The European Union has dubbed 2009 as the European Year of Creativity and Innovation, organizing a year-long celebration of conferences and exhibitions. Creativity and innovation are subjects of significant interest and importance to us at Google, and to European policymakers, so we were delighted to travel to Brussels today for an EU-sponsored event titled Beyond the crisis: design for a sustainable future . In our Brussels talk, we focus on our process in developing the Google Mobile App - a tool giving quick access to Maps, Gmail, and more Google products on your phone. We explain how we went about designing the App - carrying out initial research, iterating our design based on user testing, and once launched, further refining the
app's behaviour based on aggregated data of how users navigate through the
app's icons and menus. For most users, one of the biggest problems they face with their mobile phones is the fiddly, time consuming process of typing into small keyboards. Even touch keyboards are slow and unwieldy. Often, too, it takes numerous steps to conduct a search.
Our goal was to minimize these barriers. We included functions such as voice search and providing access to previous searches a user has done via a history list. Speaking commands rather than typing a search query makes the whole experience dramatically quicker and more intuitive.
Google Mobile App also allows users who have chosen to opt in to location services to improve their search results. For example when I am in Brussels this evening and I want to find an Italian restaurant for dinner, I just speak 'Italian restaurant' into my phone, which conducts an automatic Google search, and up pops the relevant results. Pretty cool, no? Download from
mobile.google.com for
BlackBerry , Windows Mobile and
Symbian Series 60 phones and give it a try.
No comments :
Post a Comment
You are welcome to comment here, but your remarks should be relevant to the conversation. To keep the exchanges focused and engaging, we reserve the right to remove off-topic comments, or self-promoting URLs and vacuous messages