Yesterday, I came across a post by Christopher Penn about a martial art exercise he practices.

Bud’s drill goes something like this: for this drill, your attacker will do whatever they want. You as the defender are only permitted to use your footwork for evasion and your right hand in a shuto (hand blade/hand sword) form to protect yourself.

The goal, of course, is to develop mental flexibility and agility.

Creating for the mobile world is similar to this exercise. (By that I don’t mean we get to make crazy ninja moves – though that hasn’t stopped some of our guys from trying.) What I mean is that there are limitations that are entirely out of our control. We just have to learn to work with these limiting conditions, whether they’re the phone’s capabilities, the mobile network’s restrictions or the user’s own knowledge of their phone.

However, limits and boundaries, whether imposed or chosen, are wonderful things. They require resourcefulness and a dose of creativity, but see them with the right attitude and take on the challenge!

This video is possibly one of my favourite examples of boundary-driven creativity; Ophir Kutiel, otherwise known as Kutiman, created a series of music videos using only existing content from YouTube artists. The result is beautiful, and below is my favourite one.

During South by Southwest, Paul Annett from Clearleft dedicated an entire presentation to showing us clever and inspiring little Easter Eggs site designers have included in their web projects. Small delight after small delight, Paul took us through a range of sites – including Silverback’s site, Clearleft’s very own gorilla-saving usability testing software, which uses the neat parallax effect. (Just try resizing the window width for some eye candy, if you don’t know what I’m talking about)

So you’re working with a web browser’s limited capability. A mobile browser more contrived than you’d like. A team smaller than you’d wish for. Take it in your stride and see what you can achieve – I bet you’ll surprise yourself if you treat the boundaries as assets!

As 2009 begins, we wanted to take the opportunity to share some of the UE design blogs we read regularly. For those interested in all aspects of user experience and mobile user experience, these should offer some varied reading into what people are thinking and working on in the field right now.

If you’re so inclined, feel free to grab the OPML file here to import into your RSS reader.

In early 2008, we also created a list of 20 great resources for mobile web developers and designers which you may like to have a look at again.

On with this year’s list, then!

Jan Chipchase – Future Perfect

Jan is a researcher for Nokia. He travels the world observing and understanding people in their own countries – recently in Afghanistan, Africa, Japan, China and many more countries. His blog consists of a range of beautiful photographs taken on his travels, with insightful observations at each step of the way. The guy has the most interesting job we’ve seen in a long time!

Boxes and Arrows

This site offers a wide range of articles and stories written by designers and consultants. It’s a good place to go if you want to find out about particular design methods and techniques. It has a deep searchable archive of the articles so you can find anything UE-related you can think of.

Signal vs Noise

The guys behind the site are pretty well known for their no-nonsense approach to software design and their products – including Basecamp. They are really clued up on design, web development, running a small business and have an ethos of ‘getting real’. Their writing is always compelling and relevant and the blog is updated daily.

Putting people first

The authors are a design consultancy, featuring and linking to stories and news from all over the user experience and usability world. The benefit of this blog is its wide coverage of all aspects of the UE field. It’s updated often too.

Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is a writer and speaker specialising in business, design and user experience environments. He worked for a number of years at Microsoft and now works as a freelance author and speaker. His blog is always insightful, digestible and thought provoking. The ‘essays’ section of his blog offers varied and interesting articles around creative thinking, motivation and advice for managers to name a few.

Cooper Journal

The Cooper Journal is written by a team from an Interaction Design consultancy in San Francisco. The ethos of their blog is ‘A blog about design, business and the world we live in’. Different authors from within the company write regularly on everything from elevator design, to car dashboard design and how good designers can create ‘evil’! They update regularly and one of the best features is the breadth of content and authors.

Alexander van Elsas’s Weblog

Alexander comes from a mobile background. He often raises thought-provoking insights into new technologies and their effects on human behaviour.

