Going mobile

Great content in the m-commerce sessions today. I found it interesting to hear designers stress (over and over again) the constraints posed by the small display area of the mobile device. This isn't new -- for decades, business applications have been tailored for mobile devices (not as sexy, though: RF scanners and clunky PDAs), albeit for a more committed user (who can't opt out and remain an employee). Mobile marketers and app designers are facing how the PC screen size allows us to be lazy and largely ignorant of our users' needs, wants and desires. You don't have to know your user to design a PC-based screen display: you can throw everything s/he might need onto the screen and the user does the work of figuring out how to get what s/he wants. We even push the burden of maintaining screen resolution onto the user -- as well as loading whatever software we require for our content. And, the anonymous PC user has been pretty obliging, if s/he thought the content might be compelling enough.

But with mobiles, we're finally acknowledging a responsibility to provide content that is absolutely customized for the user. I doubt this is harder (requires more effort), but it does require a fundamental change in thinking that has to persist through the entire application life cycle. Change is usually harder than work.