Preface

I’ll be honest: I’m an introduction-skipper. When I sit down with a technical book, I skip right past the introduction or preface and go straight for the goods. If it doesn’t begin with the words “Chapter,” then I figure I can probably move on and not miss anything crucial. This is not, however, one of those books.

Mobile design and development is about context, so it is somewhat fitting that the introduction of a book by the same name would establish context for the pages to follow. Before you dive into the wonderful world of mobile, I want to stress the scope of the medium and therefore of this book.

People don’t seem to realize that mobile as a whole is really, really big. When someone says the word “mobile,” they could be referring to devices, networks, services, the mobile web—even native applications like iPhone apps or a dozen other parts of a vast ecosystem. It isn’t unlike saying that all the various technologies required to create a simple web page can simply be referred to as “the Web.” There is obviously a lot more to it, but at the end of the day we just want it to work.

If there is one thing I’ve learned from my adventures in the mobile industry over the last decade, it is that in order to understand mobile, in order to make it work for you and for your users, you need understand three basic principles of mobile:

You need to know the different facets of the mobile medium

There are many variables that can change the overall experience for the user, both good and bad. Understanding what they are, and how they might affect your project, at least at a basic level, can prevent serious and expensive problems later on

You need to know how to leverage mobile technologies to address context

Context is the mental model in which information is understood. It is the key concept that makes mobile such a powerful and useful medium for millions of people around the world. But addressing context takes not just an understanding of user-centered design principles, but of what roles mobile devices play in people’s lives.

You need to know how to leverage the right mobile technology for the need

Here comes the tricky part: although there are numerous technologies within the mobile ecosystem that work well to address particular problems, finding the right one for your users, your business, or your development resources can be incredibly hard. If you don’t understand the pros and cons of each, it can be difficult to make the right investment, be it time or money, at the right time.

The first half of this book will cover these first two principles; the second half will focus on the last principle. When I sat down to write this book, I knew it would be impossible to cover every technology of mobile in detail. Therefore I’ll focus a lot of this book on the mobile web as the only ubiquitous platform across all mobile devices around the world. Not only does the majority of the mobile community believe that the mobile web is the future of the mobile medium, but I’ve also found it to have the highest return on investment, be it in terms of money, user satisfaction, or development time.

I wrote this book to be a beginning—your beginning in mobile—and to give you all the information you need to know in order to start thinking of your site, application, or business in the mobile context. At the end, you should have a firm understanding of how mobile works and how to start designing and developing for it.