Mobile Design: Less Means More

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to speak at Mobile Tech for Social Change at The Hub Halifax. The event was organized by Dale Zak who blogged about what went down following the event.

I gave a talk and led a discussion just after the internet’s Joel Kelly about Mobile Design. To be truthful, I have limited experience actually creating interfaces for mobile devices, but in my opinion, it’s just another platform and the design principles and process that we use still apply, with some special considerations. These special considerations formed the 7 tenets of good mobile design that were the backbone of my presentation. These are:

1. Making it smaller doesn’t mean it works.
2. Mobile data costs time and money. Respect that.
3. Determine if users are mobile and send em to the right place.
4. Decide which content users want and give it to them.
5. Remove navigation users don’t need.
6. Testing is essential. And costly.
7. Content isn’t king in the mobileverse

Photo by M4ChangeHfx attendee and impromptu presenter, Dave Emmett. Thanks Dave!

Overall, the day was great. Ryan Deschamps started a fantastic conversation with only a single question, emphasized in three ways written on a flipchart. Dan Robichaud gave a fascinating talk about embedding location data in web sites.

As always, I’ve posted my slides on Slideshare.net/brightwhite. I’ve embedded it here as well.