podcast ep. 4: unicorns and rainbowsinfo.macadamian.com › rs › macadamian › images ›...
Post on 06-Jul-2020
0 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
The Rainbows & Unicorns of Mobile Design & Development
No. of pages: 7
Audio recording Identification: Unicorns_&_Rainbows_-_episode_4_(use_330-430_as_teaser)
Audio length: 00:10:28
Co-Host: Anthony Hooper, Director of Engineering, Macadamian Technologies
Co-Host: Jennifer Fraser, Director of Design, Macadamian Technologies
2/22/2013
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
++Audio++ 00:00:01
[Intro music]
Welcome to Macadamian’s audio Podcast- unsalted. Strategic insights on software development and
user experience design. We are bringing you snack-sized discussions your brain can munch on. Join the
conversation at macadamian.com.
Anthony Hooper: Hi everybody! My name is Anthony Hooper and I am the Director of Engineering
here at Macadamian Technologies. I am sitting with my good friend Jen Fraser.
She is the Director of Design at Macadamian Technologies. We want to talk
today about a problem we have coined, the ‘rainbows and unicorns’ of mobile
design and development. What we mean by that is we are going to tell you a
little bit about the three major challenges that we face almost every single day
with almost every single client who is thinking about moving mobile. Jen, why
do you not introduce us to the first big problem?
Jennifer Fraser: Tony and I were talking about this. The kind of number one challenge we came
up with is what we call the ‘silver bullet’. Clients come to us with this dream that
they are going to be able to build a project once and have it work magically
everywhere across all different OS’s and form factors, which Tony and I kind of
call the ‘unicorn and rainbow’ symptom. It is a nice dream, but just the reality of
it is not that simple. The mobile ecosystem is just so fragmented right now.
There are so many different form factors and OS’s out there between IOS,
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
Android, Windows Phone 7, BB10, tablet and handset. It is just a really
fragmented market.
Anthony Hooper: One of the big challenges we face is that a lot of our customers are asking about
HTML 5; is that not the way to go? Realistically, my personal opinion is that it is
a little bit of a fallacy and a little short-sighted. Not only are we stuck within the
design constraints of each one of these OS’s, we are also stuck now within the
browser constraints. How does that browser render, how does it look, how does
it feel? Why do we not talk a little bit more about some of the design problems
with each one of these fragmented OS’s?
Jennifer Fraser: They are just different—to state the obvious, they are different! Each of those
OS’s kind of has their own experience, their own unique experience that differs
from another. Sometimes if a client comes to us and they have an application on
one operating system and are looking to have it migrated to a different
operating system, the challenge is how do you migrate it in a way that makes
sense within the context of the application? How do you make it feel like a good
citizen on that platform because how something behaves on IOS can be
different from how it behaves on an Android.
Anthony Hooper: That is awesome because that is a Segway to sort of our second problem, which
is okay. I am going to jump back to the idea of each one of the magic— the
‘unicorn’ or ‘silver bullet’ problems. Like we said, HTML 5, is that the way to
solve it? If we are looking at Mono, C Sharp/.net ported to multiple platforms, is
that one of the ways? Qt has been ported to multiple environments from a
technical perspective. Realistically, the all mobile is another OS challenge; that
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
OS is our browser. Is it WebKit, Safari, IE or a flavour of WebKit that has been
ported to a particular device, particular operating system or particular brand?
We are stuck with cascading style sheet limitations. How do we apply styles that
make sense? Responsive design is so contextual.
Jennifer Fraser: That is the buzz word that so many people are coming back with. Our clients
now are asking about responsive design and what does it mean. Really, you
need to understand how your users are using the product and what they are
using it for. How you design something for a tablet form factor should be
inherently different from how you design it for a handset because people are
not going to be using the device in the same way. You need to understand the
goals of the person when they are looking at your product on a handset versus
their goals when using it on a tablet. They could be very different which means
it is not just a question of adjusting the layout so it looks better on the device. It
is actually about what they need to do and what is different about what they are
trying to do.
Anthony Hooper: On top of that, the look and feel.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes.
Anthony Hooper: A great example of this is if we start looking at some of the more modern
operating systems that have come out recently like BlackBerry 10 or Windows
Phone 8 where they become more and more gesture-centric. The standard
gestures used for IOS no longer really apply, for example swipe to delete. That is
such an alien concept on these newer platforms and if we are going to build
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
something like that in a web container of some kind, even in a hybrid app, these
things are foreign. Swiping up changes the context, but what happens if I want
to swift through a list really quickly on a BlackBerry 10 item list view? So,
gestures have become a real big challenge. We are looking at widgets that we
can use across the board. What I am trying to point out here is that one ‘silver
bullet’ that hits everything is not really going to happen. Where I have seen a lot
of success, for people who are looking for an answer, is building some of that
business logic, informational caching and partial connectivity inside some kind
of container that sits below the UI either through Mono or Qts—some type of
Qt port or something. Well, Qt does not make sense because that is a UI
paradigm, but C++ could work. It has worked really well. You get this little
module that can be reused over and over again because all of the caching
policies stay the same, but you change the native lair.
