BDConf: Brian Fling presents Resonance: A Mobile Design Ethos

In Resonance: A Mobile Design Ethos, Brian Fling (@fling) explains how to create meaningful mobile products that have the power to change people’s lives. I unfortunately got to the session a bit late because lunch ran over. Here are my notes I caught:

• Great ideas and innovation aren’t enough. You need to articulate your vision in order to create great design.
• Stay true to design principles in the face of fickle clients.
• Brian used an example on his work for the BBC iPlayer to demonstrate how users just want the content to be clear. Clients and teams tend to overcomplicate simple problems and often create worse user experiences as a result.
• Focus on the clarity of design, not on the bells and whistles. Brian explained how after Nike Better World came out, everyone got on the parallax bandwagon. His client wanted to incorporate parallax into their design project, so they spent many hours of testing and prototyping a parallax version of the design. It was a costly process and they found that it didn’t test well with users.
• Less Is More. Constantly refine and focus on keeping the experience very very simple.
• Designing experiences that are meant to work across designs

10 ways to access an experience

1. Universal app— an experience that’s offered across a multitude of channels and devices. Brian used NPR’s COPE strategy as an example.
2. Native application— an app built specifically for a native platform. Proprietary technology isn’t going anywhere and can provide cutting edge functionality
3. Native Hybrid App— a combination of native and web views
4. HTML5 hybrid app— a native shell whose contents are built primarily in web technologies
5. Responsive Web app— An app that is created using responsive web design techniques. (I typically use AudioVroom as an example of a responsive app)
6. Mobile Web App— An app written in web technologies and deployed on the web
7. Desktop Web App— An app written in web technologies that are only optimized for desktop experiences. The experience is rendered as-is for mobile browsers
8. Responsive Web Site— a site built using fluid grids, flexible images and media queries and hopefully good progressive enhancement techniques
9. Desktop Web Site— a site optimized only for large desktop screens
10. Mobile Web Site— a site optimized specifically for small mobile browsers.

Mobile Design

• Building a design language is a mandatory step in order to create coherent cross-platform experiences.
• When we talk about design, we talk about resonating with people.