2012 was apparently the “year of mobile”. So what does that mean for mobile in 2013?

Last Monday, a few brave time travellers joined our Technical Creative Director Tobias Bard in a Mobile Thirst session in the Mobiento time machine. The mission was to find out what Mobile held in store for 2013. Let’s just say the results were impressive.

For those unable to venture through the fabrics of time we now present you with the findings of our journey:

See you on the next Mobile Thirst – in the future!

What inspired me to write this post was (finally) watching the short doc about Caine’s Arcade, a small cardboard arcade in East LA that was built by a very creative 9-year-old boy. Check it out here.

Something I have thought about from time to time is the fact that the ad world is a place where ideas, concept and campaigns are, by default, the domain of Creative Teams. Sure, most of the time, that’s where the most talked about and original ideas are spawned but it is not necessarily the only place.

For the development team kick-off this fall we headed out to a desolate bed & breakfast in the Stockholm archipelago. After some much needed reflection over the past 6 months and some chilling-out in the sun we came to the fun portion of the day: the creative challenge. All the developers gathered in teams and each chose a consumer brand (all of which had a relation to Mobiento). The goal: come up with something new and creative that the client actually would love to do.

So, how did it all turn out? First of all, everyone loved this challenge and for a kick-off, that might be the most important thing. But the teams came up with lots of stuff, ranging from quirky rich media banners to full app concepts, complete with print media strategies. All in all, the challenge was a great success.

When we, as a team, talk about doing something of our own, suggestions usually revolve around hackathons, 24-hr tech challenges or what-have-you. Nothing wrong with that but this was something different. What I like about “non-Creatives” doing something creative is that just like the kids in the Caine’s Arcade documentary we (as developers) approach creative challenges in another way than someone right in the thick of it would. And that, my friends, will be where the magic (at times) happens.

What does this all boil down to then? My suggestion – Next time you work on a concept, consider inviting someone outside of the creative team – it might be the last 5%.

For our next kick-off I want to invite our finance guy, Mange. I am thinking he is going to be a killer addition to our team and take us to the next level. Creatively speaking, that is.

Martin Warholm is working as CTO at Mobiento’s Stockholm office.

Google kindly invited Mobiento to share some of our mobile ideas at the 2nd Google Think Mobile in Stockholm last week. Up to the task was Filip Williamsson, Lead Interaction Designer from our Stockholm office who told the story of a mobile-optimized site, from planning to execution.

Fundamentally, it was about the shift from ‘mobile = small’ to ‘mobile = mobility’ and what that means for strategy, creative, product and project management. The insights he shared came from our recent experiences in adapting how we approach client work for the increasingly multi-device and responsive web world we work in.

You can see the good company Filip was in last week at the conference here and his presentation is embedded below:

If you have any questions, feel free to shoot Filip a mail on filip.williamsson@mobiento.com

Ssssslideshare. That was the word being whispered as the 40 or so people left this morning’s 2nd Mobile Thirst in Stockholm.

No surprise really, Petter’s Interaction Design presentation was, after all, jam-packed with 24 handy pointers worthy of a revisit. They were 2 types of IXD goals, 6 usability goals, 6 design principles and 10 usability heuristics.

Mobile Thirst 2: Interaction Design in a mobile context

Last week our CEO Johanna, spoke at the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce Executive Women’s Conference in NYC. We want to share here, a few of her views on leadership and innovation. But let’s start with a short side story about our dear CEO.

Johanna has a brilliant nickname. It’s JFK. These 3 powerful letters are not only her initials but also, quite coincidentally, a throwback to her leadership style. A style that in many ways borrows from John F. Kennedy. You may have read his book “Profiles in courage” which pays tribute to great American statesmen. Well, it was a similar topic that our JFK discussed in New York.

The talk was how to lead and mentor the new generation born in the 80s and 90s. In short, you have to feed them in a different way. Basic needs like salaries, benefits, education are hygiene factors.

It takes courage to breed a new kind of workplace culture. You must have trust in each other and frame goals together – then let people do their thing. Challenges must be thrown at the team, giving out responsibility in their domain.  To always do better, to give more than they take and to deliver excellence.