UIE Brain Sparks

UIE Brain Sparks has frequent postings from its founder, Jared Spool. It mainly focuses on human observation and web usability.

Small Surfaces

Small Surfaces is a mobile-centric blog, touching on all aspects of the design process. You may have heard of its author, Gabriel White, from his involvement with two of the world’s leading design consultancies: Punchcut & Frog Design.

Adaptive Path Blog

Adaptive Path are a strategy and design consultancy based in San Francisco. They have a mixed-bag of authors, ranging from design researchers, marketing gurus, and design strategists. We’re even thinking of trying out Alexa’s ‘magnetic prototyping’ concept on our next project!

[Image: Jan Chipchase Blog: Mobile phone polishing services in Kabul]

Everyone has a first time. It’s a special moment, one where we enter a world of unknown and uncertainty, fumbling around and finding enjoyment in the discovery.

I’m talking about the first time we design a mobile site. Obviously. Ahem.

So since everyone’s got to start somewhere, here are some choice resources for anyone new to creating for the mobile web. It’s one thing to create a design and hack some code together, but don’t forget the importance of testing and promoting what you create!

Designing

• Sitepoint’s Brian Suda writes about the basics of designing for mobile, starting with thinking about screen size and why these people are coming to your site.
• Sender 11 is an extremely useful blog on mobile interaction, filled with great posts and tips on designing for mobile
• Oriented towards the iPhone, A List Apart suggests ways to exploit the unavoidable device with Mobile Safari and beyond.
• For those of us who still occasionally crack a book open, Cameron Roll’s Mobile Web Design comes highly recommended.
• Even further, if you enjoy social interaction, you might like to take part in a MobileCamp, which is an opportunity to get together with people who work in or love the mobile world. It’s a great place to swap ideas, find new development partners or just check out what everyone else is up to.

Developing

• ThinkVitamin: Coding for the Mobile Web gives tips and tricks to help tackle mobile-specific issues.
• W3C Mobile Web Initiative provides information on mobile development standards.
• Considering mobile billing? Why not let experts like Bango take that challenge head on?
• DotMobi and Blue Flavor produced a Mobile Web Developer’s Guide last year to give a boost to both new and experienced mobile developers. I hear a revised version is on its way, but until then, last year’s edition is still helpful.
• If all else fails, adapt your desktop site using Mowser and let somebody else do the hard work.

Testing

• Ready.mobi: Score your mobile-readiness with this useful tool provided by dotMobi
• DeviceAnywhere is the de facto commercial testing tool, allowing you to test mobile sites on a wide range of networks and devices.
• Tarek Esber wrote a great post about mobile device testing services and products, ranging from non-profit services to manufacturers’ own developer portals and other options like emulators and outsourcing.
• Forum Nokia Launchpad is a cheaper alternative to the Forum Nokia Pro program, for those who are developing mobile applications.
• Only available to the American market is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which can be used to outsource testing. Your mileage will most likely vary, depending on the complexity of the testing you require.

Promoting

• AdMob is the largest mobile advertising network out there. Useful if you’re looking to either publish ads on your site for some revenue, or if you want to advertise on other sites.
• Wapreview is not only an excellent blog by Dennis Bournique, but also an index of useful mobile sites, all rated out of 5 for content and usability.
• Twitterfeed allows you to automatically share your blog entries to your Twitter feed. Why not create a feed of mobile-friendly content for those mates of yours who mainly use Twitter from their phone? They’ll love you for it!
• AdSense for Mobile Content: Google’s widely used ad network is also available on mobile. Like AdMob, you can sign up as advertiser or publisher to meet your promo goals.
• Got a great mobile site? If we’re not already including it in the Taptu search engine index, it may not be on our radar yet. Email me on vero@taptu.com and we’ll visit your site when we next let the crawlers loose.

Got some resources you want to share?

