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Mobile Interfaces and Latency

"How long is half a second? In the context of a mobile user interface, it can be long enough to cripple the experience and make the difference between a converting a user from a casual browser to a dedicated customer."

This wonderful piece highlights how latency in Mobile interfaces is such a big Usability issue. This half a second delay has been the major undoing on the proliferation of mobile based applications. What a consumer looks for is an intuitive + quick interface that responds lightning fast. How the service providers and the developer network manages that with the device OS, Processor or the memory issue isn't of concern to him, and justifiably so. Unfortunately, all mobile applications we come across somehow haven't been able to get the UX right, and it would be interesting to see how and when are we able to come up with something to address this issue.

Talking of usable interfaces, I just came across a couple of mobile widget platforms:

The first one was iframe Microsoft's ZenZui, a mobile widget browser that allows searching through a grid of 36 widget tiles with each tile acting as a mobile optimized interface to a website. Interestingly, ZenZui’s zooming user interface was initially developed by Microsoft’s Redmond Research lab, and was spun off into it’s own company. MobileCrunch has more on this.

The other is GPS Widgets from Where. According to "where", "GPS Widgets are small (or large) applications that help you find interesting things and do everyday tasks." An interesting concept and definitely a sign of things to come in this domain!

Comments

Anonymous said…
ZenZui looks very interesting.
1:48 PM
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