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A day of innovation with O2

Arriving at The O2 at just past 8am, we began to set up our exhibition area for little spender. Comprising of a table, two chairs, a couple of macbook pros, an N95 8GB and our shiny new business cards, we were set up in a little over 10 minutes. As the venue began to fill, [...]

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Emotion, behaviour and human context at Mobile Design UK

The second Mobile Design UK event was held in London on 23rd February and ribot were invited to give one of the talks. We’d originally planned to talk on the design process for mobile applications but at the last minute decided to present something more conceptual and thought-provoking: the topic of emotion, behaviour and human [...]

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Inspiring new ways of mobile design and development

I was recently invited to give a presentation at the O2 Litmus launch day, held in the VIP lounge of the O2 Arena. I was asked to talk about mobile design and decided to orientate the 15 minute presentation to a more developer-friendly feel. Many of the day’s attendees were developers (the afternoon consisted of [...]

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Why the iPhone ad ban can only be a good thing for mobile user experience

It was announced this week that Apple’s adverts in the UK for its recently-launched 3G iPhone were to be banned after the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) upheld 17 complaints finding them to be misleading.
The central issue related to the advertised speed when browsing the internet and the Maps application on the device, which Apple itself [...]

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First experiences of the BlackBerry Storm

The Storm is a rough diamond. Lovely industrial design, but let down substantially by the quality of the touch-operating system. Touted as an iPhone killer, I can confidently confirm that the Storm is unfortunately only half an iPhone. Confusing interactions, hard-to-click buttons and an unpolished UI result in an irritating performance. BlackBerry OS 4.7 is clearly a platform that hasn’t been fully designed for finger interaction, which is a huge shame. That said, the Storm will get better with age through software updates. The Storm (or its successors) will in time contend with the likes of the iPhone.

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Chieres for the bieres…

Recently, ribot sponsored an Brighton-based event called £5 App, kindly supplying some thirst-quenching beer to all the attendees. Though this normally wouldn’t deserve its own blog, here at ribot towers, we decided to do something a little different…
Seeing the opportunity to generate some brand recognition, and have a little fun in the process, we wondered [...]

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User experience guidelines for iPhone applications

Now that the iPhone SDK is out, many people are starting to build, or thinking about building iPhone applications. It’s incredibly important to understand how to design interfaces for this device. Here are some high-level tips:
1. Direct Manipulation

Users generally respond better if they can control something tangible.
Users will better understand the results of their actions [...]

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Removing the hurdles to map-based search on mobile

Recently, I’ve talked a lot about the following as an excellent (in my opinion) showcase for improving the user experience of a mobile product. Back in October last year, the Google mobile team released version 2.0 of their Maps product. This time round, a native application was available for most (if not all) Nokia S60v3 [...]

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Mobile World Congress – a brief review

The conference
Wow, what can I say. It’s the first time I’ve been to the world’s largest mobile event and it stood up to the hype – it was huge! There was so much to see and do but here is what stuck out for ribot:
Sony Ericsson
The Xperia X1 phone – lovely use of materials: metals [...]

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Deep Archiving: Keeping content relevant in 2015

A sunny morning was spent in the company of Mark Wubben at Lift08 last week, who posed to a number of us the strange idea of the ‘forgetful interface’.
Sorry? Forgetful interface??
Well, if we are to make better sense of the present, the past must be better managed in the future.
For, with ever-increasing amounts of information [...]

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