking mobile over the podwaves, too. Here's where you can find those conversations:

UIE Spoolcast with Jared Spool: Discoverability in Designing for Touch
UIE Brain Sparks with Adam Churchill: Buttons are a Hack follow-up
Iterate podcast with mobile geniuses Rene Richards, Seth Clifford and Marc Edwards
The Web Ahead podcast with UX phenom Jen Simmons


Even more!

I'm slated to do a slew of talks this year, and I hope you'll come say hello. You can always find my upcoming schedule at Lanyrd for the where and when.

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