Getting Real: "Functional specifications documents lead to an illusion of agreement. A bunch of people agreeing on paragraphs of text is not real agreement. Everyone is reading the same thing, but they’re often thinking something different. "

I'm not sure what the answer is, here. Certainly UIs need to get more prominence in the development process (see Palm, Apple, Sony for reasons why)... but this needs to be done within realistic parameters - there's no point in designing a user interface which can't be implemented.

I also believe that, especially with mobile, it's difficult to design an interface without playing with it - without actually having it on a target handset so that you can feel what's right and what's wrong about it. Such things can be difficult to articulate or document.

Romancing the user experience

Anyone know where I could track down a copy of this film? I posted a while back about my interest in seeing what happened to Riot-E, and would love to get a copy or see it...

Shit. There go my train journeys...

Yay, Flash is publicly available for mobiles, at last! But, a few things to note:

Macromedia are still pursuing a sell-the-player model. The Nokia deal (and others) are fantastic and don't involve direct costs to the public (from what I can tell), but expecting end-users to pay $10 for a player sounds more hopeful than realistic.

I wonder what'll happen with updates and re-releases - how will Macromedia put procedures or processes in place for this, to make it painless even for people who find Series 60 handsets overly complex and too "computery"? They did really well on the web by continually evolving the product, but that continual evolution won't translate well to mobile with some effort on their part.

We can expect to see tons of awful phone applications (and some really really great ones) as a result of deals like this. Flash may lower the barrier to producing mobile applications, but doesn't make it trivial to produce good ones (just as homebrew web-page building software like FrontPage didn't take the skill out of producing large-scale well-designed web sites).

Anyway, this is a big deal for us and I'm really excited about it. The player has looked great for years (we did some related work back in 2002), almost showing up aspects of the rest of the handset UI. Here's hoping for a swift move from announcements to distribution...