New trends in applications and user experiences
Handset and PC vendors now compete in the emerging space between them, and the number of vendors joining is increasing day by day. Apple is still gaining market share with sales of 5.4 million units in the second quarter of 2009. This is a 509 percent growth in shipments and it helped Apple maintain the No. 3 position in the smartphone market.
User experience is about how well the handset can meet the user’s expectations in giving a rich and thrilling multimedia experience. What can I do and in what way can I do it? The ability to personalize the phone choosing from all kinds of applications is key and will more and more determine my choice of handset.
An open mobile platform needs to offer a wide range of technologies to achieve this rich experience, supporting user interface design and all the content to be showed. Some of the technologies used are Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, TAT Cascades, Java, QT and GTK.
Widgets and icons are used today - basically applications from the user perspective represented by nice graphics on the screen and that are easy to interact with.
Downloaded applications are important and will be increasingly popular with users. There are some types of services like navigation and mapping that will always be better as client applications. But it is the browser where the real growth in the consumption based data will occur. The reason is the scalability and that web-based applications are cheaper to produce, distribute and maintain.
Today's smartphones with large resistive or capacitive touch screens multi-touch enabled and with an increasing number of sensors such as GPS, compass, step counter, motion, personal health sensors give us a great baseline to create really exciting handsets.
Some new, thrilling applications expanding the user experience that will probably show up in phones in the near future are:
Augmented reality, an old idea now ready to explode. The combination of compass and GPS will finally make it possible. The first phone that had this combination together with a motion sensor was the G1. In Google Maps/Street View (photos of actual locations taken from ground level), you can hold the phone perpendicular to the ground — and as you turn your body, the photo rotates, too, like a photographic compass, so that it matches what you’re seeing with your eyes.
Augmented ID is a TAT concept that visualizes the digital identities of people you meet in real life. With a mobile device and face recognition software from Polar Rose, Augmented ID enables you to discover selected information about people around you.
Enhanced search interface that takes advantage of both explicit and implicit knowledge of the kinds of data, services, applications, and websites a particular user is likely to be searching for.
Real-time video broadcasting from mobile devices is a service that enables the user to share a live experience with a community such as a sports game, a party or similar as a real time video diary.
Mobile augmented reality games combining real time video streams and supported by LBS with the game itself.
Mobile Advertising applications need thrilling graphics in order to be noticed and well perceived by the user and additionally be interactive and supported by LBS for personalized and local ads.
From now on, User Experience is much more than just the user interface. Touch screens need to have the high quality needed not to be sluggish. No compromises can be allowed when building the platforms and frameworks. Applications are very demanding, but if done right all the way they can offer the level of experience that will delight users.
Teleca, supported by world-class UX partners has the ability to provide complete support in creating applications using all the available technologies mixed to form a rich multimedia UI/UX.