Designing For Context and Convergence

March 25, 2006 | 4 Comments

I’ve been talking and thinking about context quite a bit lately. This post is a bit of a brainstorm on the topic and I’d love to get your thoughts in the comments.

The Wikipedia defines context (as it relates to an event) like this:

The context of an event includes the circumstances and conditions which “surround” it;

When it comes to design, context usually refers to the medium (or media(s)) for which you are designing. This can create some interesting challenges when it comes to convergent media such as the Web, mobile and the desktop.

A quick story

I was speaking with a colleague (who shall remain nameless and blameless) about a situation he was having on the job. He’s working on a Web project (that I admittedly know little about) and asked me for a bit of insight into a user interface problem he was having.

A coworker of his was pushing for a flash-based drag and drop interface for a Web site. The reasoning behind this decision was that “users are familiar with drag-and-drop because it’s a common convention of desktop application for all the major operating systems.”

Without knowing the details there was little I could offer in hard ammo, but I do think my friend here was on the right track in calling this into question. (He was showing both skepticism and empathy — two great traits for any designer.) There are two things he could question:

It’s rarely safe to make any assumptions about user behavior. Sure empathy and experience can help you see user patterns, but I’ve been proven wrong on my assumptions enough time to realize that some sort of validation is usually the best way to go.
Even if this assumption is correct. We’re talking about familiarity with desktop applications—not a Web site or Web based application. The context is being left out. A user might be totally comfortable with drag-and-drop as a desktop UI convention, and yet totally confounded by it as a Web UI convention.

Mobile (Hot. Hot. Hot.)

A hot topic in mobile design (a hot topic itself) is whether to miniaturize (take existing content and make it fit a smaller screen) or mobilize (rework or in some way repurpose Web content to make best use of the mobile context).

For our Design Eye panel at SXSW we spent a whole lot of time talking about how people would use craigslist.org from a mobile device. We all felt that the context of that usage was extremely important.

Would people use craigslist via a mobile phone the same way they use it via a browser? If not, how would they use it? What would they do?

We had to ask those questions. To avoid them would be to ignore that context.

Jeff Croft wrote about the mobile Web and contextual relevance the other day. It’s a post worth reading. In that he talks about the mobile version of lawrence.com.

So what’s on the mobile site? Five things. Just five. We’ve parred it down to things we think people will really want to do on their cell phone or similar device, rather than simply reformatting all of our content. So what are the five things?

He also had a great quote that sums up the work.

We didn’t just simply make it work on a cell phone, we make it for a cell phone.

They say content is king…

…maybe context is key.

Zeldman wrote an inspirational post this week. In that post he talks about convergent media, Web 2.0, the future of the Web and lots more. At the end he concludes that, for him anyway, it’s about design and content.

…my web will continue to be about good writing and good design. Because that’s what I care about. And your web is your web because you care about what you care about. And whatever that is, there’s plenty of it to be found or made on this big web we share.

He mentions multiple Webs (kind of) to get his point across. There is a strong idea out there that there is and should be only one Web, where every bit of unique content should exist only once. Hopefully this is Web that we can work with and that lets usn mold that content to our liking and our contexts. One that allows for easy “mobilization” for example.

Call it Web 2.0, One Web, Semantic Web…The Web is bringing multiple new media together, like it or not. And I’d agree that content (good writing, useful information, etc.) are of prime importance.

There are many different ways (different contexts) to access content and so many tools and technologies at your disposal to remix, rework and repurpose that content. Many designers (like myself) are just now starting to realize this and get our minds around it.

Convergence is upon us and for designers this can create some crazy problems…and some amazing opportunity.

Filed under: Technology
Keyword Tags: design context convergence web+2.0 mobile

Comments

1. Wilson Miner said:

I absolutely agree with what you’ve said. As far as how we’re going to handle it, I still think the “one web” concept (code once, deliver everywhere) sounds great to us developers, but it’s kind of a myth.

There are only a few examples really where I can see it playing out (print stylesheets, small-screen rendering in Opera mini maybe). In most cases, as Jeff illustrated with our mobile sites, the results are so much better if you *don’t* try to shoehorn the original content into the new format.

Newspapers believed (and many still believe) the same myth about the web: that they were going to “write once and deliver everywhere”. Just keep writing your content for print and magically shovelling it online. But you get so much more out of your content when you actually tailor the content to take advantage of the strengths of different media (instead of just superficially changing how its displayed). There are a lot of things you can do with content in print that just don’t work on the web, but there are a lot of things you can do on the web that don’t matter in print: more metadata, more context, more media, more words. But somebody has to provide that information, collect that media and write and edit those extra words.

The same is true between the “desktop web” and the “mobile web”. If you want to get the most out of each medium, you have to get down to the content itself and make substantive decisions about not just how it’s going to be displayed, but what is going to be displayed, and to whom, and under what circumstances.

Convergence is here, but there’s no magic solution. Each medium is unique. There aren’t any shortcuts for understanding and planning for each unique context at every stage of the game, from creation to consumption (yum).

Posted on March 25, 2006 09:04 AM | #

2. Nathan Smith said:

You bring up a very good and valid point, that of user familiarity with “conventions.” If your friend does go with a drag and drop solution, chances are it will work great. However, as you also brought up, how would that look or even work on a mobile device? I think it’s both a blessing and a curse that Ajax is the new hype, at the same time the mobile web is coming to prominence. It keeps us honest as we design solutions with JavaScript (or Flash), to ensure that King Content continues to reign, and we do not find ourselves back in the 1990’s again.

Posted on March 25, 2006 06:58 PM | #

3. Jim said:

Interesting and thought provoking post. Particularly liked the design for mobile, a concept I for one will take on board.

Posted on March 31, 2006 12:19 AM | #

4. Britney said:

I agree mobile is hot I heard they are launching a new .mobi extension and you know corperations all over the globe are looking to get there sites converted!

Posted on April 2, 2006 06:32 PM | #