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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,

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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

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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

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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

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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.


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.


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

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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,

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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.


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.

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Visit macadamian.com.

+++End of audio+++ 00:10:28

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