Book Review: Designing the Mobile User Experience

This book is (presumably) one of the first in a long series of User Experience books, specifically geared towards Mobile User Experience. Written by Barbara Ballard from Little Springs Design, a company dealing with mobile products, it attempts to give those who are working, or planning on working with mobile applications some help in the right direction.

What is apparent after reading, is that mobile user experience is still in it’s infancy. I was strangely reminded of the early days of Computer Interaction Design (which I didn’t witness, but the literature speaks volumes, excuse the pun). There is still an incredible amount of inconsistency and the myriad of different handsets out there is not making things easier.

The best way to describe this book would be as an introduction to mobile application design. A lot of time is spent explaining the context of mobile devices, not only their usage context, but also the context in which they are sold, what the issues are with carriers, compatibility etc. Which leads me to my biggest criticism:
If you are looking for a book with mobile design guidelines, you will most probably be disappointed. This is dealt with fairly briefly in the sixth chapter, making this book of somewhat less value from a purely Interaction Design point of view. However, as a redeeming point, I feel that taking so much time in looking at what surrounds developing and designing mobile applications is somewhat necessary, given the relative newness of this field.

All in all, I can say I was fairly satisfied with it, although I am still not convinced that this book is worth what it is being sold for (£37.95 at Amazon UK, $64.00 at Amazon US and 43,95 EUR at Amazon DE).