Mobile Futures Today: Art Versus Reality in Mobile UI Designs

I have the opportunity to interact with lots of customers who are in various stages of their mobility effort. Some have years of experience and are on their second or third iteration of mobility and others are just starting out on the mobile journey. Regardless of which one you may be, you need to manage the risks associated with the art-driven user interface.

For some customers the entire process may start with engaging an art house to create a user experience that is compelling and can easily pass the logo-police standards. This is usually the easy part. Creating a static set of images that can show what your application might look like in a perfect world is as simple as mocking up some screens in the graphics program of your choice. Now what? Everybody is excited and buys into the vision. But what happens next?

The answer may not be a pretty picture (pun intended). There are always limitations in what is possible when we start looking at mobile devices and those limitations are amplified with small-form factor devices. I can make just about anything fit on an Android screen using Paint, Photoshop or a number of other products. The challenge comes when I hand this off to the developers to actually build. A recent experience points out the key challenge: Quality of the user experience.

We had an art person submit a screen design for a customer’s application. I have to admit, it looked fantastic. The challenge was that this particular customer already had devices and these particular devices had low-resolution screens. The problem now is that using the cool graphics created by the art person showed up as grainy images on these low-res devices. The customer’s response was – predictably – disappointment. They expected shiny and cool, but got dull and grainy. This wasn’t the fault of anybody in particular, just a lack of understanding between what the devices were capable of supporting and the task assigned to the art person. Had anybody bothered to tell this graphics guru that the target devices were low resolution? Probably not.

The point is – you have to make decisions based on reality when it comes to user experience and in this particular situation, the project lead had already showed all these cool mock-ups to his management. Now this poor guy had to go back and do some damage control as well as pay the graphics guy to mock up a second set of graphics targeted at lower resolution devices. The second set looked good since they were designed to accommodate the lower resolution.

Fortunately for everyone involved, this didn’t introduce project delays or other impacts but it did serve as a good lesson for all. When working with artistic people, you get what you ask for. In this case they got great graphics that they couldn’t use. Hopefully, next time, they’ll be a bit more specific and the outcome will be more predictable.

Tags: Brian Philbin, Business Mobility, Mobile Futures Today