The mobile web is still only a fragment of the wider desktop web we use everyday, so one of the challenges operators, website owners and users face is how on Earth to cram this big web onto small screens.

Different people tackle the problem in different ways, as the Sender 11 blog points out:

Apple: Adapt the phone to the web.
Opera: Adapt the web to the phone.

But then, there’s a third option: Bulldoze everything with a transcoder, including sites which are already mobile, and don’t shed a tear for the casualties.

This approach has unfortunately been adopted by a number of operators, namely Vodafone and TeliaSonera with Novarra, and Sprint with OpenWave.

When I think of the carelessness these guys are exhibiting, I get a Hulk moment “Vero angry, Vero smash phones! ARGGHHHH!” It boggles the mind how Sprint can go as far as saying it’s in the customer’s best interest. If they really cared about the customer experience, they wouldn’t highjack user agents, they would acknowledge sites which are already mobile-ready and they would listen to the community’s needs.

Anyone who isn’t directly involved in the mobile industry is unlikely to realise that the site they’re browsing looks crap on their phone, not by the website owner’s fault or because their phone isn’t up to par, but squarely because of the operator’s complete disregard for its customers. A little bit of me dies every time I see a friend criticize the mobile web’s shortcomings when it’s really due to bastardised transcoding.

Operators claim to be offering a proverbial olive branch by telling mobile website owners to request to be added to a whitelist. Dennis at Wapreview sounded the alarm on the latest whitelist to join but this is a neverending game of whack-a-mole! As far as I know, between Spain and the UK, Vodafone doesn’t even share its whitelist! (If anyone can tell me I’m wrong on this one, I’ll regain a bit of faith in the Big Red.)

As Dennis explains, unless you have a handset on the local network, it’s difficult to find out what’s happening to your site once it goes through the shredder:

Unless you have a Sprint handset there’s really no way to tell if your site’s being transcoded. If you do have a Sprint phone you can generally tell just by looking at the screen but if in doubt use the device’s Show URL browser menu command. If it starts with http://sprint.aopwv.com/ you are being transcoded.

Mobhappy, Mike Rowehl, Techype, RCR Wireless News and Semapedia, amongst others, have picked up on the issue, and they’re all as unimpressed as I am with the situation.

How could anyone, in their infinite wisdom, think this was a scaleable and manageable way to decide what sites to leave as-is? Seriously, I’m willing to give anyone from an operator a fair hearing, I’ll even buy ‘em a beer, if they can explain to me how they’re going to improve on the current situation from here.

If you’re a developer and your mobile site is affected by the latest Sprint issue, register on the Sprint forums and leave a comment in this thread to get whitelisted.

[Update: Russ at Mowser posted, following my angry post, to shed light on how what Mowser does is different to the operator's transcoders, so if you're still fuzzy on what is proper and improper behaviour for adapting content, check out his post. At the core of it all though, Mowser listen to their users and are part of the community rather than living up in that cozy ivory tower. That makes all the difference.]

In technology, we’re always so focused on the future, on what’s coming next and what’s going to be the next big gadget or web app to break into the spotlight. Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz looks to the past for the designs that inspired Apple’s products. It’s impossible to deny the resemblance in some of the 60’s styling and our latest shiny goodies.

We’re big fans of great, simple design here, so it’s comforting to think that great design is here to stay, revived in different forms through the ages. I’ve had this quote from Rams stuck in my scrapbook for years now, but it’s good to see Gizmodo bring it up as well.

This passion for “simplicity” and “honest design” that is always declared by Ive whenever he’s interviewed or appears in a promo video, is at the core of Dieter Rams’ 10 principles for good design:

• Good design is innovative.
• Good design makes a product useful.
• Good design is aesthetic.
• Good design helps us to understand a product.
• Good design is unobtrusive.
• Good design is honest.
• Good design is durable.
• Good design is consequent to the last detail.
• Good design is concerned with the environment.
• Good design is as little design as possible.

[Via Thought Balloons]