It’s about reframing team motivation. In Daniel H Pink’s book “Drive”, he writes about the fact that children learn to walk, through all the bumps and tears, without a carrot or stick reward system. It’s rather about the intrinsic motivation that comes with trust, responsibility and challenges.

At Mobiento we work to have this kind of culture, one grown by the team as a whole.

More information about the conference can be found here.

This week our beautiful new business cards arrived.

Here is a shot taken by Snask, the design agency behind our rebrand.

The cards come with both the circle and square pattern on the back side. As do our lovely new correspondance slips.

Last Friday, Emil ran through Mobile First. The hot topic was the first of many to be covered in the morning sessions we call Mobile Thirst, held every now and then at Mobiento offices.
Below is the presentation that is up on Slideshare (sorry they don’t like mobile).

After the talk it was clear the penny had dropped. So had some crumbs and coffee but that was ok. The crowd of 40 were left thinking one exciting thought:

Mobile is ready for a strategy now, are you?

While you ponder that one, we’ll be putting together plans for session #2.
See you again soon.

P.S. Link love for those mentioned in the presentation:

• Mobile First Book
• Tesco case
• Jakob Nielsen: Link 1, link 2 and link 3.

When we go out and chat with students, we want to show them what life at Mobiento is like. So we loaded up a trailer and headed off to Stockholm Tech (KTH) with half of our office furniture.

Our hope was that our recreated living room would be a welcomed retreat for the students. And it was. Lounging with us on the couches were some interesting cats from all disciplines. They challenged and lost Pad Racer games to our producer (he plays this game a lot!) and shared some inspired ideas with our CTO.

The smart mobile brains made us feel at home and heartwarmingly welcome. All of sudden we forgot where we were. Time flew by. And before we knew it, Christian had jumped up on the keynote stage and presented mobile marketing. You can see the talk below.

The day ended with a delicious meal and many off-key tunes, what we call fun times at Mobiento.

Thanks to KTH for letting us move in for the day and for the great company.

Until we meet again, stay classy KTH.

Work-in-progress (never finished) is a nice idea, isn’t it?

Continually working on a digital thing. Constantly improving it. Smoothing over the rough edges. Removing the deadweight. Adding some sparkles. It’s a really hard thing to achieve because it requires a mindset that is hard for humans to accept. Nothing will ever be complete. Finished doesn’t exist.

So as we bug fix, polish, add/remove elements and use our site as a playground to test ideas and code, it will never be finished.

For example, have you seen this triangle?

Yesterday we introduced a new mobile ’fixed-position’ menu element. It’s a shortcut to the menu. Pressing it sweeps you to the top of the page where the menu rolls itself out.

We’re testing it live to see what our site visitors and Twitter followers think and to highlight a problem with mobile development. One of ‘lowest common denominator’. As many phones just can’t support it, we’ve had to choose to implement this element only for iPhone. Even there you will experience a ‘jumpiness’ which is caused by a bug on the mobile iPhone Webkit Browser. We’ll continue to look for a workaround for the glitch.

In the meantime, if you would like to know how we did it, or have any thoughts, let us know on Twitter: @mobiento

There are many different models of mobile website navigation. You can read about some of them in Brad Frost’s article “Responsive nav patterns“. So why did we choose our ‘green magic carpet’ that sits at the top of the page and rolls out like a fine persian?

We knew that our primary site visitors are prospective and existing clients. They wouldn’t be hitting the page often, at most several times a year. We couldn’t expect them to know what is on the site or to recall how it structured from their last visit months before. They may also have predetermined expectations as to how agency websites are structured and therefore are on the look out for specific labels or elements. And on top of these considerations, we had to remember that some may not be advanced mobile users and are checking us out on mobile as part of their due diligence.

As always the navigation had to be usable and functional. It had to help visitors find what they are after. To fulfill the purpose of their visit without confusion. But it also needed to be a design and code proof point – something we could be a little excited about. Something non-interaction designers would also find cool. During the project there were many function vs design discussions. As always, both sides went all in. And we are happy to say it ended well for both sides.

So how many alternatives did we look at? Quite a few. Here are some examples: