David John Mead

The M3 Conference (pronounced “m-cubed”) was a one-day event about mobile, held on November 18th, at COSI.

This being the inaugural event  I think it went pretty well. I’ve jotted down my notes from the event, but first a couple of small things I thought were teething issues:

• The name badge is the map – No one I spoke to figured out right away that the name badge on the lanyard, was in fact the folded up map to show where the talks were being held. Then if you take it out you have no name badge.
• No introductions – Apart from the two keynotes, none of the speakers I saw were introduced and were left to their own devices to quieten the room.
• The City View area at COSI is not great for presentations.

Sara Summers (Morning keynote – Mobile Innovation with UX)

I thought Sara’s talk set the right tone for the conference. She walked us through a recent trip to Stockholm where she visited the Ethnography museum, and an exhibition on Voodoo which changed her perception of that part of Haiti culture. She also ran through part of a video about the development of an iPad app for Nordtroms where the team camped out in Nordstrom’s store and did on-the-spot user research while making the app.

Being from Microsoft she also touched on some of the work she’s been doing for Windows Phone. “Authentically Digital” is a term they kept in their heads when designing the UI, which I like. Her approach to UX seems to be one I’m hearing a lot which is very guerrilla in its attitude. Similar to Cennydd Bowles recent work.

Tony Lukasavage ( Welcome to Titanium)

Turns out the nice guy I was chatting to over coffee was the next speaker. I knew of Titanium but never actually looked into using it, but Tony peaked my interest. Turns out the product is free (which is always nice) and works by using HTML/CSS/JavaScript to push out cross-platform mobile apps.

The big eye-opener for my was the libraries native support.  If I call a tab set, left alone it will display like the native tab set on each platform with no extra fumbling around on my part.  This makes leveraging the pattern libraries of iOS and Android much simpler and hopefully makes it natural for the end-user.

Brad Frost (For a future friendly web)

I hadn’t realized going in that this Brad was the same Brad from Future Friendly, so I was intrigued when the space helmet logo was on the screen. You can see a version of this talk on his website, but a couple of my takeaways were:

• “We cannot be future-proof, but we can be future-friendly”
• “Content is like water” – Josh Clarke
• “Context is fuzzy”
• “Accommodate for meat sticks” (fat fingers)
• mobilewebbestpractices.com
• Get the API’s down first

Brad gave an excellent presentation, one that I think corralled a lot of ideas and “we already know that” items into something whole and communicably.

Willie Neumann (Leveraging mobile in Enterprise)

Willie had an interesting talk on the approach he took when building a mobile presence for libraries.  They had a “develop fast, deploy fast” approach and built outside their IT infrastructure (with their blessing) using a GoDaddy server and public API’s.  They also employed the WURFL stack and Google’s translation tool.  It was great to see what they achieved in just two calender months of dev time.

Paul Czarnik (Afternoon Keynote – The Connected Car)

I didn’t really take any notes, but Paul provided a very interesting look at what the missed opportunities are, as well as what the future may bring fro the connected cars. Also the live demo curse kicked in when trying OnStar on stage

Jen Matson (Adaptive Mobile UX design)

Jen started off her presentation by walking us through her frustrating real-life case of using Sear’s mobile.  I always like this approach from speakers. She had a lot of information I was already aware of, but some things are always good to re-iterate:

• Mobile users do need the same content
• Improve & iterate often
• Adapt to context and capabilities

Was it any good?

Overall I was really impressed by the level of speakers, and the organization that everyone involved put in to M3Conf. I would definitely like to attend next year and encourage people to sign up early.

The 250 that attended seemed to be a good mix of designers, management, and developers. And that’s important. One big takeaway for me was to reinforce that “Mobile” is still evolving and there a lot of “right” methods out there.  Its our job to start blending those in order to deliver an experience thats great for our core users, but doesn’t exclude everyone else.

My photos for #M3Conf are on Flickr.