Jennifer Fraser: It is more of a hybrid solution?
Anthony Hooper: It is a hybrid, yes.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes, that way the front end that we are building is native and can adhere, as
much as it makes sense, to the OS paradigms within the system. The application
we are developing kind of feels like a good citizen on the platform and behaves
in a way the user expects and is familiar with the other applications on the
system.
Anthony Hooper: That segways us to the idea of problem number two, which is staying up-to-date
with diverging design languages and some of the technical impacts as the
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
designs change. What I mean by ‘technical impacts’ is the widget libraries and
gestures. How do we implement those technically? On top of that, how do we
create what you call good OS citizenship? More specifically, we have a challenge
with brands.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes.
Anthony Hooper: Trying to bring over their look and feel to a particular OS.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes, we notice that a lot with clients who come with having an existing
application on one platform and brand becomes so much a part of the
experience of the application. Now, when people try to migrate, say for example
an IOS application to Android, it is a kind of tug between being the good citizen
on the platform and also sticking with what you consider part of your brand
experience of the application. These things might not be orthogonal, but there
is this situation where they start tugging against each other in terms of how
much you want to modify about the experience to actually make it feel like a
good citizen on the platform like we were just talking about.
Anthony Hooper: Yes, we run into this over and over again where controls just do not migrate
well, so how do you make something like Cover Flow switch into something
completely different on Android and completely different on something like
BlackBerry 10? It just does not make sense.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes.
Anthony Hooper: Brand look and feel—one of the big ones here, the modern UI look and feel for
Windows 8, taking something from an iPad and saying you want it to look
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
exactly the same. Well, you are going to run into a lot of prones trying to get
that through approval because the Chrome-over-content concept or the
content-over-Chrome for Microsoft just completely locks it down. When we
start to develop these things, we are trying to become consultants about how
do you slowly move your brand in to the direction if it will get approved. Sort of
problem two and a half or three is this expectation that not only is the look and
feel behaving the brand conflict that happens there, but the exact same
experience on every platform, right? Not only is it do I want my brand to look
good and be a good citizen, I also say that I have built this IOS--and you have
mentioned this before--we built this IOS app, make it the same on BlackBerry 10
or make it the same on Windows Phone 8—that does not work.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes, there are intricacies about the native experience within these different OS’s
that are just so completely different. Something you may not be aware of when
you are using the device, but when you actually try and figure out how to
translate from an IOS application to a BlackBerry 10 application, you start to
understand just how different those experiences are in terms of the
fundamental structure of the information on the screen and how you navigate
between the screens. It is quite challenging to figure out how to take that
experience and map it in a way that will make sense and feel right.
Anthony Hooper: One of the biggest gestures that come into play here is the press and hold. Press
and hold is incredibly useful on some platforms because it is sort of expected
and has been taught to people. Then, on other platforms, it is virtually non-
existent. You can press and hold controls in IOS, but no one does it. In Android,
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
it is kind of something you have to do to get through advanced settings off
particular menus and lists, so people are saving their press and hold. The same
thing happens for Windows Phone 7 and 8—press and hold exists, but no one
really uses it. This whole experience in IOS with a back button at the top—that is
the best one when you see back at the top left and it is an Android app.
Jennifer Fraser: You know where it came from.
Anthony Hooper: You know exactly where it came from, right.
Jennifer Fraser: Yes.
Anthony Hooper: That is just a quick summary of what we think are the top two and a half or
three problems--I am going to say two and a half because the last two are sort
of the same, that we are running into over and over again when we have design
and develop an app across multiple platforms these days. It is just a massive
challenge, a lot of fun, but predominantly it is education. Just understanding
that the ecosystems are not the same, the design languages are not the same
and the technical impact of all these UI controls is not as simple as shoot once
and hit all ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five. We have Ubuntu coming down the
road and we have Mozilla phones coming down the road. I am just waiting to
see what those have to do with every other one in the ecosystem. It is fun,
exciting but it is the Wild West!
[Closing music]
You have been listening to Macadamian’s audio Podcast—unsalted. Get more tasty insights on our blog.
5
Podcast Ep. 4: Unicorns and Rainbows
Visit macadamian.com.
+++End of audio+++ 00:10:28
5
top related