User Experience Focused Mobile Design

As a designer, I have learned that every media has particular user experiences that need to be considered. Recently, I have been designing more and more for mobile learning. I have recently read chapters from the book The Mobile Learning Edge by Gary Woodill, ED.D. about creating content and experiences for mobile learning.

Unlike design for interactive media or the web, mobile design and development is very complex and not black and white. There are different forms of mobility, technologies, learners and context that need to be taken into account in the design process. This method reminds me of the beginning of web design. Different markup and designs needed to be created for various browsers. It is my hope that much like web design became easier with the creation of CSS, mobile learning will hopefully one day become easier with more concise changes in the technology.
 
According to Woodill, the mobile learning ecosystem consists of 5,000 mobile devices, more than 30 different web browsers and multiple input and output choices. As a result, we need to look at mobile learning experiences and content when designing for mobile devices. Woodill lists some targeted end users and their content that a designer needs to consider regarding their end user:
1. Location and setting
2. Movement and posture
3. Device
4. Workloads, distractions and activities
5. User's persona

In addition, Woodill describes different types of mobile learning content:
1. Textually organized: Exposition
2. Telling stories through a narrative: Exploration
3. Sharing and discussing concepts to broaden knowledge base: Elaboration
4. Create new experiences to broaden knowledge base: Exploitation

Source: The Mobile Learning Edge by Gary Woodill, ED.D.

After reading Woodill, I started doing some additional research regarding mobile design and found the following two articles helpful. First, Smash magazine released an article by Steven Snell that lists some challenges of mobile design:
1. Variety of screen sizes
2. User lack of understanding
3. Rapid change in technology
4. Deciding what is essential

Source: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/13/mobile-web-design-trends-2009/

So I asked myself, “As a designer, what sort of techniques do I need to take into account when designing for mobile media?" The second article I found was by Alessandra dos Santos from Brazil also described some of these techniques that need to be considered during the design process:
1. An omnipresent menu can´t always be applied. As a result, vertical menus are used more often.
2. Use a lot of negative space and content in the main priority
3. Make links easy to select
4. Consider cross-platform browsers

I’ve also found that icons can be a way to foster visual creativity in mobile design.

Source: http://abduzeedo.com/mobile-web-design

I’m currently working with Digital Publishing Suite for an IPad product related sales representative PDF. Once again, this is new frontier that I have joined and am increasingly excited about the challenges and rewards mobile learning has to offer for designers and agencies.