mobile

The best technologies disappear into the environment to minimize distraction from the content or experience at hand. Yet we design for distraction, and we call it engagement. When you say “engagement,” I now hear “theft of attention.”

As devices multiply, the new opportunity is less about designing individual screens, and more about designing interactions between the devices.

Multi-screen design is a must-have as we try to cram our content into many different screens. But get ready for the next wave of design: no screen at all.

Josh Clark takes you to the hazy edges of the tech universe, with techniques and examples that anticipate what comes next after mobile.

Entertainment Weekly has a new responsive mobile website. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at how we built it.

Smashing Magazine published The Mobile Book this week. I was honored to contribute the book’s final chapter about designing for touch.

New hybrid keyboard-touch laptops and tablets have changed the game. When any desktop machine could have a touch interface, we have to proceed as if they all do.

We designed the responsive mobile website for People Magazine. Here’s how we did it and why.

Jakob Nielsen’s dubious mobile website guidelines make the mistake of assuming that there’s such a thing as “this is mobile content, and this is not.”

Designers often conflate device context with user context—or worse, with user intent. “This is mobile, so they’ll never want to do that.” ”This is mobile, so it’s aimed only at users on the go.” Friends, this is hooey.

If you want to take advantage of the new iPad’s gorgeous screen (and of course you do), every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places and for lots of people.

More and more, when we refer to mobile, what we really mean is “non-traditional computing devices and environments,” a stodgy mouthful that really boils down to not the desktop. We need a new term for our sprawling landscape of devices.

Go figure, but pulling someone through a QR code means we have to give people information they actually want or need.

A 1922 silent movie shows off perhaps the first mobile phone, “Eve’s Wireless,” a contraption that required a fire hydrant and an umbrella to work.

Games are the best (and perhaps most commercially viable) flavor of augmented reality, painting an imaginative layer on everyday surroundings.

Newsstand is a read-all-about-it moment for publishers, as readers seem to love it so far. But we can’t let this recent success distract us from real problems with the issue-based publishing model Newsstand supports.