| Last Modified On : | March 18, 2009 5:52 PM PDT |
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Table Of Contents
Product Overview
MID Design Investigation
Derived Design Principals
UI Structure and Features
Issues Lessons and Unexpected Benefits
Summary
About GyPSii
GyPSii* is an award winning mobile lifestyle application that combines social networking and location based capabilities. The application is available on a wide range of mobile devices and the web. It is used worldwide and has been localized to 18 languages. GyPSii connects people, places and communities, across networks and devices.
GyPSii focuses on creating and sharing user-generated multi-media content and is a perfect fit for the new Intel® Atom™ based Mobile Internet Devices (MID). GyPSii fully exploits data, audio and video capture capabilities, advanced networking options, and integrated GPS capabilities. Development of the GyPSii application for the MID platform, with its different form factor and vastly different data input model than traditional cell phones, presented a series of important design challenges.
The goal of this phase was to ensure that the team developed several real-life use cases for the foundation design of the user experience. GyPSii concluded that the most natural experience regarding MID use is for the devices to be held in both hands, one on either side of the device, and for thumbs to be used to interact with the slide-out keyboard and touch screen.
GyPSii's usability engineers determined that stylus interaction regresses the usage model to the device being held in one hand with the other holding the stylus and poking at the device similar to a PDA. Using a stylus resulted in clumsier input and less efficient interaction with the MID than two-thumb operation, especially while walking or on public transportation. Nonetheless, specific use cases were discovered where finger pointing or stylus may be more comfortable for certain actions.
The most important principal was to maintain the two-thumb usage model. Standard cascading menus were abandoned because typically they could not be operated without a stylus. 'Modal thumb menus' were implemented to remove the need for continuous contact with the touch screen when doing sub-selection. This greatly improved touch accuracy and reduced wear and tear on the screen from stylus or thumbs.
Thumb menus were optimized to make almost all menu items available within two clicks. This improved the users' ability to maintain a navigational context, and also reduced the likelihood of incorrect selection in unstable environments (walking, on buses etc.)
Touch target areas were designed to be large enough so they can be clicked without overlapping. Sides of the screen were avoided for smaller buttons: most MID devices have inset touch screens which creates a '5 pixel dead zone' around the edges for thumb or finger navigation. In the GyPSii interface all menu items, list items, and buttons are easily selectable.
The GyPSii design team implemented a menu structure that reflects the natural thumb navigation model. People and Places are the primary objects a user interacts with and are available through a bifurcated menu structure. Menus are on the sides of the screen to optimize thumb navigation. The two primary menus have items that guide the user to specifics of each object. For example, under the 'Places' menu, the user has the ability to select 'My Places', 'Create a Place', etc.
GyPSii´s graphically intense UI did not overtax the platform. The application features panning and zooming maps, with screen overlays, a significant use of opacity, advanced rendering techniques, and a stylesheet driven theme engine, resulting in a unique, pleasing look and feel. The MID platform lets large numbers of images be loaded and dynamically resized as needed. Many advanced visual capabilities are possible due to the inherently high performance MID platform.
Designing a UI and Developing an application for the MID is in many ways the same as developing for any other Linux* platform, and can be easier than developing for many mobile phones. One development related issue encountered was our selection of Qt instead of the Moblin* 1.0 GTK standard GUI library. Qt was chosen for it's richer C++ toolkit. It is encouraging to learn that Qt will be standard for Moblin 2.0.
Other issues in development were related to the relative immaturity of the Moblin 1.0 platform. MID vendors have created obstacles for developing complex applications by not following Moblin 1.0 standards and recommendations. This causes road blocks against easily integrating across a range of manufacturer's devices. The MID is a great baseline platform but deploying software on existing MID devices developed using the published guidelines resulted in significant amounts of additional engineering work around device-specific packaging and APIs. As with toolkit selection, many of these issues will also be resolved with Moblin 2.0.
Lessons and Unexpected Benefits
GyPSii found that optimizing for thumb navigation creates clear design goals. Developing effective MID UIs requires a discipline often missing on other platforms, such as web, mobile or typical desktop applications. This results in improved user experience.
GyPSii designed a MID UI that scales remarkably well to netbooks and desktops. The navigation clarity carries across the devices and the element placement works well even with a larger screen. This eliminated the need for a follow-on client for netbooks and desktops. Study of usability and careful design ensured a straightforward transition from the MID UI to other devices.
This success in usability led GyPSii to port the application to platforms other than Moblin. Many netbooks ship with Windows* XP pre-installed. While not an original goal of the MID effort, our choice of toolkit (Qt) allowed us to compile for Windows XP with very few changes. Since all the targeted devices use an Intel chipset, obstacles such as cross-compilation tool chains, emulators (and the issues in using them), and constrained development tools were removed. Porting has been very straightforward. Currently GyPSii developers work on Windows XP and Linux concurrently, and choose their development platform, based purely on personal preference. Overall, this cross-platform capability has had a tremendously positive influence on developer productivity.
Overall the experience developing on the MID has been positive. GyPSii had access to many devices and running various versions of Moblin 1.0 compliant operating systems. The ease of development, increased developer productivity, and the potential for 'write once, run everywhere', when realized, will positively change the way mobile applications are developed and deployed. The platform capabilities offered by even the lower-end MID's remove many of the impediments holding back mobile developers, and should open the way to more sophisticated, consumer-focused mobile applications. The MID's increased capabilities requires careful planning and focus during the design phase while creating enormous opportunity.
About GyPSii
GyPSii is the market-leading mobile digital lifestyle application and geo-mobility social networking platform: connecting people, places and communities across networks and devices. Headquartered in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, GyPSii operates offices in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, visit www.gypsii.com and www.gypsii.com.cn© 2009 GyPSii. All rights reserved.
The GyPSii related marks, images and symbols are the exclusive properties and trademarks of GyPSii. All other brands, product names, company names, trademarks and service marks are the properties of their respective owners.
See Also
Other common concerns when porting to a MID are power optimization (see Energy) and memory optimization (see Memory)
Featured Applications...
Every month, Intel will feature a new application that has been ported to a MID. Check back for our next featured application in April.
Applications already featured are:
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