MEX - the strategy forum for mobile user experience - First Else. I met with Eldad Eilam, CTO of Else Mobile, to learn more about the unique approach they’ve taken to create a handset with a new type of interaction flow and a back-end architecture to deliver a suite of connected services.
I first saw the product when it was announced at CES in January and it was immediately apparent it offered a very different approach to the mobile user interface. I was keen to learn more about a company which had obviously made a conscious decision to research user behaviour and develop a new form of interaction for an experience best suited to the needs they identified. This willingness to risk the development of a new UI is rare within the mobile business and Else stands out as a stark contrast against all the iPhone-inspired imitations.
After the arrival of the iPhone, mobile UI designers responded by trying to recreate the results, as opposed to the design methods, employed by Apple’s engineers. Making of Else’s sPlay. Sometimes an extreme requirement pushes you to your limits.
When designing the Idle screen interaction for ELSE we decided we wanted to enable 80% of the day-to-day interaction from the idle screen. This in itself is not a strange requirement and it is evident that the designers of Android have indeed tackled a very similar requirement.