Fraser Speirs has a post entitled: There is More Than One Mobile Context which I found after visiting Tom Hume’s blog and this post.
You can read both posts in their entirety but I wanted to bring you these points…
From Fraser:
There is more than one mobile context. Decide which you’re interested in.
Followed by the three types of context (as he sees them):
There is the context in which you’re actually physically moving as you try to use the device. This is a really hard one to nail down, but you need big tap targets and big information display. Most crucially, though, you need to impose a very lightweight mental model on the user since they already have enough on their plate avoiding obstacles. The design of car dashboards and GPS navigation units is a source of inspiration. Twitterrific’s expanded tweet view is a great example of this kind of design.
The second context is interstitial time. Your user is probably standing upright but still, using one hand, probably waiting for something. Again, you have to bear in mind the physical situation – one-handedness, maybe holding a basket of shopping – but the mental model can start to grow in complexity a little. Mobile Mail’s ability to show a couple of lines of preview in the list of emails works really well in this context.
Finally, you have the context of being away from home base with just the iPhone. Your user is “mobile” in the sense that she’s out with just her iPhone, but she might be in a series of meetings, on a train trip or visiting a relative. There will be lots of sitting down time, maybe some opportunities to get something meaningfully complex done.
And then Tom adds a fourth one:
… the mobile as your primary means of getting online, not because you’re away from home, but because it’s yours, it’s nearby, and it’s how you choose to be online in general.
One thing I find interesting is how the coversation in a large part of the blogosphere regarding mobility and usability is almost completely focused on the iPhone. Yet in the enterprise space iPhone penetration numbers are still quite low.
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