I got to work with Christian Lindholm while he was still at Yahoo! on the mobile site for fifa 2006. I feel guilty that I have never read his book.

He is the inventor of the Navi-key interface and spent 10 years at nokia working on the mobile user interfaces.

There where 3 things I noticed about the way he worked.

  • First, during product development phase, he would insist on having engineers present in the meeting. Often this is not the case - product people often write a spec and throw it over the wall to engineering to build. He was very keen to hear new ideas or additional features that would be easy to add.
  • He insisted on getting the prototype onto a mobile phone as soon as possible and would test the prototype on the phone not an emulator.
  • You got the impression that he was happy to go though as many iterations of testing as he deemed needed - until he was happy with the product (and we did go though a lot of iterations - including moving things one pixel to the left).

From what I can remember of the site - I think the site would have been better if the navigational search was better. There where a lot of pages on the site and I think it was hard for a new user to navigate to the information he wanted. The sites search engine that we built was only indexing the content of the site - a news feed and not the actual templates that the pages where displayed in. So a player wanting to navigate to his teams page - may end up on a news article containing his teams name. Another mobile design pattern: navigational search is more important in mobile because of weeny window and click pain.